Unlike Carter, White says, Reagan reinforced that image even when dealing with the touchiest of issues. When he fired his long-time campaign manager John Sears, for instance, Reagan actually made himself seem more in control, by reasserting dominance over his campaign. By contrast, White reminds us, incumbent Carter courted notorious image problems after he sacked various staff members, and his frequent shakeups led the media to brand him as petty.

WHITE'S PORTRAIT of Carter depicts the former president as an enormous contradiction: a deeply sincere man who honestly felt his 14-hour days, commitment to "human rights" and sermonizing did the country good, combined with a political animal willing to resort to ruthless campaign tactics. Of one thing White is certain--Carter was extraordinarily unprofessional.

From the day he became president-elect to his four-year botching of the energy issue to his handling of the 1980 campaign, Carter emerges as out-of-touch with longtime Democratic officials, willing to preside over the disintegration of his party's grand coalition and too proud to ask lesser-ranking Democrats for advice. On major issues, he was similarly misguided. White describes Carter's practice of poring over 1000-plus page military budget documents. He concludes that by mid-term, Carter, amazingly, had become the White House's chief researcher and goofball aide Hamilton Jordon its chief policymaker.

By contrast, White says, Reagan seemed aware of his shortcomings, doling out major responsibilities to his aides while himself dealing only with campaign themes and media images. But Reagan's victory stemmed in no small part form the candidate's own strategic intuition. His fateful decision to debate Carter alone a week before election day, for instance, was apparently Reagan's own, against his aides' advice. White reports that the Republican nominee decided he had to take on Carter in mid-October, after the two standard-bearers appeared at an Alfred E. Smith dinner in New York. At that bipartisan function, Reagan, whose address was typically graceful, found himself astonished at Carter's taut, partisan remarks.

As fascinated by power and politicans as ever, White draws these and other conclusions about why 1980 turned out as it did. In the end, however, he refuses to say whether the election marks "twilight or dawn, an era ending or an era beginning. "He suggests that the ultimate significance of 1980 remains in the hands of Ronald Reagan and his Republican coat tail-riders, who can now either cement their tenuous 1980 coalition or embark on another "wrong turning" that could, as in the 1960s, "bring us to convulsion in the streets. "This is perhaps the one unfortunate thing about America in Search of Itself. More than any of the previous Making of the President installments. White writes here of long-term political trends and how our most recent election fits in with them, but in the end, he refuses to look ahead. He observes only that we live in "a clouded time."

WHITE CONCLUDES his final book on presidential politicking by observing the truism that "the quality of American political reporting has improved almost unbelievably over the past 25 years." What he doesn't say is that his own efforts over the last two decades--trekking through the snows of New Hampshire when it was unfashionable to do so, and the like--largely transformed presidential election reporting into the art that it now is acknowledged to be.

That omission may be significant. The Theodore White style has always been one of modesty. He has peppered his books with previously unrevealed anecdotes and information that always seemed to catch a candidate or a campaign in a nutshell. Yet almost never did he choose to call attention to his own remarkable detective work. So if White errs a bit in refusing to acknowledge his own edging towards the political Right in America in Search of Itself, his modesty in declining to give himself a going-away journalistic pat on the back more than makes up for it. White's final election chronicle proves that, no matter what his politics, America's premier author of political romance is retiring at the top of his game.