In Search of History

By Theodore H. White

A Personal Adventure

War and famine in China. Europe rising from its ruins. The carnival of that most American of spectacles, a presidential campaign. Eyewitness to all these events, and more, Theodore H. White has produced a steady flow of distinguished reportage for four decades: stirring dispatches for TIME and LIFE magazines from Asia in convulsion; a bestselling book on the civil war that eventually brought Communism to Peking, Thunder out of China (1946); another on Western Europe's phoenix-like recovery from the devastation of World War II, Fire in the Ashes (1953); and then, after his return to a changed and changing U.S., the biggest hits of all, The Making of the President series (1960 to 1972).

But Watergate erupted just as White was completing his study of the 1972 race. Thus, even as he began work on the next volume in that series, he found himself increasingly disturbed by what he saw as his failure to understand fully the connections between politics and power, his inability to answer that most vexing of questions: "What's it really all about?" So he set aside The Making of the President, 1976 (he hopes to complete his presidential series in 1981) to write what he calls neither an autobiography nor a political history but "a long essay"--a try at fitting together the sights, sounds, persons and episodes that he had witnessed as he had been whipped around in the slipstream of American power. In Search of History: A Personal Adventure will be published in August (Harper & Row; $12.95). It traces White's life from 1915, the year of his birth in Boston, to 1963, the year of John F. Kennedy's murder, a year he terms "the Divide"--not simply for him but for an America on the edge of upheaval. (White plans a second volume covering the '60s and '70s.) The following excerpts span three continents and a tempestuous quarter-century.

MacArthur: The Napoleon of Luzon

After leaving Harvard in 1938 with a degree in Chinese language and history and a traveling fellowship, Teddy White made his way to Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek's mountain-girt wartime capital. There White began reporting for TIME, and in 1940 the magazine sent him on a tour of Southeast Asia that eventually took him to Manila and to a man who was then an outcast from power or influence, but not for long:

When I met him, on this trip, he was, by my youthful judgment, a very old man--over sixty! I went to see lim because in my military survey of Southeast Asia had been so disappointed by the U.S. Army in the Philippines--commanded by dull men who had contempt for the "aging" and retired one-time Chief of Staff of their army, Douglas MacArthur. They called him "the Napoleon of Luzon," and one spokesman told me that he "cut no more ice in this U.S. Army than a corporal." MacArthur was just an adviser to the Philippine Army, he said, not worth seeing. So I went to see this relict of history, this great soldier, now a field marshal in the Philippine Army.

MacArthur at sixty, on the eve of his great war command, was, I found, still a spectacle. His hands trembled; his voice sometimes squeaked. But he paced, and roared, and pointed, and pounded, and stabbed with his cigar, and spoke with an intelligence and a magniloquence and a force that overwhelmed. He was holding himself, he said, in readiness to command the American expeditionary force in Asia when the war broke out. This was a year before Pearl Harbor, but he insisted war was coming. Beware of the Japanese Navy, he said, and continuing, he said that Japanese carrier-based aviation was superb. He believed, however, that the Japanese Army was not even second class, that it was shot through with venality. He, himself, was building the new Philippine Army. He was altogether impressive.

I wrote my dispatch on the defenses of Asia for TIME and then, provocatively, sent it upstairs from my room at the Manila Hotel to his penthouse suite. I had written that after three months of seeing all the generals --American, French, Dutch, English--in Southeast Asia, by far the best in every respect was General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Army, retired. With this judgment MacArthur totally agreed, and I was immediately summoned to him.

It was late in the afternoon, and he was dressed in an old West Point bathrobe of blue and gray wool which displayed the Army "A" on its back; occasionally he puffed on a corncob pipe. We rejoiced together that we alone understood the Japanese peril to America; in this sympathetic mood, he began to reminisce. He had been a young first lieutenant when he came here after graduation from West Point in 1903; he had fought the little Philippine brown brothers in the Aguinaldo insurrection. He had commanded a U.S. division in combat in World War I; had been Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army under Hoover; had retired. But he felt that our fate and Asia's were intertwined.

MacArthur was to be in Asia from 1935 to 1951 without ever coming home, conquering the Pacific islands, occupying and restoring the Japanese islands, commanding in Korea until Harry Truman fired him. Harry Truman fired him for good cause, of course, but there was in their clash a quintessence of the century-old clash in American history between military and civilians. MacArthur understood the politics of Asia, and not only in his legacy to Japan but in his parting admonition to his successors ("Anybody who commits the land power of the United States on the continent of Asia ought to have his head examined") demonstrated this understanding. What he could not understand were the politics of America. He was convinced that the military and the political executives were co-proprietors of American history, equal partners in the great adventures of war.

It did not occur to me that he was flawed politically until two years later. By that time, we, too, were at war with the Japanese. He had just escaped from Corregidor, was again an American general, not a Philippine field marshal, had been named commander of all U.S. forces in the Southwest Pacific--but with no visible support in troops, ships or supplies. He was indignant. I visited him in his headquarters at Melbourne, Australia. He managed to denounce all at once, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the President; George Catlett Marshall, the regnant chief of staff; Harry Luce, the publisher of my magazine; and the U.S. Navy. ("White," he said, "the best navy in the world is the Japanese Navy. A first-class navy. Then comes the British Navy. The U.S. Navy is a fourth-class navy, not even as good as the Italian Navy.") He was completely wrong in this in the spring of 1942, for the U.S. Navy was about to prove it was the finest navy that ever cut water; and Franklin D. Roosevelt and George C. Marshall were men greater than he.

Chou En-lai and the Dinner of the Pig

Back in China, White found himself more and more frequently in touch with another of the larger-than-life figures thrust up by the 20th century. His friendship with Chou Enlai, who headed the minuscule Communist liaison headquarters in Chungking, ripened over a memorable meal:

Having been tugged too often by friendship and affection for men I have reported, I am now as wary of friendship with the great as a reformed drunkard of the taste of alcohol. But Chou En-lai was, along with Joseph Stilwell and John F. Kennedy, one of the three great men I met and knew in whose presence I had near-total suspension of disbelief or questioning judgment. In all three cases I would now behave otherwise, but most of all in the case of Chou En-lai--a man as brilliant and ruthless as any the Communist movement has thrown up in this century, yet one capable of warm kindness, irrepressible humanity and silken courtesy. He had a way of entrancing people, and I cannot deny that he won my affection completely.

Perhaps the best way of getting at the twinkling character of the man and his charm is to describe what I remember as the dinner of the pig.

Chou had much time then, for the six-or seven-man staff of the Chinese Communist headquarters in Chungking were a lonesome group; and the visit of a malleable young American reporter gave them an opportunity, as they saw it, of influencing TIME magazine. After a year of growing friendship, Chou En-lai invited me to a banquet in my honor. We went to the finest restaurant in Chungking, the Kuan Sun Yuan, to dine--Chou, the Communist headquarters staff and myself, the only Westerner.

The reader must remember now how far I had come from my Jewish home. I knew I had been for months eating nonkosher food, but always tried to delude myself that the meats I ate were lamb, beef, or chicken. I was still so pinned to Jewish tradition that to eat pig outright seemed a profanation. At Chou En-lai's banquet, however, the main course was unmistakably pig, a golden-brown, crackle-skinned roast suckling pig.

"Ch 'ing, ch 'ing, "said Chou Enlai, the host. "Please, please," gesturing with his chopsticks at the pig, inviting the guest to break the crackle first. For a moment I held on to my past. I put my chopsticks down and explained as best I could in Chinese that I was Jewish and that Jews were not allowed to eat any kind of pig meat. The group, all friends of mine by then, sat downcast and silent, for I was their guest, and they had done wrong.

Then Chou himself took over. He lifted his chopsticks once more, repeated, "ch 'ing, ch 'ing, "pointed the chopsticks at the suckling pig and, grinning, explained--"Teddy," he said, "this is China. Look again. See. Look. It looks to you like pig. But in China, this is not a pig --this is a duck." I burst out laughing, for I could not help it; he laughed, the table laughed, I plunged my chopsticks in, broke the, crackle, ate my first mouthful of certified pig, and have eaten of pig ever since, for which I hope my ancestors will forgive me.

But Chou was that kind of man--he could make one believe that pig was duck, because one wanted to believe him, and he understood the customs of other men and societies and respected them.

At that time, Chou En-lai was only 43 years old. His job, as scout in the tower for Mao Tse-tung, was to keep contact with the outside world. Later, that assignment would make him Foreign Minister, then Prime Minister of the People's Republic of China. What set Chou apart from the other Communist Chinese leaders was that he was, by education, a larger man; and by temperament, an elastic man. He could fight ruthlessly--but he could give up hatred, which made him unique among Communists. He had, for example, in 1945, pleaded with friends at the American Embassy to be allowed to fly to the U.S. to visit Franklin Roosevelt and explain the revolution to him; he had been turned down. He had helped design the Geneva conference of 1954, which temporarily halted the Vietnam war. But at Geneva, when he extended his hand in friendship to American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Dulles humiliated him in public, refusing to shake the proffered hand. It was probably the most expensive display of rudeness by any diplomat anywhere, ever. Chou became a dedicated enemy of American diplomacy for many years; yet it was Chou who swung Mao's mind to accepting once more the bridge to America that he and Nixon built together. If that bridge endures in peace, it will be Chou's greatest contribution to both peoples.

This world eminence was far in the future when I first knew him. I do not know whether he was trying to persuade me, and through me, TIME magazine, that Chiang's government was a useless one and the Communists were the wave of the future; or whether he was simply enjoying educating me. One day he was explaining a particularly intricate point of Chinese politics and I interrupted to finish his sentence, which was rude. But he laughed and said that now I was on the threshold of beginning to understand the country. I was flattered; I do not know how many times Chou said this to foreigners, but I am told that his ultimate flattery of Secretary of State Kissinger was to tell him that he, too, was finally beginning to understand China.

Our personal relationship ended when he returned to Communist headquarters in Yenan in 1943. I saw him again and again in the years 1944 and 1945, but I would rather remember Chou the last two times I saw him, on the occasion of Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972.

The first glimpse was in Peking's Great Hall of the People, at a banquet. The American journalists sat at the far rear of the hall which reputedly seats 10,000. When President Nixon rose to circle the innermost ring of tables of the mighty, I headed for the big table where Chou En-lai sat next to Mrs. Nixon. I was abruptly stopped by agents of our American Secret Service as well as Chinese security. Both Chou En-lai and Mrs. Nixon, next to him, saw my predicament simultaneously. Perhaps they were bored with their conversation, for I do not think that Patricia Nixon and Chou En-lai had much in common to discuss. Simultaneously both waved to their agents to let me through, and each tried to explain to the other why they had beckoned to me. Chou Enlai, his English by now rusted away, could only say that I was "old friend, old friend." pointing at me. And she, believing that I had approached to talk with her, was saying the same thing. For two or three minutes, I hovered awkwardly over the President's empty seat, but when Nixon returned, I fled.

I saw Chou again seven days later in Hangchow, one of the beauty spots of China. Nixon and Chou strolled over one of the several bridges spanning the lake with affected nonchalance. Nixon, who noticed me first, pointed me out to Chou, and I could not catch what he said. Chou said, "But that is Teddy White. He has not come back to China since the liberation." I was angry; I had tried without success for 20 years to reach Chou En-lai and to revisit China, so I shot back: "It's not my fault I haven't been able to come back." At which Chou En-lai shot back a jest in Chinese. My command of Chinese had by then rusted away; the official interpreter said that Chou En-lai had responded, "Maybe it's both our faults."

It sounded like the Chou En-lai I had once known, who was amused by Westerners' efforts to understand China, yet appreciated the effort. He might have accepted the Kipling phrase --"East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." But I like the way he said it better: "Maybe it's both our faults."

Chennault and the Kunming Whorehouse

After Pearl Harbor, Lieut. General Joseph Stilwell, U.S. Commander of the China-Burma-India theater, quarreled constantly with Chiang, whom he once described to White as "an ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, peasant son of a bitch." There was also a feud with one of his own men, Brigadier General Claire Chennault of the famed Flying Tigers, Commander of the U.S. China Air Task Force.

Stilwell and Chennault despised each other, but their feud was not merely personal. They fought over a conceptual difference about war, a conceptual difference which to this day splits all American defense and war plans: the concept of ground war as against the concept of air war.

I backed into the feud inadvertently. TIME had directed me in 1943 to write a study of Chennault, out of which they would carve the story that would run with his portrait on the cover. By then the Stilwell-Chennault feud could not be ignored.

I began by asking Chennault, off the record, where and how his great feud with Stilwell had begun. "That whorehouse of mine," he said obliquely. His first breach with Stilwell--over a whorehouse! Chennault's early strategy in 1942 rested on a strike force of fewer than 80 planes. But sometimes as many as half his planes might be grounded by accidents of casual copulation--ground and air crews both being hospitalized for infections acquired in Kunming's famous Slit Alley. Venereal disease reduced Chennault's combat effectiveness as if his planes had been bombed on the ground. Intolerable. Thus, since he could not pen up his young Americans in stockades, he must recognize their appetites, yet protect their health to keep his planes flying. Therefore Chennault had sent a U.S. Air Corps plane, with a medical crew aboard, over the Hump to India, where twelve nondiseased Indian prostitutes had been inspected, medically cleared and recruited for the service of the China Air Task Force; and had flown them back in an American plane to our forward strike base, where the air and ground crews might dally with them and not be infected.

Stilwell had not authorized this, and exploded when he heard of it. Stilwell was the theater commander; he was a puritan. Stilwell knew that the Japanese had whorehouses for their troops, the Prussians had whorehouses for their troops; the French had whorehouses for their troops. But not the U.S. Army, goddamn it; the U.S. Army would not fly whores across the Hump in Air Corps planes; it established no brothels for its men. Chennault wanted only to keep his planes flying and would do anything necessary to keep them in the air, to deliver his message with bombs. Stilwell had the morality of Oliver Cromwell--he was pure, absolutely pure, of graft, adultery, lying, thieving, or any transgression of the Ten Commandments. Such men served the U.S. Army in those days. Both were necessary--but Chennault had to close down his whorehouse.

Famine in Honan Province

"Of all marks on my thinking," writes White, "the Honan famine remains most indelible." It happened in the winter of 1943:

The scene was Honan, a province about the size of Missouri, but inhabited by 32 million peasants who grew wheat, corn, millet, soybeans, and cotton. Honan was a fine flat plain whose soil was a powdered, yellow loess which, when wet with rain, oozed with fertility. And which, when the rains did not come, grew nothing; then the peasants died. The rains had not come in 1942, and by 1943, Honan peasants, we heard in Chungking, were dying.

What a famine was, I did not know--nor did I know that the Honan famine of 1943 was one of the worst in modern history. But it sounded as if it would make a story. So, at the end of February 1943, I flew to North China with my friend Harrison Forman of the London Times, and won permission to travel the Lunghai railway from Paochi through Sian to the gap through which the Yellow River flowed and the railway ran. The Japanese, on the far side of the river, habitually shelled this gap by day. The station at the break, where we spent the evening, stank of urine, stank of shit, stank of bodies. All around us were acres of huddled peasants, bundles of flesh lying in the cold on the ground, waiting for the next train to take them east, to the rear area and food. Babies cried; but no one paid any attention, even if a baby was crying in the arms of a lifeless woman lying on the ground. Soldiers patrolled the mob, else they would have stampeded for the food or to board the trains that rolled at night.

In the morning a handlebar car was ready, too small a target for the Japanese artillery on the north bank of the Yellow River to shoot at. And thus, bundled in a soldier's padded robe, seated in the cold wind on an open pump-car, I traveled 30 miles that day as if I were a general reviewing his troops. But I was reviewing a famine.

There was, of course, much blood. First a man, lying by the rail line, still alive, crying, with his leg severed at the shin and the shinbone sticking out like a white cornstalk. He must have fallen under the wheels of the train. Then another man, still alive, his hip mangled and bloody. But the blood was not my chief distress; it was my inability to make any sense of what I was seeing. In a famine, where no one kills but nature, there are no marks on the body when people die; nature itself is the enemy--and only government can save from nature.

All day, along the railway tracks, as far as I could see, trailed an endless procession. They walked in the cold, and where they dropped of hunger or cold or exhaustion, there they lay. There were the wheelbarrows, piled high with family goods, father pushing, mother pulling, children walking. Old ladies hobbled with bound feet; sometimes young men carried their mothers piggyback on their shoulders. No one stopped. If children cried over the body of a father or a mother, they were passed, soundlessly. I was seeing people in full flight, where no armed man pursued.

I was glazed with the sight when I arrived in Loyang, the provincial, capital of Honan; and there at the station, in the dark, they were packing refugees into boxcars like lumber for the night run over the gap. And again, the stink of urine and bodies; then, through the deserted streets to the Catholic mission.

Its master was Bishop Thomas Megan, of Eldora, Iowa, a stocky, cheerful, healthy man, devoutly Catholic and American. In this theater of death, the missionaries were partners in charity, Americans joining with Europeans, Catholics with Protestants. What outside relief came in, came through the missionaries; where we located them on our travels they were beleaguered--assailed by wasted men, frail women, children, people head-knocking on the ground, groveling, kneeling, begging for food, wailing, "K'o lien, k'o lien"("Mercy, mercy"), but pleading really only for food.

With Megan, we set out on horseback through the winds of February and March, because he felt we should see the people dying. What we saw, I now no longer believe--except that my scribbled notes insist I saw what I saw. There were the bodies: the first, no more than an hour out of Loyang, lying in the snow, a day or two dead, her face shriveled about her skull; she must have been young; and the snow fell on her eyes; and she would lie unburied until the birds or the dogs cleaned her bones. The dogs were also there along the road, slipping back to their wolf kinship, and they were sleek, well-fed. We stopped to take a picture of dogs digging bodies from sand piles; some were half-eaten, and the dogs had already picked clean one visible skull. Half the villages were deserted; some simply abandoned, others already looted. One saw, as one traveled, people chipping bark from trees, with knives, scythes and meat cleavers; you could grind bark and eat it. The trees would then die and be chopped down for firewood; perhaps all China had been deforested that way.

The orphanage of central government General Tang En-po stains memory with its smell. It stank worse than anything else I have ever smelled. Even the escorting officer could not stand the odor and, holding his handkerchief to his nose, asked to be excused. Abandoned babies were inserted four to a crib. Those who could not fit were simply laid on the straw. They smelled of baby vomit and baby shit, and when they were dead, they were cleaned out.

So I saw these things, but the worst was what I heard, which was about cannibalism. I never saw any man kill another person for meat, but it seemed irrefutably true that people were eating people meat. The usual defense was that the people meat was taken from the dead. In one village a mother was discovered boiling her two-year-old to eat its meat. A father was charged with strangling his two boys to eat them; his defense was that they were already dead. In one village, the army had insisted that the peasants take in destitute children and an eight-year-old boy had been imposed on a peasant family. Then he disappeared. And on investigation, his bones were discovered by the peasant's shack, in a big crock. The question was only whether the boy had been eaten after he died or had been killed to be eaten later.

What had happened slowly became clear. The war was the first cause. If the Japanese had not made war, then the Chinese would not have cut the dikes of the Yellow River to stop them by switching the river's course. Then, perhaps, the ecology of North China would not have changed. Or, perhaps, food might have been packed in from food-surplus areas. But in addition to the war had been the drought. That was nature's guilt. At this point, men had become guilty--either for what they did or failed to do.

The only verdict was that the Chinese "government had let these people die, or ignorantly starved them to death. The government was fighting a war against Japan; it was relentless in collecting taxes for the war. But since it did not trust its own paper money, its armies in the field were instructed to collect taxes in grain and kind for their own support. ("If the people die," said an officer to me, "the land will still be Chinese. But if the soldiers starve, the Japanese will take the land.") The army had emptied the countryside of food; shipped in no gram from grain-surplus areas; ignored the need of the people to eat. The army's tax, I found, was usually equivalent to the full crop, but in some cases it was higher--and peasants were sometimes forced to sell animals, tools, furniture, for cash to make up the difference. Moreover, the peasants were required to feed the army's animals when they marched; and one civilian official said of his peasants, "It's very hard to make them give grain to army horses when I know they're eating straw themselves." In some army units, storehouses bulged with surplus grain--which officers sold for their own profit, and which missionaries and good officials bought from the black market to feed the starving.

I concentrated my last week in the famine area on estimating figures. My best estimate was five million dead or dying --which may have been 20% off the mark, one way or the other. But figures that large become statistics, thus forgettable. My sharpest memory is a glimpse, at evening as we were riding, of two people lying in a field sobbing. They were a man and his woman, and they were holding each other in the field where they lay, intertwined to give warmth to each other. I knew they would die and I could not stop.

So impatient had I been to get the story out from the famine area that I had filed it raw from Honan, from the first telegraph station en route home--Loyang. By regulation, it should have been sent back via Chungking to be censored and almost certainly stopped. This telegram, however, was flashed from Loyang to New York via the commercial radio system in Chengtu, direct and uncensored. Thus, when the story broke, it broke in TIME magazine--the magazine most committed to the Chinese cause in all America. Madame Chiang K'ai-shek was then in the U.S., and the story infuriated her; she asked my publisher, Harry Luce, to fire me; but he refused.

In Chungking I was denounced by some officials for avoiding censorship, and accused by others of having plotted with Communists in the telegraph administration to slip my story out It took five days to get through to Chiang K'ai-shek and then only with the help of the sainted widow of Dr. Sun Yat-sen one of Madame Chiang K'ai-shek's older sisters. It was she who insisted the dictator receive me and then, to stiffen me the dainty lady wrote, "... report conditions as frankly and fearlessly as you did to me. If heads must come off, don't be squeamish about it."

In his dark office, Chiang sat in his high-backed chair, listening to me with visible distaste because his meddling sister-m-law insisted he had to. I talked of the dying; then of the taxes; then of the extortions. It was obvious he did not know what was going on. I tried to break through by telling him about the cannibalism. He said that cannibalism in China was impossible I said that I had seen dogs eating people on the roads. He said that was impossible. But there I had him. I had asked Harrison Forman to accompany me to Chiang's office, for he had photographs of famine conditions. His pictures clearly showed dogs standing over dugout corpses. The Generalissimo's knee began to jiggle slightly, in a nervous tic. He took out his little pad and brush pen and began to make notes. He asked for names of officials; he wanted more names; he wanted us to make a full report to him, leaving out no names. In a flat manner, as if restating a fact to himself, he said that he had told the army to share its grain with the people. Then he thanked us; told me that I was a better investigator than "any of the investigators I have sent on my own." And I was ushered out.

Heads I know, did roll, starting, I assume, with those at the hapless telegraph office of Loyang, which had let slip to America the embarrassment of death in Honan. But lives were saved --and saved by the power of the American press.

Yahoo in Yenan

By late 1944, the military situation in China was desperate. Chiang and Stilwell were at an impasse; and Nationalist and Communist troops were faced off, as ready to open civil war against each other as to fight the advancing Japanese. To settle these intractable quarrels, President Roosevelt sent a special emissary:

All too often the dialogue of great historic forces is skewed by the spin of the initial conversation--and the dialogue of the American Democracy and Chinese Communism was thus skewed by their first official contact. The spokesman of China was Mao Tse-tung; the spokesman of America was Major General Patrick Hurley. Mao was a genius, Hurley was an ignoramus, and Hurley's arrival in Yenan during that first week in November 1944, to begin American negotiations with Chinese Communists, is a classic instance of the derailment of history by accident.

Hurley had made his mark as a politician in the Republican convention of 1928 in Houston, where he was one of the floor managers corralling delegates for Herbert Hoover. An Oklahoma corporation lawyer, he got his piece of the traditional share-out of office after a Presidential victory, being named Secretary of War in 1928. Later Franklin Roosevelt, making the war a bipartisan effort, sent Hurley, now accoutered as a major general, to negotiate with Chiang K'ai-shek for both the creation of a coalition government between Communists and Nationalists, and the supersession of Chiang K'ai-shek by Stilwell as Commander in Chief of the Chinese land forces.

Hurley had already failed to make peace between Stilwell and Chiang when he decided to take off for Yenan to make peace between Communists and Nationalists. Hurley was talkative, with the Southwestern garrulousness that marked Lyndon Johnson--his concept being that, if he held a conversation together by his own chatter long enough, he might find out what he himself was talking about. His style was caught best by a young congressman, sent by Roosevelt to China in November 1944, Mike Mansfield, later to be the Majority Leader of the U S 'Senate. Mansfield reported pithily to Roosevelt: "I saw Major General Pat Hurley and we had a very long talk. He talked for two hours and forty-seven minutes, and I talked for thirteen minutes."

Hurley loved dramatics--and what could be more dramatic than the personal representative of the President of the US. dropping in, from the air, for the first summit conference of the American state and the Chinese revolution, unannounced. Because it was a dull afternoon, John Paton Davies, the State Department's political adviser to Stilwell, Colonel David Barrett, chief of U.S. military observers in Yenan, and I had gone to the airstrip to see one of our rare weather-service planes arrive. But there was a second plane, and out of it descended a six-foot-three-inch character in American uniform and overcoat, the pants pressed knife-sharp, a silver-haired, bushy-mustached major general, whose chest was covered with ribbons from shoulder to rib cage. It was Hurley. Barrett, as senior American military officer, approached, looked the general up and down, offered the observation, "General, it looks as if you have a medal there for every campaign except Shays' Rebellion." Barrett was to suffer for this, as were I and Davies, and all who tried to instruct Hurley on China.

No more than five minutes could have elapsed before a ragged group of Communist Chinese soldiers raced down from the hill to line up in an honor guard. And almost instantly thereafter, appeared the Communist high command: Mao Tse-tung himself, in a baggy unpressed cotton-padded blue cloak; Chu Teh, the Commander in Chief, in the orange-tan thick woolen uniform of a common soldier; Yeh Chien-ying, the Chief of Staff, in the smart khaki-colored wool uniform of an officer; and Chou Enlai, in a dingy brown leather coat. There were only four automobiles in Yenan then, and when Mao required one, his vehicle was a converted ambulance. Out of this ambulance they now rushed, trotting pell-mell to greet Franklin Roosevelt's emissary. Hurley towered above the stocky Chinese like Captain John Smith surrounded by Powhatan's tribal braves.

Hurley advanced on the honor guard of disheveled soldiers, stood for a moment, and then let out a loud screech--"Yahoo!" --giving the Choctaw yell of his native Oklahoma. We gaped; but this was President Roosevelt's choice. That evening, since the Communists had already prepared a banquet in honor of the November 7 anniversary of the great Russian Revolution, we were all invited. At that banquet, when Hurley was called on to speak, he rose, paused, and then yelled again at the top of his lungs, "Yahoo!"

Of more consequence to me was my conversation with Hurley between our afternoon tea and the banquet. I had spoken to Mao Tse-tung, formally, only a few days before. I told Hurley that Mao had said there was no way of "untying the knot," no way of negotiating a peaceful end of the embryonic civil war, unless America recognized the existence of a de facto Communist government, and saw it as an independent ally in the great war against Japan.

For this briefing I was to suffer. I did not know, when I told Hurley that his unannounced and unbriefed mission was probably futile, how much it would enrage him. But 20 years later, when the documents were published, I read that the next morning, November 8, Hurley had sent a dispatch to the State Department concerning my disruptive presence: "Theodore White," wrote Hurley in his classified message, "... told me that he had just talked to Chairman Mao and Mao had told him that there was not any possible chance of an agreement between him and Chiang K'ai-shek ... White's whole conversation was definitely against the mission with which I am charged."

That report would remain filed in the dossiers of American intelligence for years, and would return to plague my life many years later, when I was accused of being one of those who "lost China to the Reds."

Unintended Consequences

The big war was over, and China's civil war was being won by Mao's Communists. White was no longer with TIME--the result of a dispute with Time Inc. Editor-in-Chief Henry R. Luce over the magazine's policy toward Chiang--and he shifted his front-row seat to Europe. There the Marshall Plan was beginning to work wonders, and also to produce some surprises:

The Law of Unintended Consequences is what twists history's chronology into drama. Our treatment of England and Germany is a classic example of the Law's operation. After victory we began by seeking to punish the Germans for Hitler's savageries and to help the British for having defended freedom's way for all people. We ended, by the logic of the Marshall Plan and the Law of Unintended Consequences, in dismissing from greatness the British, our allies, and elevating the Germans, our enemies, to the status of Europe's senior power.

This historic reversal was not at all intended. Twice in one generation Germany had been our most violent enemy. Neither its military governor, General Lucius Clay, nor anyone else in the U.S. Army enjoyed asking the Congress for "Army" appropriations to feed or help Germans.

The result, thirty years later, is amusing to consider. I first stumbled on its roots in a conversation with one of Lucius Clay's economic experts in the Villa Huegel, the quintessential private Teutonic mansion of the Krupp family in Essen, all smelling of walnut oil and echoing of Wagner. The Villa Hugel was the command point and surveillance center for Allied occupation of the Ruhr. Clay's expert was quite simple. "Our policy." he said, "is to make these bastards work their way back." The Germans should be forced to work, and work hard, he felt, to pay for the food, fiber and raw material that American humanitarians believed we must ship in via the Marshall Plan.

Other West European governments were democratic governments; as all modern elected governments must, they promised more--more good houses, more schools, more health insurance, more equality. The most democratic and responsible government in Europe was the British government; it promised its people most. The most autocratic government in Europe was West Germany--and its autocrat was the U.S. Army. England, France, Belgium, had governments that could vote on how many hours went into a working week, and what maternity benefits should be, and how many days or weeks of vacation people should have. In Germany, Lucius Clay and his advisers decided that Germans must work a 48-hour week, and work they did. The U.S. Army said the Germans must rebuild their factories, roads and bridges first; meanwhile, let them shiver in cellars, ruins and rags; no housing or clothing until they earned their way back.

It was years before I could fully measure the results of the Law of Unintended Consequences. When I first reported Europe, shortly after the war, the British standard of living was roughly three times that in refugee-crammed West Germany. Since then, somehow, England has gone its jovial way across its pleasant plateau of civility, but Germany has boomed. The average per capita income in victorious England had risen to $3,871 thirty years later--while in defeated Germany it had reached $7,336, and the gap was widening. Somehow, the severity with which the Americans policed Germany and directed the flow of aid proved more fruitful than the affection and support we gave the free government of the English people to do as they wished with our billions.

Nobody could have envisioned that what was being done in the reconstruction of Europe and Asia would result in the rise of Germany and Japan--and that 30 years later, our two former enemies would threaten, like giant pincer claws, America's industrial supremacy in the new trading world we had tried to open to all.

Ike Decides to Take the Plunge

In early 1952, the curtain had already risen on the U.S. presidential campaign, but the most talked of potential candidate was off in Europe, serving as Commander in Chief of the three-year-old North Atlantic Treaty Organization and refusing to commit himself. A very special luncheon in Paris finally convinced White that Dwight D. Eisenhower was going to run:

From the fall of 1951, we correspondents had begun to report the parade through Paris of movers-and-shakers trying to see Eisenhower. There was our old friend Paul Hoffman returning for a visit in 1952; there were Thomas E. Dewey and Herbert Brownell, purse-lipped; there was Harold Stassen, open to the press as always, hoping the headlines of his visit would amplify his importance. There was Henry Cabot Lodge, so sure of his own Massachusetts Senate seat (which he was to lose to John F. Kennedy that year) that he felt he could spend full time on the Eisenhower campaign. But none could come away with a flat-out quotable commitment from Dwight D. Eisenhower that his hat was in the ring.

Time wore on into the primary season, into his surprise New Hampshire victory, but Eisenhower's position was still obscure. Those of us who, as military correspondents, were accredited to his headquarters at Marly-le-Roi outside Paris were sternly instructed that anyone who brought up politics, or Eisenhower's candidacy, in the general's presence, would be forthwith escorted out of his presence. Bang. Finally, Ike yielded. He would accept the invitation of an inner group of correspondents for a private, off-the-record, all-secret lunch on politics at the home of Preston Grover of the Associated Press.

He came to our lunch of eight people two days after the March 18 Minnesota primary of 1952; and he was an Eisenhower none of us had ever known: pink-cheeked as always, but bubbling, expansive, joyful. The Minnesota primary, just over, had been contested by both Taft and Stassen, Minnesota's favorite son. And Eisenhower, not listed on the ballot, on a write-in vote, had come in second to Stassen with 37.2% of the total to Stassen's 44.4% on the regular ballot! (Ike's one-time chief, Douglas MacArthur, it should be noted, won only 1/2 of 1% of the vote that day.) Following Eisenhower's New Hampshire victory a week earlier, it was a phenomenal showing, an earthquake. There could no longer be any dodging the reality that Ike was the leading Republican candidate for President of the U.S.

His good mood that day was too irrepressible to quench. He had Politicians' Euphoria, a condition I later came to recognize on election-night victories--that moment of vulnerability when candidates are at their loosest and most expansive. Ike held a drink in his hand, and I found myself in a corner encouraging his indiscretion. Baron Krupp had just been freed from Allied imprisonment; and two of us launched him on that subject. There was nothing we could do about Krupp now in 1952, said Ike; we had to let Krupp go free; but he didn't like it. If he had to do it over again, he would do it differently. Shoot all the war criminals you're going to shoot right away, then let the rest go free, said Ike. Like the Malmedy massacre of American GIs by Nazi storm troopers. He felt we should have caught, convicted and shot the SS killers immediately after victory; all shooting after a war should be done within six months. He did not like the Nuremberg trials either. But the trials had been Roosevelt's idea. As he talked about Roosevelt, his own admiration and exasperation came through. He picked out Roosevelt's vast geographical knowledge as the President's most extraordinary quality, and then, with irritation, spoke of the difficulty of pinning Roosevelt down to specifics. the stubbornness of Roosevelt, his own inability to get clear instruction from him. We finally sat down to lunch and Grover said flatly that since we were forbidden to talk politics at Ike's military headquarters, we were here to talk politics in his, Grover's, home. So--how about it?

At which Eisenhower took over, as if on cue.

What he wanted most, he said, was to keep the U.S. Army from being sucked into politics. It's bad for Americans to think of military figures in a political way; and now here he was, a general and a political figure. He made a rather impassioned speech about the vital separation of military from civilian in American life. He'd made the mistake, on Jan. 7, of stating he would never run for the presidency unless there was a "clear-cut call to political duty" from the American people, and he shouldn't have used that phrase. What was a clear call? he asked rhetorically. The New Hampshire primary? The Minnesota write-in?

He'd never sought the nomination, not once. Even in 1948, he went on, when the Democratic "big wigs" told him he could have their nomination on a platter if he wanted it, he'd said no. And all he'd done since was listen. Yet now he was a candidate in uniform, looking for the honorable thing to do.

He grasped his Eisenhower jacket by the lapels and tugged it. "I can't, I won't drag this uniform through politics. It's been all my life," he said. We must help him; what should he do?

We all knew what he was going to do; but now we had been conscripted as advisers to tell him how to do it. He had made us a council of his friends. Few sophisticated reporters today would let themselves be so trapped in confidence and thus barred from breaking a great story; but Eisenhower had more candidate skill than any amateur on first run I have ever known.

It was a jovial lunch as we fell to at table. Grover, a bachelor, rarely gave his gifted cook an opportunity to prepare the hearty Burgundian meals in which she specialized, so now for the great General Eisenhower she had outdone herself. The wine went round and round, the pastries of ham-curls stuffed with goose liver piled up.

My notes reflect all the contradictions of impression of anyone who met Eisenhower only occasionally: the mixture of simplicity and astuteness, the beguilement he could cast over any conversation he wanted; the boy-scout sincerity; the shrewdness of manipulation; his understanding of the twisting corridors of government.

If he was going to run, he said--and by now it was so obvious he would that we were all practically marching into the White House with him--he must resign soon. But he couldn't lay down the NATO command overnight. He had to give Bob Lovett (Secretary of Defense) at least six weeks to find another man for the command. And he wanted to be home by May 15. if he was going to run his own campaign. But Truman had always been "decent and honest" with him. He could not challenge President Truman except openly. We found ourselves all agreeing with Ike's final thought: to write his resignation letter to Truman in a sealed envelope, but to send the envelope to Lovett for delivery, with Lovett being told what was in the envelope. And then leave it to both of them to decide how to announce that General of the Armies Dwight D. Eisenhower was leaving the U.S. Army to campaign for the presidency.

What I find most authentic today in the notes I typed after that lunch was the spontaneous sound of the Republican voice 25 years ago. Ike could have had the 1952 nomination, I now know, on the ticket of either party. But I find my notes picking up his theme--a theme which then sounded fresh to me, but now, on the larynxes of Republican orators, sounds as old-fashioned as a lament from the Prophets. Ike was closing the lunch with his credo.

"The people have the right to know what I stand for," Ike began. His ideas were clear: this business of centralism in government. There was too much of the bureaucracy, too much looking to Washington. He wanted to get the federal government organized so it did not wipe out the states and the municipalities and the communities. He didn't want to have people looking to Washington for everything. The problem was that the federal government was "taking so much money from everyone it left no resources for local government to run its educational apparatus. That was the problem ..."

This was the Eisenhower who, years later decided, as he had to, that federal troops must be flown into Little Rock, Arkansas, to force that community to comply with the decision of the Supreme Court. This was the man who set up the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and did begin the modern chapter of federal aid to education. But the incantation against the central government went on, and on, and on, to be voiced later by every Republican candidate and President for the quarter-century since.

As Ike rose at lunch's end, we all rose. We knew we had a candidate.

On the Seesaw: The 1960 Election

Back in the U.S. after 15 nomadic years, White watched the growing flow of power to Washington that Ike had condemned but could not, even as President, manage to stem. Not until the campaign for the 1960 presidential election was under way did White begin work on the series of books that was to bring him his greatest renown. The morning after Election Day, White waited in suspense at the Hyannis Armory on Cape Cod to see whether Illinois would give John F. Kennedy or Richard M. Nixon the title role in The Making of the President, 1960:

The vote kept seesawing; it was the first time I had read precincts with professional politicians: and these professional politicians understood the game. It was downstate (Republican) versus Cook County (Democratic). and the bosses, holding back totals from key precincts, were playing out their concealed cards as in a giant game of blackjack. There was nothing anyone could do in Hyannisport except hope that Boss Daley of Chicago could do it for them. Daley was a master at this kind of election-night blackjack game. So were the men I was with in the back room--all of them tense until the A.P. ticker chattered and reported something like this: "With all downstate precincts now reported in, and only Cook County precincts unreported, Richard Nixon has surged into the lead by 3,000 votes." I was dismayed, for if Nixon had really carried Illinois, the game was all but over. And at this point I was jabbed from dismay by the outburst of jubilation from young Dick Donahue, who yelped, "He's got them! Daley made them go first. He's still holding back ... watch him play his hand now." I was baffled, they were elated. But they knew the counting game better than I, and as if in response to Donahue's yelp, the ticker, having stuttered along for several minutes with other results, announced: "With the last precincts of Cook County now in, Senator Kennedy has won a lead of 8,000 votes to carry Illinois's 27 electoral votes." Kennedy, I learned afterward, had been assured of the result several hours before. Later that evening, Kennedy told Benjamin Bradlee of an early call from Daley, when all seemed in doubt. "With a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends," Daley had assured Kennedy before the A.P. had pushed out the count, "you're going to carry Illinois."

The President-designate appeared shortly thereafter in the Hyannis Armory in Republican Barnstable County, Cape Cod. Barnstable Township had voted its Protestant prejudice the previous day, preferring Nixon over Kennedy by 4,515 to 2,783. Kennedy strode up on the platform, puffy-eyed, but still handsome. He had insisted that his father now appear with him in public, and also his pregnant wife. The elegant and controlled John F. Kennedy had tears in his eyes.

He spoke briefly, gracefully, composed as the camera held on his face; but his hands below camera level quivered and shook as he tried to hold his papers. He stepped down from the platform and, suddenly, we all noticed that there was an elastic membrane of Secret Service men separating us from him. He spoke first as he descended to the old Massachusetts guard. He had special words of greeting for all within touch distance; for myself a taunting "O.K.. Teddy, now you can go ahead and write that book of yours." And somewhere in that ten minutes he uttered a phrase that has scored itself on my memory.

It remains in my memory thus: "The margin is thin, but the responsibility is clear." The echo has returned to me on every election night in America, however thin or large the margin. Politics, in the U.S., beget power; and when the votes are counted, however thin the margin, the man who has that margin cannot escape the responsibility of power.

"Camelot, Sad Camelot"

A week had passed since that dreadful day in Dallas, and the nation was drained by its vigil of mourning before the TV screens. One thing remained to be done, and it was the widow of the assassinated John F. Kennedy who did it. She provided a fitting epitaph for his tragically foreshortened presidency:

The morning after Thanksgiving I was taken from the dentist's chair by a telephone call from my mother saying that Jackie Kennedy was calling and needed me. I came home immediately. Making a call back to Hyannisport, I found myself talking to Jacqueline Kennedy, who said she must talk with me--there was something that she wanted LIFE magazine to say to the country, and I must do it. She would send a Secret Service car to bring me to Hyannisport. I called the Secret Service--and was curtly informed that Mrs. Kennedy was no longer the President's wife, and she could give them no orders for cars. They were crisp. I could rent no plane because a storm hovered over Cape Cod. At this point it became quite apparent that my mother, unused to this kind of excitement, was having a heart attack. If the widow of my friend needed me and my mother needed me--what should I do? My wife Nancy made that decision; our family doctor, Harold Rifkin, said he would come now, holiday weekend or not, and preside at my mother's bedside; but Nancy said that I must go to comfort the President's widow.

In a rented limousine, in a driving rainstorm, I made my way back to New England. The driver stopped now and then so I could telephone to find how my mother was doing, learn she was stable, and then finally I told the chauffeur to gun the car.

It was now quite late on Friday, November 29th, a week after the assassination. Once more I had asked LIFE magazine to hold its presses open as it had the week before. Without hesitation, the editors had agreed to my suggestion. They would hold until I found out what Jacqueline Kennedy wanted to say to the nation. But since it cost $30,000 an hour overtime on Saturdays at the printing plants for me to hold up LIFE, they hoped I could let them know soon whether there was a story there. At that sum per hour; desperately worried about my mother; still unstabilized by the emotions of the assassination, I entered the Kennedy home in Hyannisport.

Jacqueline Kennedy had been trying to escape for days. No single human being had endured more public attention, more of the camera watching, the microphones intruding, the tears caught glistening, the children's hands curling in her own, than she had in the telecasts of the assassination and the ceremonies. She had performed flawlessly, superbly. I know now she wanted to cry, and she could not. She had fled from Washington to Hyannisport, to be away from it all. But still with her, in the room when I entered, were several good-willed comforters. She did not want anyone there when she talked to me. So they left. I sat down on a small sofa, looked at her, the journalistic imperative forcing reportage almost automatically into my notes: "... composure ... beautiful ... dressed in black trim slacks, beige pullover sweater ... eyes wider than pools ... calm voice ..." She was without tears; drained, white of face.

She had asked me to Hyannisport, she said, because she wanted me to make certain that Jack was not forgotten in history. The thought that it was up to me to make American history remember John F. Kennedy was so unanticipated that my pencil stuttered over the notes. But there was so much that this woman--who regarded me as one of Kennedy's "scholar" friends rather than an "Irish" or "swinging" friend--wanted to say that if indeed I was a friend (as I still feel myself to be) my first duty was to let this sad, wan lady talk out her grief. And let LIFE'S presses wait.

What bothered her was history. She wanted me to rescue Jack from all the "bitter people" who were going to write about him in history. She did not want Jack left to the historians.

There poured out several streams of thought that mingled for hours. Jacqueline Kennedy, that night, talked first of her personal anguish, then of what she thought history might have to say of her husband, and then wandered from his childhood to Dallas, trying always to make clear to me that I should make clear to the people how much magic there had been in John F. Kennedy's time. She thought her husband was truly a man of magic, which is a lovely thought in any wife.

We talked for a few moments aimlessly and then the scene took over, as if controlling her.

"...there'd been the biggest motorcade from the airport. Hot. Wild. Like Mexico and Vienna. The sun was so strong in our faces. I couldn't put on sunglasses ... Then we saw this tunnel ahead, I thought it would be cool in the tunnel, I thought if you were on the left the sun wouldn't get into your eyes ...

"They were gunning the motorcycles. There were these little backfires. There was one noise like that. I thought it was a backfire. Then next I saw Connally grabbing his arms and saying no, no, no, no, no, with his fist beating. Then Jack turned and I turned. All I remember was a blue-gray building up ahead. Then Jack turned back so neatly, his last expression was so neat... you know that wonderful expression he had when they'd ask him a question about one of the ten million pieces they have in a rocket, just before he'd answer. He looked puzzled, then he slumped forward. He was holding out his hand ... I could see a piece of his skull coming off. It was flesh-colored, not white--he was holding out his hand ... I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from his head. Then he slumped in my lap, his blood and his brains were in my lap ... Then Clint Hill [the Secret Service man], he loved us, he made my life so easy, he was the first man in the car ... We all lay down in the car ... And I kept saying, Jack, Jack, Jack, and someone was yelling he's dead, he's dead. All the ride to the hospital I kept bending over him, saying Jack, Jack, can you hear me, I love you, Jack."

She remembered, as I sat paralyzed, the pink-rose ridges on the inside of the skull, and how from here on down (she made a gesture just above her forehead) "his head was so beautiful. I tried to hold the top of his head down, maybe I could keep it in ... but I knew he was dead." It was all told tearlessly, her wide eyes not even seeing me, a recitative to herself.

Then she described how, when they came to the hospital, they tried to keep her from him, "these big Texas interns kept saying, Mrs. Kennedy, you come with us, they wanted to take me away from him ... But I said I'm not leaving ... Dave Powers came running to me at the hospital, crying when he saw me, my legs, my hands were covered with his brains ... When Dave saw this he burst out weeping ... I said I'm not going to leave him, I'm not going to leave him ... I was standing outside in this narrow corridor ... ten minutes later this big policeman brought me a chair."

Rear Admiral George G. Burkley, U.S. Navy, personal physician to the President, brought her into the operating room, insisting "it's her prerogative, it's her prerogative." Doctor Malcolm Perry, the operating surgeon, wanted her out. But she said, "It's my husband, his blood, his brains are all over me."

Then it was over. "... There was a sheet over Jack, his foot was sticking out of the sheet, whiter than the sheet. His mouth was so beautiful ... his eyes were open. They found his hand under the sheet, and I held his hand all the time the priest was saying extreme unction." Her gloves had stiffened with his blood and she gave one of her hands to "this policeman," and he pulled the glove off. Then: "... the ring was all blood-stained ... so I put the ring on Jack's finger ... and then I kissed his hand ..."

Interspersed with the memories, spoken with the particular whispering intimacy of Jacqueline Kennedy's voice, was constantly this effort to make the statement she had asked me to come and hear. Her message was quite simple:

She believed, and John F. Kennedy shared the belief, that history belongs to heroes; and heroes must not be forgotten. We talked from 8:30 until almost midnight, and it was only after she had rid herself of the blood scene that she tracked clearly what she wanted to say:

"... But there's this one thing I wanted to say ... I'm so ashamed of myself... When Jack quoted something, it was usually classical ... no, don't protect me now ... I kept saying to Bobby, I've got to talk to somebody, I've got to see somebody, I want to say this one thing, it's been almost an obsession with me, all I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy, it's been an obsession with me.

"... At night before we'd go to sleep ... we had an old Victrola. Jack liked to play some records. His back hurt, the floor was so cold. I'd get out of bed at night and play it for him, when it was so cold getting out of bed ... on a Victrola ten years old--and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record, the last side of Camelot, sad Camelot: ... 'Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.'

"... There'll never be another Camelot again ...

"Do you know what I think of history? ... For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But Jack loved history so... No one'll ever know everything about Jack. But ... history made Jack what he was ... this lonely, little sick boy ... scarlet fever ... this little boy sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history ... reading the Knights of the Round Table ... and he just liked that last song.

"Then I thought, for Jack history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way, if it made him see the heroes, maybe other little boys will see. Men are such a combination of good and bad ... He was such a simple man. But he was so complex, too. Jack had this hero idea of history, the idealistic view, but then he had that other side, the pragmatic side. His friends were his old friends; he loved his Irish Mafia.

"History!"--and now she reverted to the assassination scene again, as she did all through the conversation. "... Everybody kept saying to me to put a cold towel around my head and wipe the blood off [she was now recollecting the scene and picture of the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson on Air Force One at Love Field, as the dead President lay aft] ... I saw myself in the mirror, my whole face spattered with blood and hair. I wiped it off with Kleenex. History! I thought, no one really wants me there. Then one second later I thought, why did I wash the blood off? I should have left it there, let them see what they've done. If I'd just had the blood and caked hair when they took the picture ... Then later I said to Bobby--what's the line between history and drama?"

At some point she had said to me, "Caroline asked me, what kind of prayer should I say? And I told her, 'Either please, God, take care of Daddy, or please, God, be nice to Daddy.' " What Jacqueline Kennedy was saying to me now was: please, History, be kind to John F. Kennedy, don't leave him to the bitter old men to write about.

Out of all this, then, I tried to write the story. I typed in haste and inner turmoil in a servant's room, and in 45 minutes brought out the story.

At 2 a.m. I was dictating the story from the Kennedy kitchen to two of my favorite editors, Ralph Graves and David Maness, who, as good editors, despite a ballooning overtime printing bill, were nonetheless trying to edit and change phrases as I dictated. Maness observed that maybe I had too much of "Camelot" in the dispatch. Mrs. Kennedy had come in at that moment; she overheard the editor trying to edit me, who had already so heavily edited her. She shook her head. She wanted Camelot to top the story. Camelot, heroes, fairy tales, legends were what history was all about. Maness caught the tone in my reply as I insisted this had to be done as Camelot. He let the story run.

So the epitaph on the Kennedy Administration became Camelot--a magic moment in American history. Which, of course, is a misreading of history. The magic Camelot of John F. Kennedy never existed. The knights of his round table were able, tough, ambitious men, capable of kindness, also capable of error. Of them all, Kennedy was the toughest, the most intelligent, the most attractive--and inside, the least romantic. He was a realistic dealer in men, a master of games who understood the importance of ideas. He advanced the cause of America, at home and abroad. But he also posed for the first time the great question of the '60s and '70s: What kind of people are we Americans? What do we want to become?

For 25 years, I had been fascinated by the relationship of the Leader to Power, of the State to Force, of the Concept to Politics--and most recently of the Hero to his Circumstances. I would never again, after Kennedy, see any man as a hero.

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