Theodore H. White

Theodore Harold White (Chinese: 白修德, May 6, 1915 – May 15, 1986) was an American political journalist and historian, known for his wartime reporting from China and accounts of the 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1976 and 1980 presidential elections.

White was born May 6, 1915, in Dorchester, Boston, the son of David White, a lawyer. He was raised Jewish. In his memoir In Search of History: A Personal Adventure, White describes helping form one of the early Zionist collegiate organizations during his time in college. He was a student at Boston Latin School, from which he graduated in 1932; from there, he went on to Harvard University, from which he graduated with a B.A. in Chinese history as a student of John K. Fairbank, who went on to become America's foremost China scholar.

Awarded a traveling fellowship for a round-the-world journey, he ended up in Chungking (Chongqing), China's wartime capital, and later became a freelance reporter after briefly starting out with the only job he could find: as an advisor to China's propaganda agency. When Henry R. Luce, the China-born founder and publisher of Time magazine, learned of White´s expertise, he hired him and then came to China the following year, where the two became friends. White became the China correspondent for Time during the war. White chafed at the restrictions put on his reporting by the censorship of the Nationalist government, but he also chafed at the rewriting of his stories by the editors at Time, one of whom was Whittaker Chambers.

Although he maintained respect for Henry Luce, White resigned and returned home to write, along with Annalee Jacoby, widow of fellow China reporter, Mel Jacoby, a book about China at war and in crisis, the best-selling Thunder Out of China. The book described the incompetence and corruption of the Nationalist government and sketched the power of the rising Communist Party. The authors called upon Americans to come to terms with this reality. The Introduction warned “In Asia there are a billion people who are tired of the world as it is; they live 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.” (p. xiii).

During the war, White had gotten to know and respect General Joseph Stilwell, the American commander in Asia. He sympathized with Stilwell's disgust with Chiang Kai-shek's unwillingness or inability to wage all-out war on the Japanese invader. Stilwell died shortly after the war, and Stilwell's widow called White to her home in Carmel, California and asked him to undertake the job of putting the General's papers into publishable form. White succeeded in seeing The Stilwell Papers through to publication. White witnessed and reported on the famine that occurred in Henan in 1943.

White then served as European correspondent for the Overseas News Agency (1948–50) and for The Reporter (1950–53)

White returned to his wartime experience in the novel The Mountain Road (1958), which dealt with the retreat of a team of American troops in China in the face of a Japanese offensive provoked by bombings by the 14th Air Force. The novel was frank about the Americans' conflicting, sometimes negative attitudes toward their Chinese allies. It was made into a 1960 movie, starring James Stewart and Lisa Lu, that has been characterized as anti-war.

The McCarthy period made it difficult for any reporter or official who had had any contact with communists, however innocent, to come out from the shadows of suspicion such contact aroused in the minds of people like McCarthy, and those who feared him, and persist in their chosen careers. White opted to turn from writing about China, though all of his education and training was oriented to that country. Instead he took up reporting on the Marshall Plan in Europe and then ultimately to the American presidency.

With experience in analyzing foreign cultures from his time abroad, White took up the challenge of analyzing American culture with the books The Making of the President, 1960 (1961), The Making of the President, 1964 (1965), The Making of the President, 1968 (1969), and The Making of the President, 1972 (1973), all analyzing American presidential elections. The first of these was both a bestseller and a critical success, winning the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. It remains the most influential publication about the election that made John F. Kennedy the President. The later presidential books sold well but failed to have as great an effect, partly because other authors were by then publishing about the same topics, and White's larger-than-life style of storytelling became less fashionable during the 1960s and '70s.

A week after the death of JFK, Jacqueline Kennedy summoned White to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port to rescue her husband's legacy. She proposed that White prepare an article for Life magazine drawing a parallel between her husband and his administration to King Arthur and the mythical Camelot. At the time, a play of that name was being performed on Broadway and Jackie focused on the ending lyrics of an Alan Jay Lerner song, "Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot." White, who had known the Kennedys from his time as a classmate of the late President's brother, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., was happy to oblige. He heeded some of Jackie's suggestions while writing a 1,000 word essay that he dictated later that evening to his editors at Life. When they complained that the Camelot theme was overdone, Jackie objected to changes. By this telling, Kennedy's time in office was transformed into a modern-day Camelot that represented, “a magic moment in American history, when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when artists, writers, and poets met at the White House, and the barbarians beyond the walls held back.” White later described his comparison of JFK to Camelot as the result of kindness to a distraught widow of a just-assassinated leader, and wrote that his essay was a "misreading of history. The magic Camelot of John F. Kennedy never existed."

After Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon, White broke his quadrennial pattern with Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon (1975), a dispassionate account of the scandal and its players. There was no 1976 volume from White. (The closest analogue was Marathon by Jules Witcover.) After a volume of memoirs, published in 1978, he returned to presidential coverage with the 1980 campaign, and America In Search of Itself: The Making of the President, 1956-80 (1982), draws together original reporting and new social analysis of the previous quarter-century, focusing primarily but not exclusively on the Reagan-Carter contest.

Time magazine partnered with White to publish the 400 page “The Making of the President, 1984”, which was to be a collaborative effort amongst multiple writers. White was expected to write the opening and closing chapters, and the chapter covering the Democratic National Convention. The remaining chapters were to be written by other Time magazine writers, principally Hays Gorey, Time’s Washington correspondent. However, prior to the election, the partnership dissolved, as White was unhappy with the quality of work he was seeing from the Time reporters. This final entry in the series was shortened and titled "The Shaping of the Presidency, 1984," a lengthy post-election analysis piece in Time, in its special Ronald Reagan issue of November 19, 1984.

On May 15, 1986 White suffered a sudden stroke and died in New York City. He was survived by two of his children, Heyden White Rostow and David Fairbank White.

• Thunder Out of China (with Annalee Jacoby) (1946) reprinted Da Capo, 1980 ISBN 0306801280; READ BOOKS, 2007, ISBN 9781406773484
• Fire in the Ashes (1953); Sloane, 1968
• The Mountain Road (Sloane (1958), reprinted with an Introduction by Parks Coble, Eastbridge, 2006, ISBN 978-1-59988-000-6) which was made into a movie starring James Stewart.
• Breach of Faith : The Fall of Richard Nixon Atheneum Publishers, 1975; Dell, 1986, ISBN 978-0-440-30780-8 A comprehensive history of the Watergate Scandal with biographical information about Richard Nixon and many of the key players of the event.
• In Search of History: A Personal Adventure Harper & Row, 1978, ISBN 978-0-06-014599-6; Warner Books, 1990, ISBN 978-0-446-34657-3
• America in Search of Itself: The Making of the President, 1956–1980 Harper & Row, 1982, ISBN 978-0-06-039007-5; Warner Books, Incorporated, 1988 ISBN 978-0-446-37098-1
• Theodore H. White at large: the best of his magazine writing, 1939-1986, Authors Theodore Harold White, Editor Edward T. Thompson, Pantheon Books, 1992, ISBN 978-0-679-41635-7

Both W. A. Swanberg in Luce and His Empire and David Halberstam in The Powers That Be discuss how White's China reporting for TIME was extensively rewritten, frequently by Whittaker Chambers, to conform to publisher Henry Luce's admiration for Chiang Kai-shek. Chambers himself explained post-factum:

The fight in Foreign News was not a fight for control of a seven-page section of a newsmagazine. It was a struggle to decide whether a million Americans more or less were going to be given the facts about Soviet aggression, or whether those facts were going to be suppressed, distorted, sugared or perverted into the exact opposite of their true meaning. In retrospect, it can be seen that this critical struggle was, on a small scale, an opening round of the Hiss Case.

Conservative author William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote an obituary of White in the National Review in which he described that "conjoined with his fine mind, his artist's talent, his prodigious curiosity, there was a transcendent wholesomeness, a genuine affection for the best in humankind." He praised White, saying he "revolutionized the art of political reporting." Buckley added that White made one grave strategic mistake during his journalistic lifetime: "Like so many disgusted with Chiang Kai-shek, he imputed to the opposition to Chiang thaumaturgical social and political powers. He overrated the revolutionists' ideals, and underrated their capacity for totalitarian sadism."

In her book, Theodore H. White and Journalism As Illusion, Joyce Hoffman contends that White's "personal ideology undermined professional objectivity" (according to the review of her work in Library Journal). She alleges "conscious mythmaking" on behalf of his subjects, including Chiang Kai-shek, John F. Kennedy, and David Bruce. Hoffman alleges that White self-censored information embarrassing to his subjects to portray them as heroes.

But White wrote:

There is the question of civil liberties and minority rights, which lie at the root of America's concept of democracy. During the war the Communists championed all that was good in Chinese life; they fought against Kuomintang dictatorship and in so fighting fought for the liberties of all other groups. But up to now the Communists have been in opposition to the dominant regime, and their base has lain in the backward villages, where opposition has been nonexistent. How will they react to the organized opposition of the large cities where the Kuomintang middle class is firmly established and where, with money and influence, it can command a press that will present an alternative program? Will the Communists, if they govern large and complex industrial cities, permit an opposition press and opposition party to challenge them by a combination of patronage and ideology? They say that they will, for they believe that in any honest contest for the vote of the people, the people will vote them and their allies a majority against the candidates of the landed and well-to-do minority. But if the Communists are wrong in their calculations and are outvoted, will they yield to a peaceful vote? Will they champion civil liberties as ardently as they do now? This is a question that cannot be answered until we have had the opportunity of seeing how a transitional coalition regime works in peace time practice. Theodore White, Thunder Out of China, pp 236-237

Contemporary critics on the left have strongly criticized a 1967 made-for-TV documentary that White wrote called China: The Roots of Madness as a "callous and condescending" portrayal of Chinese. White's reporting was described as "self-important, sanctimonious and he gave voice to no more than an American viewpoint", wherein he portrayed the Chinese as merely pawns in the Cold-war, blinkered by their Communist ideology. Film Threat remarked that White never attempted to take on board the Chinese viewpoint, and points out there were unconfirmed rumors that the CIA was involved in the film's making.

His reporting role in Henan is portrayed by actor Adrien Brody in the 2012 film Back to 1942. Billy Crudup portrayed White in Pablo Larrain's Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis biopic Jackie.