Books That Take You Behind the Scenes of a Presidential Campaign
Posted on October 14, 2020
by Eric P
If you’ve been mainlining the national news for the past nineteen months, presidential campaigning may be the last thing you want to read about right now. But getting the inside dirt on past campaigns – whether it’s coming from historians, journalists who followed candidates on the trail, or other involved parties – can offer some context for the things that are happening now, and the things that will happen next time around.
A Magnificent Catastrophe
By Edward J. Larson
If you think the current political climate is tumultuous, you should’ve been around for the election of 1800, which included an acrimonious campaign, a months-long voting season, disputed ballots, and an electoral college tie. And then everyone sang about delegates. Or maybe that last part only happened in Hamilton.
The Making of the President, 1960
By Theodore H. White
The Making of the President 1964
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The Making of the President 1968
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The Making of the President 1964
White’s monumental book, which follows the Kennedy-Nixon race from the primaries through election night, won the Pulitzer and guaranteed that campaign books would proliferate on library and bookstore shelves until the end of time. In other words: blame him. In fact, White wrote some sequels of his own, including a couple – The Making of the President 1964 and The Making of the President 1968 – that you can find on our shelves or on hoopla.
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72
By Hunter S. Thompson
But then, Theodore White was a distinguished journalist. Maybe you’d prefer the narcotically enhanced perspective of a gonzo anti-authoritarian. In that case, Thompson’s chronicle of Nixon’s reelection campaign is the book for you.
The Boys on the Bus (1972)
By Timothy Crouse
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Covering the same campaign as Thompson – in fact, Thompson’s a character in this book too – and arguably even more influential than White’s book is this one: a fly-on-the-wall (or, I guess, fly-on-the-bus) reporter’s-eye view of the campaign trail, a treatment that helped transform campaign journalists from anonymous scribes into recognizable personalities. Reportedly, the same dynamics described in this book still persist among campaign reporters today, with the significant difference that nowadays many, or most, of them aren’t boys – as some of the authors later on this list demonstrate.
What it Takes
By Richard Ben Cramer
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This is both an exhaustively researched account of the 1988 primaries and a blast-from-the-past time capsule of formerly boldfaced names like Dukakis and Dole and Gephardt. Remember those guys? (If you answered “No,” then I’m sorry to report that you’re young and you’re supposed to be on TikTok right now.)
Game Change (2010)
By John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
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Though its legacy has since been tarnished by the sexual-harassment allegations leveled against Halperin, Game Change is still an intensely readable narrative of the 2008 election’s explosive twists and turns. Its revelations irritated the teams of both Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, which probably means it’s doing something right.
Chasing Hillary
By Amy Chozick
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Chozick’s first-person account of covering Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign is personable and often funny, and it offers a keenly individualized depiction of the tensions between a presidential campaign’s staff – depicted here in a highly unflattering, and usually amusing, light – and the reporters covering them.
Unbelievable
By Katy Tur
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Tur, also an endearing and insightful narrator, offers a memoir that’s similar to Chozick’s but from aboard the other bus. She started covering the Donald Trump campaign in June 2015, in an assignment she thought might last a couple months but turned into a yearlong rollercoaster. The resulting relationship between the candidate and the reporter he called “Little Katy” generates some striking insights.
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