The Making of the President 1960
by Theodore H. White
Summary
Theodore White followed John Kennedy and Richard Nixon through the entire 1960 campaign, from Kennedy's primary fights against Hubert Humphrey and Stuart Symington through a general election he won by a margin so narrow that Nixon's own advisers spent weeks arguing over whether to contest it. White had a kind of access to both campaigns that few reporters before him had managed, and he uses it to write politics as human drama rather than as a tally of positions and platforms: tired staff on airplanes, a candidate rehearsing an answer in a hotel room, the exact moment a strategy meeting turns into an argument. He gives real weight to the four televised debates, the first ever held between presidential candidates, and to how differently the same exchange looked to people listening on radio and people watching the still new medium of television.
The book reads less like political analysis than like a novel with real names attached, four hundred pages that move from convention hall to hotel suite to polling place with genuine narrative drive, and it rewards a reader who wants the feel of a campaign from the inside rather than a summary of positions. White does not hide his own admiration for Kennedy, and the book's warmth toward its subject is part of what makes it readable rather than a mark against it. It suits anyone curious about how a presidential campaign actually runs day to day, hour to hour, rather than how it looks from the outside once the result is known.
The book spent more than forty weeks on the bestseller list and reshaped how political journalism got written, launching a genre of campaign chronicles other reporters imitated for years afterward, and White himself returned to the format for the elections of 1964, 1968, and 1972. He later said, with some regret, that the personality driven style he had pioneered here helped push political coverage toward spectacle at the expense of substance. A documentary adaptation reached television in 1963, not long after Kennedy's assassination gave the book's admiring portrait a very different weight than it had carried on first publication.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board created its general nonfiction category in 1962, and White's book was the first winner, a choice that signaled the prize would reward literary reportage as readily as scholarship. Kennedy had died within three years of the book's publication, and rereading it after November 1963 gave White's admiring portrait an unplanned weight that the original reviews, written before the assassination, could not have anticipated.
The book's success turned the campaign chronicle into its own publishing category, and White wrote three more volumes covering the 1964, 1968, and 1972 elections, each built on the same reporting method he had used here. His unusual access to both Kennedy's and Nixon's inner circles became a template political reporters have chased ever since, even as the personality centered approach he pioneered drew later criticism, including from White himself, for pulling coverage toward character and image and away from policy.