| DIALOGUE WITH THE READERBY WAY OF A PREFACEere is always that first question intelling any story--where to begin? This time it was particularly important to me to pick the properbeginning. The campaign of 1980 would be the last, I promisedmyself, in a series of stories about American politics that I had begunin 1960. The plan, back then, was to follow every four years withanother book about the Making of the President until 1980. At theend there would be an account of twenty-four years of passage ofpower in American politics, telling how we got from there to here.This time I wanted to add it up. But where was there? Elections are important; they give Americans not only theirchief sense of participating in their government but, more impor-tantly, a sense of control. Control is what politics are all about. Butthis time, in the campaign of 1980, there was a questioning not onlyof control but of national purpose itself. Somehow, public affairs hadgone off the track, almost as if the country had lost its way into thefuture. There was no sense of coherence in government; it did notrespond; it could not manage. Nor was it the fault of the Carteradministration alone, or the Nixon administration, or the Johnsonadministration. It went much farther back than any of the sevennational campaigns I had covered. I had reported such campaigns for a quarter of a century and hadseen what was, in retrospect, one of the great periods of change inAmerican history. Historians are scholars who tell us later what it allmeans, after time has burned off passing detail, and left the ridges ofchange bare; their job is to make us aware of man in his time and |
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