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Living Politics

The downward spiral, from Lubell to Witcover.

Oct 23, 2006, Vol. 12, No. 06 • By MARK STRICHERZ
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Around the time Theodore H. White ended his Making of the President series, Jules Witcover emerged as his de facto successor. Witcover wrote big, sprawling books about the modern presidential campaign. By himself, he wrote three dealing with the 1968 presidential race--The Resurrection of Richard Nixon; 85 Days: The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy; and The Year the Dream Died--and one dealing with the 1976 election--Marathon. With Jack Germond he cowrote books about every presidential race between 1980 and 1992: Blue Smoke and Mirrors, Wake Us When It's Over, Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars? and Mad as Hell. His latest tome, last year's The Making of an Ink-Stained Wretch, is a memoir of his time on the presidential campaign trail.

One virtue of Witcover's campaign coverage, as all this suggests, was his indefatigability. Another was his adroit reporting of the "inside baseball" of presidential campaigns. (One of his many scoops was that Harry Dent, southern coordinator for President Ford's election, played a major role in Ford winning the 1976 Republican nomination, largely by convincing Mississippi's GOP state party chairman, Clarke Reed, to back Ford over Reagan.) In fact, Witcover was in some ways better than White at getting the inside skinny, partly because he was a shrewder judge of character.

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