These times demand a chronicler

Few writers can occupy Theodore White's seat on the balcony of history.

- F S AIJAZUDDIN

White is more famous for his quartet of books, each titled The Making of the President, covering the election campaigns of John F. Kennedy (1960), Lyndon B. Johnson (1964), and Richard Nixon (1968, re-elected in 1972).

Less well-known was his memoir In Search of History (1978), an account of his war-time adventures in China (1938-45), post-war Europe (1948-53), and a US in transition (1954-63) as it expanded its influence across a damaged globe.

As Time's correspondent based in Chungking, White reported on the conflict between Mao Zedong's communist forces and Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist battalions, and their faltering failed negotiations towards a truce. To White, Mao Zedong held "the book of history, written in cabalistic symbols only he could decipher, and from this book he lectured the comrades and their leaders, telling them where China was going, how he would take them there, and what they must do, when they arrived".

Chiang Kai-shek, by contrast, was a man "ripped out of the old world too soon, plunged into a new world he could not understand". Chiang Kai-shek lost to Mao and retreated with his Ivy League advisers to offshore Taiwan.