The Making of the President 1960 was excerpted as "Secret Moments in a Famous Campaign" in the July 7, 1961 edition of Life.
An impoverished commuter student who received the only degree in Chinese in his class at Harvard, White established his reputation as a freelance journalist in the wartime capital of Chunking during World War II under the auspices of John Hersey before serving as Time's bureau chief in the Chinese theater. Presaging his later reputation as an exponent of "access journalism" and the intimate friendship with President Kennedy that ensued, White became a close confidante of General Joseph Stilwell (the theater's commanding American general and subject of a 1972 Prize-winning biography by Barbara Tuchman) and ultimately edited a posthumous collection of Stilwell's papers at the request of his widow.
The exigencies of the emergent "deep state" amid the greater social tableaux of McCarthyism forced White (an avowed liberal who empathized with the communist insurgency and shared Stilwell's contempt for the American-backed military dictatorship of Chiang kai-Shek) to abandon his post at Time in 1946. A brief stint at The New Republic under the short-lived editorship of former Vice President Henry Wallace did little to disabuse his critics of this notion; over the next decade, much of White's training would be abandoned altogether as he struggled to burnish his reputation. The nadir came in the temporary confiscation of his passport during a 1954 State Department's investigation of Foreign Service officer John Paton Davies, an old friend from Chunking. Despite these setbacks, Fire in the Ashes (1953; a chronicle of the Marshall Plan culled from his work as a nearly-blacklisted freelancer for the Overseas News Agency and other organizatons) was chosen as White's second Book of the Month Club selection, precipitating the second stage of his career (following a brief interregnum in fiction) as a prolific political journalist.
Scott Porch has assayed the enduring influence of this period of White's work in a 2015 article for Politico magazine.
President Kennedy's brief congratulatory note to White (reported by The New York Times in 1986) upon the announcement of his Prize may prove to be of additional interest to Pulitzer aficionados: "It pleases me that I could at least provide a little of the scenario.''