THEODORE H. WHITE'S final work in his legendary Making of the President series will make him seem a turncoat to many who once worshipped John F. Kennedy's Camelot with him.

In America in Search of Itself, White repeatedly attacks the Great Society envisioned by Kennedy and realized by his sucessor as a monument to the slain president. White derides those social entitlement programs for producing the inflation and factionalism to which he attributes Ronald Reagan's 1980 triumph. White once celebrated that a poor Jewish boy like himself could rise to become America's premier author on presidential politics. Now he turns on federal programs designed to give today's needy the opportunities he took advantage of. Worst of all, he refuses to acknowledge that he himself has switched from persuasive Democratic cheerleader to cynic. To many, White will now seem guilty of the worst kind of hypocrisy: not being honest about himself.

Certainly he has retreated from the liberal idealism that characterized his first four Making of the President books and In Search of History, his remarkable 1978 account of his personal odyssey. That book ended with a capsule account of the 1960 presidential race and White's portrait of triumphant John Kennedy as the most prescient, commanding politician he had encountered. Early in his final work, White does mouth some of the same hero-worship, saying that JFK alone might qualify as "a rare personality--a Roosevelt, a Churchill, a Mao, a Monet--[who] might alter the direction of the forces, and make his own life a legend, a starting point of future departures."

But the balance of America in Search of Itself shatters that myth. Again and again. White rails on the quotas, racial and otherwise, of Kennedy's and Johnson's assistance programs. He intimates that female activists--who owed their ascendancy to Democratic initiatives--largely discredited those moves toward political equality by stubbornly pushing obstructionist feminist convention planks that divided the major parties. Other scattered observations reinforce the impression that after 22 years, White has left the New Frontier-Great Society fold.

The mystique of Kennedy liberalism, in short, continues to haunt White's heart, but it has finally loosened its grip on his political intellect. Specifically, White says, his old heroes' spending helped cause nearly uncontrollable inflation; their broken promises of a glorious international role contributed to the humiliating loss of confidence in American power that reached its nadir with the Iran hostage crisis. White pinpoints those trends--economic aimlessness and national impotence, along with the increasingly potent reign of television--as leading America to its conservative backlash of 1980. That landslide, to White, was the ultimate repudiation of impotent Democratic goodwill.

SO THEODORE WHITE has gone neoconservative and dyed in-the-wool liberal critics aren't happy. Big deal. No one-ever read White's quadrennial bestsellers because they agreed with his politics. America snapped up the Making of the President series, and In Search of History because of White's ability to lend dreary presidential races the excitement of a bullfight or a boxing match.

From his account of how John Kennedy's skillful man-on-man debating helped floor Richard Nixon in 1960 to his tale of George McGovern's hopelessly quixotic quest for the Oval office in 1972. White turned presidential politics into high drama. The candidates media ploys, public pronouncements, travel schedules, deployment of personnel--White briskly showed how every little tactical choice carried the potential for making or breaking a campaign. And in 1976, when White refrained from writing about the presidential sweepstakes, no one else's electoral post mortem could fill the void. Jules Witcover's painstakingly researched Marathon came surprisingly close, but even casual readers of the genre could see it lacked the romance of The Making of the President series.

America in Search of Itself shows the old master in top form; he has lost neither his flair for the suggestive campaign anecdote or his crystalline analysis. The book's first half is more wide-ranging than any Making of the President work and hence its broader title. White starts back at the 1956 Eisenhower-Stevenson campaign, where, he says, the era of political bosses, candidates who were "gentlemen of heritage," and American world dominance began to give way to the age of endless presidential primaries, media blitzes, and limited American potency. Frequently pausing to dish out anecdotes left out of his earlier books, he runs through several thematic chapters--"The Great Society," "The Great Inflation," "The Reign of Television." In typically rapid-fire style, he shows how each of those nascent trends came to a head in 1980. And in the second half of the book, he shows how those developments and Ronald Reagan's strategy of skillfully using them to his benefit, made him America's 40th president.

Addressing the first of those themes, White argues that Democratic generosity backfired. He says America overreached itself in trying to implement the national ideal of equality at the expense of the competing traditions of liberty and laissez-faire government. The second theme, the rampant inflation that topped 12 percent in 1980, he attributes to excessive federal government spending--notaby for the Vietnam War--but mostly from amateurish and inconsistent attempts to fine-tune a massive economy whose reactions could be predicted broadly at best.

The fatal reliance on contradictory economic policies came to a head under Jimmy Carter, whom White rightly chastises for flip-flopping between inconsistent monetary and fiscal approaches as the previous month's initiatives seemed to have failed. White concludes that candidate Reagan's devotion through 1980 to a single supply side program, no matter what its theoretical flaws, won him support from an electorate that craved a sense of executive leadership and foresight. The author also credits Reagan for seizing on the issue of prices long before any of his competitors in either party. He pinpoints the former California governor's victory as becoming close to inevitable as far back as the summer of 1979. The as-yet unannounced candidate and his aides agreed then to follow domestic advisor Martin Anderson's strategy of hammering home the inflation issue at the expense of all others over the next year and a half.

White's discussion of his final major reason for the Reagan victory--the governor's obvious mastery of television, a medium more potent than ever--is less illuminating that his analysis of economic malaise and national impotence. But his dissection of Reagan's manipulation of the media, and through it the nation, is more complete than any other. And there are, of course, the incomparable White anecdotes. He tells of a moment during the 1968 Republican convention, when a Reagan operative sought to switch a delegate from Nixon to Reagan:

'But I can't switch,' the delegate said 'I'm already pledged.'

To whom? was the next question. And the reply came back.

'I told CBS that I'm voting for Nixon. I'm pledged to CBS.'

The Reagan triumph stems from more than the candidate's two 1980 debate roundhouse punches--in Nashua, N.H. over an unnerved George Bush ("I paid for this microphone") and on national television over a helpless Jimmy Carter ("Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"). Instead, Reagan's tactics appear honed to present an image of a genial yet commanding leader, one in control both of issues and himself.

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.