The Making of the President 1960

The choosing of America's President is one of the world's most mysterious and complicated transactions in power. No troops mass on election day, no bands play, no clandestine conspiracies gather to strike in violence at the political jugular. Yet what emerges from the transaction is a single leader, separate forever from his fellow Americans, at whose disposal lie the most awesome forces of terror and the most majestic power for good that is given any individual on the globe.

An American election begins long before the fall season of excitement when the country turns its attention to the public claims of two candidates. It is an adventure for which men have planned, plotted and calculated years before the country wakes too their ambitions. It is a pageant re-enacted every four years, in which the most squalid and most selfless characters in American life all play a role. It is a game in which may can play, but only one can win.

More than a year before the election of John F. Kennedy, Theodore H. White began to explore the secret planning and private aspirations of seven men, each of whom, in his own way, found his dreams tormented by the power that might be his in the White House. By spring, Mr. White had begun to follow the open candidates as they plodded through the snows and early jousting of the primaries. Continuing through the conventions, the campaigns and the final drama of election night, he fashioned a work of contemporary history that highlights the decisions, the acts, the accidents, that created and American President, and also the cold political realities of a country upon whose decision the world of freedom waits. At once a political study of power in America, and a chronicle of individual Americans caught in the act of leadership, it is a story no other writer has attempted to tell before.

This vivid and important book combines the talents that have made Theodore H. White one of America's most distinguished authors — the historical journalism that produced Thunder Out of China and Fire in the Ashes and the dramatic storytelling that created The Mountain Road and The View from the Fortieth Floor.