As the United States marks its first presidential election of a new century, Witcover shows us how professional mercenaries -- with little party loyalty and diminished political principles, driven by an insatiable need for money -- are poisoning public life. At the same time, politicians themselves have condoned and even encouraged these developments, responding to the demands of a media-driven age in which the press corps pursues its own quest for celebrity and financial reward.Sharp, revealing, and rich with anecdotes, No Way to Pick a President offers a wealth of presidential history, from the role of the vice president's office to campaign funds, television and the electoral college.

A seasoned political writer who has covered every presidential election since Eisenhower, Jules Witcover has seen it all: from powerful party chieftains to political analysts, from the trenches of primary elections to the high-tech weapons of mass communication. In No Way to Pick a President, he blasts the current process by which America chooses its president, denouncing the road to the White House as divisive, corrupt and noisy. costly for the candidate and the public.
As the United States marks its first presidential election of the new century, Witcover shows us how professioanl mercenaries - with little party loyalty and diminished political principles, driven by an insatiable need for money - are poisoning public life. At the same time, politicians themselves have condoned and even encouraged these developments, responding to the demands of a media driven age in which the press corps pursues its own quest for celebrity and financial reward.
No Way to Pick a president offers a wealth of presidential history. Witcover concludes with prescriptions to improve presidential politics and revive public confidence.

Month by month, Witcover re-creates 1968 as he travels with, and reports on, the political fortunes of Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, George Romney, and Hubert Humphrey. He conveys the actual words of national figures and commentary by rock artists, media people, economists, Vietnam veterans, and Haight-Ashbury hippies. That year Witcover crossed the country from New Hampshire to California; he was standing on the rioting streets of Washington with Robert Kennedy after King was shot; he was in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel the night Kennedy was gunned down. An eyewitness to history, he presents a unique perspective that captures the mood of a nation and the life of ordinary people as shattering news erupts from assassins' bullets and backroom deals. Witcover broadens our understanding of how that year sowed the seeds of liberalism's demise, the shame of Watergate, Reagan's long reign, and today's new Democratic agenda.

The assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, campus riots, Richard Nixon--the American dream was shattered in 1968. Prominent journalist Jules Witcover looks at the most pivotal year in modern American history, and its irrevocable consequences for today's society.