OUR DEMOCRACY'S NEW CLOTHES: Theodore White was very bright!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2024

Could he have imagined these clothes? Could "our democracy" possibly die in disorder? 

As we float that question today, forgive us if we ask you to think about Theodore White again.

Quite literally, White wrote the book about the presidential campaign which inaugurated the modern political era. Even today, his famous book bears a famous title:

The Making of The President 1960

White was 46 years old when he wrote his famous book. That said, who was Theodore White? The leading authority on his life offers this instant thumbnail:

Theodore H. White 

Theodore Harold White (May 6, 1915 – May 15, 1986) was an American political journalist and historian, known for his reporting from China during World War II and the Making of the President series.

White started his career reporting for Time magazine from wartime China in the 1940s. He was the first foreigner to report on the Chinese famine of 1942–43 and helped to draw international attention to the shortcomings of the Nationalist government.

After leaving Time, he reported on post-war Europe for popular magazines in the early 1950s, but lost these assignments because of his association with the "Loss of China." He regained national recognition with The Making of the President 1960...

So goes the initial thumbnail. As the profile continues, additional background appears. We apologize for offering all this info. But this is part of "the way it was" at the dawn of this failing era:

White was born May 6, 1915, in Dorchester, [a part of] Boston. His parents were David White (born David Vladefsky, a Russian immigrant) and Mary Winkeller White. His father was a lawyer. He was raised Jewish, and as a teenager was a member of the socialist-Zionist Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. 

He was a student at Boston Latin School, from which he graduated in 1932; from there, he went on to Harvard College, from which he graduated [summa cum laude] with a B.A. in history as a student of John K. Fairbank, who went on to become a leading China scholar and White's longtime friend...

Awarded a Harvard traveling fellowship for a round-the-world journey, White ended up in Chungking, China's wartime capital. The only job he could find was with China's Ministry of Information. When Henry R. Luce, the China-born founder and publisher of Time magazine, came to China, he learned of White's expertise, the two bonded, and White became the China correspondent for Time during the war. He was the first foreign journalist to report the widespread Henan Famine and he filed stories on the strength of the Chinese Communists.

White chafed at the restrictions put on his reporting by the Chinese government censorship, but he also chafed at the spiking or rewriting of his stories by the editors at Time...

Although he maintained respect for Luce, White resigned and returned home to write freely, along with Annalee Jacoby, widow of fellow China reporter, Mel Jacoby. Their book about China at war and in crisis was the best-selling Thunder Out of China.

And so on from there, including a couple of best-selling novels in the 1950s.

White was 46 years old when he wrote the book which described the start of the modern political era. Some of his claims in the book strike us as perhaps a bit eccentric. That said, he was a summa cum laude Harvard grad who had seen large chunks of the world.

At the dawn of the modern era, White complained about the shriveled political discourse of the 1960 presidential campaign. Our question today will be this:

Smart and experienced though he may have been, could White have imagined what happened at last week's debate between Candidate Harris and Candidate Trump? Even at 46 years of age, could Theodore White have imagined the shape of our society's new suit of clothes?

More specifically, could White have imagined a major party nominee like one of the two in last week's debate? Could he have imagined a nominee who advanced the sorts of claims one candidate chose to advance during last Tuesday's event?

In our view, Candidate Harris was less than perfect during last Tuesday's debate. So were David Muir and Linsey Davis (ABC News), the moderators of that debate. Perfection is rarely achieved.

That said, our floundering nation's flailing discourse groans under the weight of the ongoing behaviors of the other candidate at the debate. We refer to behaviors our major news orgs don't seem to know how to describe—or may not want to confront.

We'll take a guess! The candidate made an array of claims which White could not have imagined. According to the ABC transcript, one of the most disordered of those claims started off like this:

TRUMP (9/10/24): Our country is being lost. We're a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what's going on here, you're going to end up in World War III, just to go into another subject. 

What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country—and look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States! And a lot of towns don't want to talk—not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it. 

In Springfield, they're eating the dogs! The people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating—they're eating the pets of the people that live there! And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame...

In Springfield—he seemed to mean in Springfield, Ohio—"the people that came in" are eating the cats and the dogs! According to the candidate, "the people that came in" are "eating the pets" of the people who live there! 

Within the context of "our democracy," the candidate almost seemed to be wearing a new suit of clothes. But so the candidate angrily said—and a large amount of public disorder has followed along from there.

Could Theodore White have imagined a major party nominee making such a presentation—it was only one of many—during a presidential debate?  We're willing to guess that the answer is no. We'll guess that he couldn't have done that.

Now for the rest of the story:

In a judgment for which he's been aggressively trashed, one of the moderators decided to "fact-check" what the candidate said about the eating of the dogs and the cats.

Rightly or wrongly—we have a mixed view—he didn't just let it go. This is what happened when David Muir, wisely or otherwise, decided to "clarify" the strange thing the hopeful had said:

MUIR: I just want to clarify here. You bring up Springfield, Ohio. And ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community—

TRUMP: Well, I've seen people on television—

MUIR: Let me just say here, this is—

TRUMP: The people on television say, "My dog was taken and used for food." So maybe he said that, and maybe that's a good thing to say for a city manager.

MUIR: I'm not taking this from television. I'm taking it from the city manager.

TRUMP: But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.

MUIR: Again, the Springfield city manager says there's no evidence of that—

TRUMP: We'll find out.

MUIR: Vice President Harris, I'll let you respond to the rest of what you heard.

"We'll find out," the candidate said. In the meantime, he was willing to broadcast the claim, which had already been widely disputed, to 67.1 million American citizens.

He was willing to broadcast the claim to the 67 million. Also, to the additional tens of millions of people who would see his claim amplified all across the programs of the Fox News Channel.

Should Muir have stepped in to "clarify" this point? By now, he and Davis have been savaged all through the halls of Red America for having engaged in such conduct during last Tuesday's debate.

As the week proceeds, we'll show you text from the several other times they fact-checked or sought to clarify statements by Candidate Trump. 

In our view, their approach to such matters wasn't always perfect. But in fairness, they were struggling with highly unusual statements.

Putting it a different way: 

They were trying to deal with this candidate's peculiar new suit of clothes.

To be clear, it wasn't just the eating of Springfield's pets. The candidate made other highly unusual claims in the course of the evening.

Candidate Harris also made statements which we would regard as inaccurate. In our view, it's hard to say that she made statements as disordered and "new" as those which emerged, with some regularity, from the other candidate in this year's White House campaign.

Candidate Trump was willing to say that some unspecified group of people have been eating the cats and dogs of some under-identified town. 

He said he'd seen someone say that on TV.  "We'll find out," he eventually said.

Starting with the Kennedy-Nixon debates, have moderators ever been forced to deal with such behavior? In support of Muir and Davis, we're prepared to suggest the possibility that this was a new suit of clothes.

The candidate emitted his statement about the eating of pets on Tuesday night. Yesterday morning, the New York Times was reporting on some of the effects of his behavior.

In Springfield—and yes, that would be Springfield, Ohio—there have been bomb threats since last Tuesday night. The FBI has been forced to step in. More than once, children have been evacuated from some of the city's public schools. 

In yesterday's print editions, the Times pushed its report about this state of affairs all the way back to page A21. Rightly or wrongly, they didn't think this remarkable state of affairs deserved a spot on the famous newspaper's front page.

It seems to us that the highly educated players at that famous newspaper didn't exercise perfect judgment about this matter. About the way to respond to behaviors like these—to this candidate's new suit of clothes.

We're prepared to cut the moderators some slack concerning the way they responded, in real time, to some of this candidate's statements. We'll even cut the New York Times some slack—for that newspaper's ongoing failure to come to terms with our society's new suit of clothes.

In fact, very few people have had to deal with this sort of disorder before. We'll guess that Theodore White—he of the summa cum laude degree—couldn't have imagined such disordered conduct during a presidential debate.

Long ago and far away, a famous emperor was striding about in a new suit of clothes. Citizens of the empire in question had a famously difficult time seeing the truth of the matter—had a hard time coming to terms with what was right there before them.

The New York Times has refused and refused, and refused and refused, to come to terms with our own society's new suit of clothes. People wear that raiment on the Fox News Channel, and that raiment was recently worn by one of the candidates in a presidential debate.

Final question for today:

Could "our democracy" die in this way? Imperfect though it always has been, could our democracy die in disorder as a gaggle of under-performing journalists insist on averting their gaze?

Could Teddy White have pictured this? Despite his summa cum laude degree, we'll guess that the answer is no!

Tomorrow: And on and on from there