The Rush to Report the Race

Because of his competitive, hard-driving temperament, David English, as sociate editor of Lord Beaverbrook's London Daily Express, is admiringly referred to as a "flyer." That temperament served English well when he and a team of top Express reporters set out to produce a book on the 1968 U.S. presidential election. Divided They Stand (Prentice-Hall, $6.95) is not only the first full-length study of that memorable race. It is also brisk, readable and sharply focused, with a detached perspective that injects freshness into familiar events.

English deployed his men before the New Hampshire primary and pushed them almost to rebellion in his determination to beat out a rival team dispatched by the London Sunday Times.

The Express reporters covered all the candidates, examined the antiwar sentiment and racial conflict that lay be hind the election. Working from his reporters' lengthy files, English knocked out a rough draft of half the book in New York before Election Day. He shifted to London for seven weeks of fevered final writing, much of the time locked in a room with his closest collaborator, Correspondent Richard Kilian. "We thought we were never going to finish," English says.

When they did finish, the Sunday Times team under Executive Editor Bruce Page was still writing in Manhattan. Page contends that the Times book, to be published in May as An American Melodrama (Viking, $10), will not only be longer but more probing.

Both books will face the formidable competition of U.S. Journalist Theodore White, whose third consecutive "Making of a President" account is also scheduled for July publication.

Occasional Disbelief. The Express book will be tough to top. Much of its appeal lies in the wonderment with which the British team views the way the U.S. governs itself and elects its officials. The U.S., "once the fastest-moving nation in the world," in 1968 was "like a champion sprinter trying to do the hundred-yard dash with a ball and chain around his ankle." They likened the failings of President Johnson to those of Harold Wilson. "Both had an almost messianic sense of their own importance. Both understood politics better than they understood principles, and both understood principles better than they understood people."

In a fascinating interview with Senator Eugene McCarthy, the Express team quotes the Minnesota Democrat as having told Robert Kennedy before New Hampshire: "I think I have a chance. But I must have a clear run. You can have it all in 1972. But in return I want you to leave it to me in 1968." Bobby flatly promised to stay out, McCarthy told the British newsmen, and had he stuck to his word, "not only would he almost certainly be alive today but most probably he would have emerged as President of the United States in 1972."

The Britons, surprisingly, compare the victorious Nixon favorably with Jack Kennedy. "Many of the country's troubles arose from the unfulfilled expectations aroused by John F. Kennedy's magic words. The U.S. avoided this mistake in 1968. No American saw Richard Nixon as a political superman. He had no magic. He would not set America's sights too high, and in that he might well achieve more for his country than all the visionaries."

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