Theodore White at Large

White ( The Making of the President series) was a prescient reporter, as shown by his 1952 profile depicting the Catholic left as a new force in European politics, or his 1960s coverage of the racial conflict and white backlash tearing apart U.S. cities. He filed impressive dispatches as a WW II Time and Life correspondent in China, and he gauged the impact of the war and of Japan's sordid occupation. In his best work--which combines a journalist's immediacy and a historian's breadth--White, who died in 1986, illuminates the centuries-old hatred between France and Germany and the trail of errors that led the U.S. into the Vietnam quagmire. He provokes with his analysis of the breakdown of African American communities, with his 1985 attack on Japan's ``unfair'' business practices and with his call to abolish the electoral college but to retain the electoral vote by each state. Rich, varied, at times dated, this collection encompasses city politics, McCarthyism and White's 1983 return trip to China, where Deng Xiaoping struck him as ``half elf, half gunman.'' (Nov.)