In his retelling of the 1964 presidential election, T.H. White shows us America at a turning point. Less than five months removed from the assassination of President Kennedy, the citizens of New Hampshire kicked off the primary for the Republican nomination to the presidency. Taking center stage for the first half of White's narrative are the men who would try to fashion a coherent, conservative response to an American condition that in so many ways seemed in the throws of change. It reads as seemingly unfair that well-meaning and thoughtful leaders such as William Scranton and Nelson Rockefeller had to espouse a logical response to an administration which was itself struggling through its nascent stages. Regardless of political stances one gets the sense that any Republican nominee in '64 would have been doomed from the start.
The nomination of Barry Morris Goldwater set off what White describes as a re-examination of American present and future, with the conservative crusader valiantly trying to combat not only a changing world, but the political ranges of Lyndon Johnson and the specter of John F Kennedy. White paints a picture of Goldwater as perhaps the most reluctant presidential candidate in recent memory. Averell Harriman said that, above all else, a man seeking the presidency must desire the position more than anything else in his life and more than his competitors. Goldwater lacked this desire. Truly concerned about the future of America Goldwater desired to crusade on issues of spirit, freedom and liberty. Very adroitly President Johnson and his staff responded by focusing on issues of economic and national security and assuaging fears as the civil rights movement continued to burn across the country. In what would be a historic landslide for ole Landslide Lyndon, America was perhaps denied a chance to engage on questions surrounding the concern of a moral society: "what is man's relationship, and his responsibility to, his fellow man"?
This retelling comes across as one framing perhaps the first truly modern election in American history. White provides us glimpses at the candidates and their issues that feel so strikingly relevant to much that Washington gropes with today. Phenomenally reported and masterfully written, White has taken an election whose outcome we know in advance, as it seems did so many of the players at the time, and given it drama, vitality and wonder. Coming on the heels of tragedy as it does, the taste for retail politics seems all but spent and therefore the cycle takes on a thoughtful, melancholy and, in the end, hopeful tone.
This election could not help but live in the shadow of John Kennedy; White sets the stage for all of this by devoting the first forty pages to the assassination of and funeral for President Kennedy; this passage ought be regarded as some of the best historical/journalistic writing produced by an American. Later White would write in his autobiography that November 22nd in Dallas was a fundamental moment of change and paradigmatic shift in the narrative of the country. Whether he was aware of it in 1965 as he wrote this book is unclear, but on reflection from the present this work gains so much power as we see America once again in the process of struggle and reinvention; of citizens and leaders, of the young and old, rich and poor, black and white wrestling with what kind of people they are and of what kind of country they want to continue to build around them. A masterful work.
