The Making of the President 1964

The greatest political story ever told—the epic clash between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, as captured in Theodore White's dramatic and groundbreaking chronicle

The Making of the President 1960 is the book that revolutionized—even created—modern political journalism. Granted intimate access to all parties involved, Theodore White crafted an almost mythic story of the battle that pitted Senator John F. Kennedy against Vice-President Richard M. Nixon—from the decisive primary battles to the history-making televised debates, the first of their kind. Magnificently detailed and exquisitely paced, The Making of the President 1960 imbues the nation's presidential election process with both grittiness and grandeur, and established a benchmark against which all new campaign reporters would measure their work. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction—and the first entry in White's influential four-volume "narrative history of American politics in action"—this classic account remains the keystone of American political journalism.

In The Making of the President 1968, the third volume of the groundbreaking series that revolutionized American political journalism, Theodore H. White offers a compelling account of one of the most turbulent presidential campaigns in history: the 1968 election that put Richard M. Nixon in the White House. Viewing the electoral process from an insider's perspective—capturing both the vast scope and the intimate, behind-the-scenes details—White chronicles a campaign that saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, was marked by protest and violence in the streets of Chicago, and that came down to a neck-and-neck finish between the tenacious but ill-starred Hubert H. Humphrey and the most fascinating politician of the modern age: the finally, unexpectedly, victorious Richard Nixon.

In The Making of the President 1972, the fourth volume of narrative history of American politics in action, Theodore H. White brings his defining quartet of campaign narratives to a surprising and riveting close. The consummate journalist, White chronicles both the Democratic and the Republican parties as they jockeyed for position toward the end of Richard M. Nixons turbulent first term. He illuminates the cinematic moments that shaped the campaign-the attempt on George Wallaces life, Edmund Muskie crying in the snow in New Hampshire, the swift rise and fall of Tom Eagleton, and the ongoing anguish of Vietnam-leading inexorably to a second chaotic collapse among the Democrats and a landslide victory for Nixon. Yet even as the presidents highest ambitions were confirmed, White watches aghast as the new Nixon of 1968 is eclipsed by the corrupt Nixon of old-a Shakespearean conclusion to an astonishing political epoch.