whistlestop my favorite stories from presidential campaign history

“Thirty-five percent of Wisconsin was Catholic-including my grandparents, which has nothing to do with this story but I thought you should know,” Dickerson writes.īut similar to the billionaire businessman who is now the presidential nominee of the Republican Party, Kennedy became the friend of the workingman. Kennedy should have lost due to inexperience in Wisconsin, yet Kennedy’s Catholicism helped him win there. In 1960 stars seemed to be aligning for Humphrey, a Protestant who had the most experience. Kennedy was facing off against Hubert Humphrey, who later vied for the presidency again after serving as the vice president under Lyndon B.

He does so again during the 1960 primary election, when John F. There are many times that he does so, including infusing himself into the story on occasion, as he did with this self-effacing detail about covering John McCain during the 2000 presidential election: “A dozen or so reporters encircled him, including a Time magazine correspondent who thought it was a good idea to grow sideburns that year and who hadn’t been able to get off the trail long enough to get a haircut.” This doesn’t mean that his writing has no angle, or that he doesn’t occasionally arrange facts into a narrative. Dickerson isn’t dumbing things down or engaged in tiresome revisionism. You Don’t Know Jackįortunately, Dickerson does not presume to judge or call us to action in the book, allowing the stories to speak for themselves, as a true reporter would.ĭickerson offers full portraits of past presidential campaigns, which stands in stark contrast to the “history-lite” that many millennials receive, taking their education from Facebook memes or videos from partisan websites designed to educate the masses on “real” history, or, the history “they” didn’t want to tell you. We are the ones who would benefit from Dickerson’s book the most. But to millennials like me, Trump seems to stand in a class all by himself. In many respects, Donald Trump is not an enigma, but a composite sketch of candidates that went before him.

It also helps to know how to deal with the present when it resembles the past. The lessons of history help us avoid future mistakes. Maybe it’s a bit cliche to quote a text as old and well-known as Ecclesiastes, but it’s in keeping with the point of Dickerson’s book.

Whistlestop my favorite stories from presidential campaign history