Volume 5, Number 1 · August 5, 1965
The Knack
By I.F. Stone
The Making of the President:1964
by Theodore H. White
Atheneum, 431 pp., $6.95
Theodore H. White has become the poet laureate of American presidential campaigns. The occupational hazard of poets laureate, judging by the experience of royal courts, is a declining ratio of flattery to poetry. White's first book in this genre, The Making of the President: 1960, which I have just read for the first time, holds up amazingly well. It is written with unflagging narrative tension and is full of rewarding insights; I think it will last as a minor masterpiece of political reporting. Its successor, The Making of the President: 1964, is on a lower level. The wonder and zest of the first often decline into a schoolgirlish gushiness in the second. The first is muscular, the second mawkish.
Review, 2391 words
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