In This Review

America in Search of Itself: The Making of the President, 1956-1980
America in Search of Itself: The Making of the President, 1956-1980
By Theodore H. White
Harper, 1982, 465 pp

More pessimism. This valedictory to a quarter century of superlative writing about presidential campaigns is pensive and questioning. One of the author's several unhappy themes is that Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 indicated that the majority of the American people "were persuaded that the cost of equality had come to crush the promise of opportunity."

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