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FEW writers can occupy Theodore White’s seat on the balcony of history. White is more famous for his quartet of books, each titled The Making of the President, covering the election campaigns of John F. Kennedy (1960), Lyndon B. Johnson (1964), and Richard Nixon (1968, re-elected in 1972).
Less well-known was his memoir In Search of History (1978), an account of his war-time adventures in China (1938-45), post-war Europe (1948-53), and a US in transition (1954-63) as it expanded its influence across a damaged globe.
As Time’s correspondent based in Chungking, White reported on the conflict between Mao Zedong’s communist forces and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist battalions, and their faltering failed negotiations towards a truce. To White, Mao Zedong held “the book of history, written in cabalistic symbols only he could decipher, and from this book he lectured the comrades and their leaders, telling them where China was going, how he would take them there, and what they must do, when they arrived”.
Chiang Kai-shek, by contrast, was a man “ripped out of the old world too soon, plunged into a new world he could not understand”. Chiang Kai-shek lost to Mao and retreated with his Ivy League advisers to offshore Taiwan.
Theodore White attended Japan’s formal surrender to Gen MacArthur.
On Sept 2, 1945, White joined fellow correspondents aboard the USS Missouri to attend the formal surrender of the Japanese to US Gen Douglas MacArthur. White remarked, ceremonies like this one were “little more than punctuation marks in history”.
The victorious Americans squeezed as much as they could out of the ritual. They paraded the same flag that Commodore Perry had taken to Tokyo when he opened Japan to the West in 1853. Another flag given prominence had flown on the Capitol building on Dec 7, 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. As the Japanese delegation signed the instrument of surrender, to complete the humiliation, 400 US B-29 bombers — “the fire bombers that had levelled Japan” — flew low over USS Missouri, accompanied by 1,500 fleet planes. “It was American power at its zenith.”
Three years later, in 1948, White relocated to Paris. There he saw a shattered Europe (“America’s parentland”), “where people were hungry; some starved; others stole, most hoarded; everyone cheated”. To resurrect Europe, America conceived the $13 billion Marshall Plan. The US military governor in Germany, Gen Lucius Clay, declared that US policy was “to make these [b*******] work their way back”. Germany did. One of the ‘unintended consequences’ of the Marshall Plan was to dismiss the British from greatness and to elevate “the Germans … to the status of Europe’s senior power”.
White held on to the view that “politics is the story of a handful of men reaching for the levers of power”. He shared his hero John F. Kennedy’s belief that “the chief responsibility of a leader is to set before the people the unfinished public business” of the country.
White “entertained the illusion that we could make events march in the direction we pointed, if we pointed clearly enough”. It is a failing found amongst politicians and armchair pundits, even columnists.
Theodore White died in May 1986. He did not live to see the prediction in the introduction of his book Thunder Out of China (1946): “In Asia there are a billion people who are tired of the world as it is; they live in such terrible bondage that they have nothing to lose but their chains... . Less than a thousand years ago Europe lived this way; then Europe revolted... . The people of Asia are going through the same process.”
White was spared the sight of Donald Trump changing his America “from the country that history had taught of it”. Kennedy as a Catholic destroyed an old myth that “America was not only a Christian country but a Protestant one”. Trump works tirelessly to remind his compatriots that in America, all Americans are equal — but WASPS are more equal than others.
In one interesting observation, buried in a footnote, White recalls that Jacqueline Kennedy seemed to bask in her husband’s presence. “She was as docile as Jiang Qing seemed with Mao — an impression I later learned was deceptive in both cases.”
Trump, it is said, is working towards a constitutional change that would allow him a third term. His bombastic VP J.D. Vance covets the Oval Office for himself. Elon Musk intends to quit DOGE by end-May. His chainsaw has trimmed an overstaffed USAID with a bloated budget of $25bn from 10,000 employees to 294. (Eighty years ago, the Marshall Plan by comparison managed $13bn with 587 staff in HQ and 839 in the field.)
For the moment, Trump controls all the levers. Which latter day Theodore White, one wonders, will chronicle Trump’s ‘The Unmaking of a President — 2028?’
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, April 3rd, 2025
