Theodore H. White

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, whose combination of interviews, on-the-ground reporting, and vivid writing were developed in best-selling accounts of the 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1980 presidential elections, and became a model for later journalists.

White studied at Harvard University and Hebrew College. The recorded working language is American English and English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are essay. Distinctions recorded are Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism.

• Name — Theodore H. White • Born — 6 May 1915 • Birthplace — Dorchester, Boston, U.S. • Died — 15 May 1986 • Place of death — New York City, U.S. • Occupation — Journalist, historian • Education — Harvard College • Period — 1940s–1980s • Genre — Political journalism, history • Spouse — Nancy Bean (divorced) Beatrice Kevitt Hofstadter • Children — Heyden White Rostow, David Fairbank White • Awards — Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (1962, for The Making of the President 1960)

White was born May 6, 1915, in Dorchester, Boston. His parents were David White (born David Vladefsky – a Russian immigrant, he adopted the name "White" from a Boston department store) 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 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. In his memoir In Search of History: A Personal Adventure, White describes helping form one of the early Zionist collegiate organizations. He also wrote for The Harvard Crimson.

Awarded a Harvard traveling fellowship for a round-the-world journey, White ended up in Chungking (Chongqing), 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, one of whom was Whittaker Chambers. 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. The book described the incompetence and corruption of the Nationalist government and sketched the power of the rising Chinese Communist Party. The introduction warned, "In Asia there are a billion people who are tired of the world as it is; they live such terrible bondage that they have nothing to lose but their chains.... Less than a thousand years ago Europe lived this way; then Europe revolted... The people of Asia are going through the same process." White also witnessed and reported on the famine that occurred in Henan in 1943. White then served as European correspondent for the Overseas News Agency (1948–50) and for The Reporter (1950–53). He returned to his wartime experience in the novel The Mountain Road (1958), which dealt with the retreat of a team of American troops in China in the face of a Japanese offensive provoked by bombings by the 14th Air Force. The novel was frank about the Americans' conflicting, sometimes negative attitudes toward their allies. It was made into a 1960 movie. The McCarthy period made it difficult for any reporter or official who had had any contact with communists, however innocent, to escape suspicion of communist sympathies. White opted to turn from writing about China to take up reporting on the Marshall Plan in Europe and then ultimately to the American presidency.

White's marriage to Nancy Bean ended in divorce. They had a son and a daughter, Heyden White Rostow and David Fairbank White. His second marriage was to Beatrice Kevitt Hofstadter, the widow of historian Richard Hofstadter. On May 15, 1986, nine days after his 71st birthday, White suffered a sudden stroke and died in New York City. He was survived by his children and his wife.

Both W. A. Swanberg in Luce and His Empire and David Halberstam in The Powers That Be discuss how White's China reporting for Time was extensively rewritten, frequently by Whittaker Chambers, to conform to publisher Henry Luce's admiration for Chiang Kai-shek. Chambers himself explained: The fight in Foreign News was not a fight for control of a seven-page section of a newsmagazine. It was a struggle to decide whether a million Americans more or less were going to be given the facts about Soviet aggression, or whether those facts were going to be suppressed, distorted, sugared or perverted into the exact opposite of their true meaning. In retrospect, it can be seen that this critical struggle was, on a small scale, an opening round of the Hiss Case. Conservative author William F. Buckley Jr. wrote an obituary of White in the National Review, saying that "conjoined with his fine mind, his artist's talent, his prodigious curiosity, there was a transcendent wholesomeness, a genuine affection for the best in humankind." He praised White, saying he "revolutionized the art of political reporting." Buckley added that White made one grave strategic mistake during his journalistic lifetime: "Like so many disgusted with Chiang Kai-shek, he imputed to the opposition to Chiang thaumaturgical social and political powers. He overrated the revolutionists' ideals, and underrated their capacity for totalitarian sadism." In her book, Theodore H. White and Journalism as Illusion, Joyce Hoffman contends that White's "personal ideology undermined professional objectivity" (according to the review of her work in Library Journal). She states "conscious mythmaking" on behalf of his subjects, including Chiang Kai-shek, John F. Kennedy, and David Bruce. Hoffman concludes that White self-censored information embarrassing to his subjects to portray them as heroes. Others note that White and Jacoby reported on but did not endorse Chinese Communist strength, and cite such passages as: Will the Communists, if they govern large and complex industrial cities, permit an opposition press and opposition party to challenge them by a combination of patronage and ideology?.... But if the Communists are wrong in their calculations and are outvoted, will they yield to a peaceful vote? Will they champion civil liberties as ardently as they do now? This is a question that cannot be answered until we have had the opportunity of seeing how a transitional coalition regime works in peace time practice. They also note that the book's influence was ephemeral. Henry Luce, however, refused to even tip his hat to White when they passed on the street, and bitterly criticized "that book by that ugly little Jewish son of a bitch." Contemporary critics on the left have strongly criticized a 1967 made-for-TV documentary that White wrote called China: The Roots of Madness as a "callous and condescending" portrayal of Chinese. White's reporting was described as "self-important, sanctimonious and he gave voice to no more than an American viewpoint", wherein he portrayed the Chinese as merely pawns in the Cold War, blinkered by their Communist ideology. Film Threat remarked that White never attempted to take on board the Chinese viewpoint, and points out there were unconfirmed rumors that the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in the film's making.

His reporting role in Henan is portrayed by actor Adrien Brody in the 2012 film Back to 1942. Billy Crudup portrayed "the Journalist", an unnamed representation of White, in Pablo Larraín's Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis biopic Jackie.

* * • French, Paul. Through the Looking Glass: Foreign Journalists in China, from the Opium Wars to Mao. Hong Kong University Press, 2009. * * * • Rand, Peter. China Hands. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. • Sullivan, Walter. "... The Crucial 1940s Nieman Reports." The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University (Spring 1983)