The Making of the President 1960 Quotes

“History is always best written generations after the event, when cloud, fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.
(Page 212)”
― Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960

“Every American election summons the individual voter to weigh the past against the future.”
― Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960

“A genuine primary is a fight within the family of the party - and, like any family fight, is apt to be more bitter and leave more enduring wounds than battle with the November enemy.”
― Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960

“The 'smoke-filled room' as political reality is now as dead as Prohibition.”
― Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960

“The Americans of the age were not an irreligious people; and the fact that they were Christian was very important, for the marks of Christianity lay all across the Constitution.”
― Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960

“Perhaps the book’s greatest weakness is its romantic depiction of President Kennedy as a kind of knight in shining armor.”
― Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960: The Landmark Political Series

“The election of 1960 can, if one wills, be seen as an interlocking set of ifs: if Nixon had made up his mind which he wanted, the Northern Negro or Southern white vote; if the Puerto Rican Catholic bishops had made their intolerant intervention into Puerto Rican politics earlier and if Nixon had taken advantage of it; if the hysterical States-Righters of Dallas had not roughed up Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson in the hotel lobby; if Eisenhower had been used earlier; if Nixon had moved as forthrightly as did John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy in the Martin Luther King arrest; if only the citizen Democrats of California and the new coagulating boss groups of California had been able to work together in harness, as they could not; if Nixon had clung to his original television strategy and not panicked; if Nixon had clung to the original Forward theme of Hall and Shepley—an interminable series of ifs can be strung together to account for, reverse or multiply the tiny margin of 112,000 popular votes by which Kennedy led Nixon. Yet when all these ifs are strung together, they are only the froth and the foam in the wake of the strategies of the two candidates who sought to lead the American people.”
― Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960: The Landmark Political Series

“In the hard life of politics it is well known that no platform nor any program advanced by either major American party has any purpose beyond expressing emotion. Platforms are a ritual with a history of their own and, after being written, they are useful chiefly to scholars who dissect them as archeological political remains. The writing of a platform does indeed flatter many people, gives many pressure groups a chance to blow off steam in public, permits the leaders of such pressure groups to report back to their memberships of their valiant efforts to persuade. But in actual fact, all platforms are meaningless: the program of either party is what lies in the vision and conscience of the candidate the party chooses to lead it. Nevertheless,”
― Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960: The Landmark Political Series

“But if America falters in greatness and purpose, than Americans are nothing but the offscourings and hungry of other lands.”
― Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960

“The forces that run in American politics in our age are many and varied; they run in strange ways in our times of general education--they run in the meeting of white and black; in the nagging, daily concern for war and peace; in automation and unemployment. Yet one man must make them all clear enough for American people to vote and express their desire.

He is the President.”
― Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960

“He had always acted as if men were masters of forces, as if all things were possible for men determined in purpose and clear in thought—even the Presidency. This perhaps is what he had best learned in 1960—even though he called his own victory a “miracle.” This was what he would have to cherish alone in the White House, on which an impatient world waited for miracles.”
― Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960: The Landmark Political Series

“THE most hopeful adage of political folklore is: “One man plus the truth makes a majority.”
― Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960: The Landmark Political Series

“Ah,” replied Shorenstein, “you’re worried? Listen. Did you ever go down to the wharf to see the Staten Island Ferry come in? You ever watch it, and look down in the water at all those chewing-gum wrappers, and the banana peels and the garbage? When the ferryboat comes into the wharf, automatically it pulls all the garbage in too. The name of your ferryboat is Franklin D. Roosevelt—stop worrying!” The Shorenstein rule no longer has quite the strength it had a generation ago, for Americans, with increasing education and sophistication, split their tickets; more and more they are reluctant to follow the leader. Politicians, of course, still look for a strong leader of the ticket; yet when they cannot find such a man, when it is they who must carry the President in an election rather than vice versa, they want someone who will be a good effective President, a strong executive, one who will keep the country running smoothly and prosperously while they milk it from underneath. In talking to some of the hard-rock, old-style politicians in New York about war and peace, I have found them intensely interested in war and peace for two reasons. The first is that the draft is a bother to them in their districts (“Always making trouble with mothers and families”); and the second is that it has sunk in on them that if an H-bomb lands on New York City (which they know to be Target A), it will be bad for business, bad for politics, bad for the machine. The machine cannot operate in atomic rubble. In the most primitive way they do not want H-bombs to fall on New York City—it would wipe out their crowd along with all the rest. They want a strong President, who will keep a strong government, a strong defense, and deal with them as barons in their own baronies. They believe in letting the President handle war and peace, inflation and deflation, France, China, India and foreign affairs (but not Israel, Ireland, Italy or, nowadays, Africa), so long as the President lets them handle their own wards and the local patronage.”
― Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960: The Landmark Political Series