If today it is the social networks that perpetuate an endless presidential election in Spain, in the United States and since 1960, television forever hijacked the coverage of electoral campaigns. First with innovative debates and then with the usual “cuts” and “declarations” that bombarded American television every night. Daily cascade of slogans, set phrases and showy gestures made in front of the gallery and, above all, of the microphones and cameras that fed a poor and tedious “journalism of statements”.
All this changed thanks to a journalist who decided to “tell what is not seen.” It was Theodore White, an apparently innocuous reporter who sensed that “it was very difficult to reflect reality when the nose is very close to the mirror.”
In the fall of 1959 he was 44 years old and was inducted as one of the regiment of hundreds of journalists, cameramen and photographers that followed the 1960 presidential elections. He was listed as a reporter for the Saturday Review. It was a battle of many months between a garrulous and tricky Republican (Nixon) and an aristocratic and charismatic Democrat (Kennedy). The year that the elections were decided by a difference of 112,000 votes after four agonizing television debates.
“Ted” White was a not inconsiderable “pen”: thanks to a scholarship for “newspaper carriers” he studied at Harvard University and specialized in Chinese culture. He was a correspondent for Time magazine during the fierce war between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung. He then spent a few years in Europe covering the Marshall Plan and the beginnings of the Cold War.
His stories had a novelistic style with suspense: he wrote reality literature as a detailed and meticulous witness and observer of what the French call “les choses vues” (things seen). In fact, in the lists of journalists who followed Nixon, he appeared as “Theodore White, novelist” and was often relegated to the tail plane of aides and little-known journalists.
It was his first electoral campaign and he very soon understood that it was much more interesting to tell what “democracy in action” really was like than the hollow and boring propaganda of prefabricated and repetitive speeches.
Until then, the US press reported on the elections in the traditional way. Coverage always controlled by the candidates and their press officers. Traveling with the candidates had a price: reproducing insipid speeches, having limited access to the politicians of the day and, above all, avoiding opinions and judgments about the campaigns. Supposedly factual journalism that limited the risks of these as bad as necessary outside observer companies.
In a year he covered more than 70,000 kilometers following Nixon and Kennedy, writing a few weekly chronicles, while observing and recording all kinds of details thanks to “access and proximity journalism” that allowed him to write The Making of the President. 1960, a book written between November 1960 and March 1961. Three publishers rejected the manuscript and Atheneum finally published it in July 1961. He always appreciated the work of editing the book: “There are two kinds of publishers, those who correct your original and those who say it is wonderful”.
In a few days his royalties exceeded one million dollars today, and in less than a year he sold more than four million copies with a book that won a Pulitzer.
This “election accountant” did the same in the next three presidential elections and his books were always on the best-seller lists of the year. Conservative William F. Buckley said then that “White revolutionized the art of election coverage,” and liberal Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press officer, capitulated to his enormous powers of observation, minutiae that demonstrated “I was there.” ”; for example when he recorded that on the eve of election night Bob Kennedy was on the phone for hours and hours and that the bill was a million dollars, or how his “speechwriter”, Theodore Sorensen, was the first to tell Kennedy at 9:30 the night he had won: he was in his pajamas and sitting on the bed of the presidential suite.
This new way of telling political stories was soon imitated in 1968 by Joe McGinnis (Selling a President), in 1972 by Hunter Thompson (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail), and in 1988 by Richard Cramer (The Boys on the Bus). ).
If White revealed the secret of the first television debates; McGinnis exposed the power of political marketing and image consultants; Thompson denounced the miseries of the candidates; and Cramer fixed his attention not on the politicians but on the poor journalists embedded in the electoral caravans.
Even John F. Kennedy’s widow was fascinated by her husband’s unbiased account of the campaign; In 1963 and after her murder, she called White and gave him her only interview about the Dallas assassination. Published in LIFE magazine, she became famous for a phrase: “There will be great presidents again, but there will not be another Camelot.”
