David M. Shribman

National Perspective

The best way to view the 2024 presidential election and to understand the dramatic transformation of American political history may not be to focus on Tuesday’s debate, the news of the day or even the cascade of books about the composition of the modern Democratic Party or the phenomenon of Donald Trump. It may instead be to pick up a copy of a 63-year-old book that you can find on the internet for about the price of this newspaper — or search for it in your local library, if it hasn’t been shipped out to a storage annex or donated to a summertime sidewalk used-book sale.

Theodore H. White’s “The Making of the President 1960,” now almost two-thirds of a century old, remains a reliable guide to presidential politics — about how the process works and about how it has changed. It was the first book I purchased with my own money, at age 12 at the Shaw Junior High School book fair in Swampscott, Massachusetts. It’s the only book I have read three times — including this summer.

White’s book was praised, and then pilloried, for its concentration on the inside workings of presidential politics — what the candidates ate, how they traveled, who shaped their views, why they chose to campaign in one city and not in another. A dozen years later, White observed reporters in the hotel room of Sen. George McGovern after he won the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. “All of us are observing him, taking notes like mad, getting all the little details,” he told the writer Timothy Crouse. “Which I think I invented as a method of reporting and which I now sincerely regret. If you write about this, say that I sincerely regret it.”

But the enduring value of White’s book is the beauty of the writing — no journalist today has the sweep and command of White, who was born at home in Boston’s Erie Street and who would produce five books in the “Making” genre.

In these pages are vivid portraits of political figures long gone — you may, in this torrid and tumultuous summer, ache for a candidate like John F. Kennedy, or even for the not-yet-disgraced Richard Nixon. You may yearn for a political world not shaped by smartphones, cable scream-a-thons, social media and the 24-hour news cycle, and White provides some perspective on all of that.

One element of that long-ago era made a surprising return this summer: the phenomenon of political leaders and party bosses dictating what they believe is best, which is how Kamala Harris was anointed by the self-proclaimed wise men and women of the Democratic Party who enforced their choice for the presidency without the vice president having campaigned in a single primary — a back-to-the-future moment for the ages.

The lessons of White’s volume come in three waves — what has endured (the power of personality); what has changed since 1960 (the eclipse of the Democratic Solid South); and what could not have been anticipated then (the assassination of Kennedy’s brother Robert in the very Los Angeles hotel where, nearly eight years earlier, the Nixon press corps gathered to await the election returns).

White noted, for example, that John Kennedy chose to keep his motorcade convertible top closed at the end of the campaign; he didn’t want his pregnant wife, Jacqueline, to catch cold. Almost exactly three years later, an open automobile would be the scene of his death. About three-quarters of Americans now alive would not have even the remotest notion of the implement the pollster Lou Harris used to calculate Kennedy’s prospects on Election Day. The slide rule is described on eBay as a “collectible.”

We might view the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in the context of White’s comment about the inviolability of American elections and wish that at least this element of our politics had not been altered:

Good or bad, whatever the decision, Americans will accept the decision — and cut down any man who goes against it, even though for millions the decision runs contrary to their own votes. The general vote is an expression of national will, the only substitute for violence and blood. Its verdict is to be defended as one defends civilization itself.

Republican supporters and Democratic critics alike might consider this passage in White’s portrait of the GOP, in light of the flight of corporate leaders and liberal Republicans during the Trump years:

Within the Republican Party are combined a stream of the loftiest American idealism and a stream of the coarsest American greed.

This summer, as the Democrats struggled with questions surrounding the mental acuity of Joe Biden, who is 81, and as the Republicans rallied behind Trump, who is 78, this account of the plight and prospects of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, then in agony about whether to mount a challenge to Vice President Nixon for the nomination, provides much perspective: Rockefeller “was 51 years old, and in 1960 he would be 52,” White wrote. “If he did not move in 1960, and if the succeeding Republican president held a normal two terms, he would be 60 in 1968, too old.”

Harris turns 60 next month.

As the country continues to struggle with its legacy of racism, it is bracing to consider that in 1959, the Kennedy staff, unknowingly anticipating the Harris campaign theme, had as its goal to “sweep out of the decade of the sixties America’s past prejudices, the sediment of yesterday’s politics, and [create] a new politics of the future.”

And as we contemplate the Trump effect on American politics, it’s instructive to remember that, as White put it, Kennedy “had somehow stirred every nerve end of the American political system, and that system would never be the same.”

But that remains the same, as Trump has proven:

The web of American communication, influence and politics is so sensitive that when touched in the right way by men who know how, it clangs with instant response.

For the nine years Trump has been on the political scene, the clanging has never ceased. All the more reason to retreat in quiet to an easy chair and read a book that, unlike some of our contemporary political figures, never seems to grow old. It still has much to teach, and we still have much to learn.

A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.