These days The Making of the President 1972 is of course damned, because Theodore White comes too close to accepting President Nixon's view of himself…. Hunter Thompson …, with his [Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail '72] has aroused even more partisan comment: if you hate President Nixon and the American establishment generally, Thompson is good; if not, he's unbelievably bad. (p. 7)

It is true that [Thompson] claims to "record the reality of an incredibly volatile presidential campaign while it was happening" …, but his reality is openly—one might say deliberately—biased. "Combining aggressive ignorance with a natural instinct to mock the conventional wisdom," he would give us a "high-speed cinematic reel-record of what the campaign was like at the time, not what the whole thing boiled down to or how it fits into history."…

White's effort, in contrast, is precisely to show how the whole thing fits into...