THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 1, 1995 TAG: 9509280451
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
Not long after journalist Theodore H. White arrived at the Oval Office for a crucial interview with President John F. Kennedy, the Chief Executive stripped down to blue boxer shorts and submitted to the ministrations of three tailors measuring him for a new suit.
It was like watching a king chew gum.
The moment did not seem at all suitably historic to the political writer earnestly seeking climactic material for the final chapter of his celebratory history, The Making of the President 1960. Nor did the commander in chief's preoccupations of the moment seem particularly imperial. JFK's burning question to White:
So how much money do you expect to make on the book?
``White had gone to the Oval Office in search of an epiphany,'' writes Old Dominion University journalism professor Joyce Hoffman in her new book, Theodore H. White and Journalism as Illusion (University of Missouri Press, 194 pp., $27.50). ``He came away enormously disappointed.''
But White preferred to chronicle the purple toga, not the emperor's new clothes. His overwrought, though widely admired, account depicted a decisive, even magisterial leader. JFK was atomic.
``In the process of glorifying the American presidency,'' Hoffman observes, ``White also glorified the president. By wrapping him in an aura of power, White's words helped to suffuse Kennedy with the qualities of an all-American Superman - missing only the blue Spandex body suit and red cape.''
Hoffman reveals the well-meaning but patriotically misguided reportage of a generation of journalistic/promotional Good Old Buoys in Theodore H. White and Journalism as Illusion. White and his ilk - Arthur Krock, Joseph Alsop, James Reston, all the uptown brood of American bald eaglet Walter Lippmann - wrote as insiders and paid the insider's price: They bought into their material.
Notes Hoffman: ``In its unquestioning acceptance of the cold war theology, and in its apparent unwillingness to explain alternatives, White's work, as well as that of his contemporaries, helped to limit the range of debate on America's foreign policy options, the result of which helped to keep the nation locked into a costly arms race for four decades.''
But White (1915-1986) became, for his efforts, an honorary Kennedy. He sent stories to family members for prepublication approval. He boogied at Bobby's.
``Sure Teddy sucked up to the Kennedys,'' conceded Washington Post bigwig Ben Bradlee. ``We all did.''
It was a mistake.
The week after JFK's assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy called White out of a Manhattan dentist's chair to put the definitive spin on her husband's significance for an elegiac Life magazine story. She wanted nothing less than mythic proportions. White supplied them.
Don't let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot.
Well, I knew King Arthur. And Jack Kennedy was no King Arthur. Maybe if he had had a larger nose and a smaller bank account, the role wouldn't have fallen so easily to him.
Savvy and incisive, Hoffman is not an insider who travels among the august and symbiotic circles of White, Bradlee, et al. She is 51 and single. She lives in the Larchmont section of Norfolk with her Scottish terrier, Zelda.
She worked for the Easton Express and the Allentown Morning Call in Pennsylvania and acquired her Ph.D. last year from New York University, where she first embarked on this book as her dissertation. She came to ODU in answer to an ad in Editor & Publisher magazine.
She's an outsider.
That's where a reporter belongs.
``Theodore White was an extraordinary journalist who lost his way at the end,'' Hoffman said in an interview. ``He came to forget the one he was really supposed to be serving - the reader.''
Now, when somebody catches the President of the United States with his pants down, we hear about it. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Joyce Hoffman looks at the way Theodore White inflated the image of
President Kennedy in ``Theodore H. Whire[sic] and Journalism as
Illusion.''
by CNB