We know only one thing for certain about history – that historians will write it. What they will write about periods of turbulence in American and World history (some would say it is the same subject over the last century), that’s another matter entirely. Nobody knows how historians will view 2008-2009 and the great economic upheaval, which is not done upheaving yet, not by a longshot.
I grew up staring at a bookshelf filled all the way across with my Uncle Teddy’s books, each personally autographed to me, starting back before I could read, but, they were one of the first things where I worked out the letters to read words that I could pronounce. Teddy did that for my Dad and his other brother and sister, and for me and all the other nieces and nephews.
(Theodore H. White, wrote The Making of the President series, tracking nearly 20 years of American Presidential campaigns, after beginning his career as the Time/Life correspondent in World War II-torn China, which produced his early landmark book: Thunder Out of China)
What would Teddy White, whom many say invented modern political journalism, say about what we have been living through these past 17 months?
– About two of three of America’s Big Three Automakers in Bankruptcy?
– About financial titans like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers having vanished beneath the tidal wave of economic troubles without a trace?
– About the incredible bubble of incomprehensibly exotic financial instruments bursting so big and so hard, that, if it was bubble gum, we’d all be covered in the gooey, pink stuff.
– About America’s first Black President ? Teddy would not know the term “African-American, having passed in 1986, but having reported the 60’s right there from the streets while it happened, Teddy knew well the term “Black,” the preferred reference for those they had called Negroes and all kinds of demeaning racial slurs back in the 30’s and 40’s, when Teddy first started in journalism after graduating Harvard on a Newsboys’ Scholarship.
My favorite quote of Teddy’s is timely for today’s intra-party squabbles:
“A liberal is a person who believes that water can be made to run uphill. A conservative is someone who believes everybody should pay for his water. I’m somewhere in between: I believe water should be free, but that water flows downhill.”
As one of the first to write on the incredible, game-changing effects of television on American politics, Teddy said, presciently: “He who is created by television can be destroyed by television.” I only wish Teddy could have been around to see 1,000-plus examples of his prediction fulfilled in the nearly quarter-century since he stopped walking the earth, from Jim and Tammy Faye Baker to John Edwards to so many others, going from media rocket to tearful apologies, all right there in your living room.
Of course, Teddy is best remembered today in connection with the title from the hit Broadway musical, Camelot, being adopted as the name for the brief JFK Administration in an exclusive interview with Jackie Kennedy at the Kennedy Family Hyannisport Compound on Cape Cod on November 29, 1963, just a week after her husband had been shot dead in Dallas, literally splattered across her pink dress and matching Pillbox hat. The interview that Teddy did with Jackie ran in LIFE Magazine as the sensational “Camelot Interview,” where Jackie herself referred to those brief White House years as having been like King Arthur’s mythical land of Camelot, and early 60’s America swooned.
All that sounds more than a bit naïve through the lens of our 46-year-look-back with all the brutally frank reporting of today’s journalism about JFK’s wild extra-curricular life at the White House, Jackie’s subsequent marriage to become “Jackie O,” and so many salacious details we really didn’t need to know. But, that’s the difference between now and then – our modern style of in-your-face 24/7 Talking Heads journalism is something that Teddy would find more than a little upsetting today – repellant might be the word.
By agreement, Teddy’s notes of his interview with Jackie, part of his archive of papers donated to Harvard after he passed, were sealed and not to be opened until one year after Jackie passed. Jackie left this Mortal Coil May 19, 1994; the notes of Teddy’s Camelot Interview were dutifully opened, as is the wont of faithful estate administrators, on May 26, 1995. If you promise to keep this between us, you can download Teddy’s notes of the Camelot Interview on the Internet at [look for the link in small type in the left column of the page].
One thing I can conclude after giving this some thought: Teddy White would not, I repeat not, refer to the last 18 months’ economic roller coaster ride as Camelot. The rest, as lawyers say, is pure speculation.