This Day in Literary History (‘Death of a President’ in JFK Family Firestorm)

April 7, 1967—Death of a President, finally published by Harper and Row after threats, litigation and the author’s physical collapse, was eagerly snapped up by a public wanting to know just what happened in the hours surrounding John F. Kennedy’s assassination, as well as what material in the book had made the President’s family ready to take down an author they themselves had hired.

Last Sunday would have been the 90^th birthday of the indefatigable writer at the heart of the controversy, William Manchester. He would go on to write biographies of Douglas MacArthur and the German arms manufacturers the Krupps, as well as an account of his own traumatic WWII experience and a history of America from the Great Depression to Nixon. But the nonstop immersion in a subject he felt passionately about that he displayed in Death of a President ended up leaving his last great project, a three-volume history of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion, only two-thirds completed when two strokes that incapacitated him for several years before his death in 2004.

Manchester’s work still forms an indispensable element of two of the great controversies of the last half-century. Both involve the fellow World War II Pacific hero with whom he bonded, JFK.

The first controversy continues to be argued by conspiracy theorists and their opponents to this day: the train of events on November 22, 1963, in Dallas. The second controversy has faded with time, but for a while it preoccupied a whole platoon of politicians, editors, attorneys and journalists in late 1966 and early 1967: the effort by the President’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, and brother, Robert Kennedy, to burnish JFK’s image, even in death.

What brought much of this to mind again was the large excerpt from the latest volume of Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson that appeared recently in The New Yorker. The critical distance, even outright animus, that Caro feels toward Johnson is not a trait that Manchester would have shared. But I think he would have admired Caro’s relentless drive in tracking down every conceivable fact about an event or place, as well as his fascination with how men gain and exercise great power.

Caro’s riveting account of how LBJ assumed the Presidency mentions the dispute among aides for LBJ and Robert Kennedy on what exactly was said between the two men when the Attorney-General learned about the shooting of his brother. Many of the seeds of that conflict came to light as a result of Manchester’s work.

In The Kennedy Imprisonment, Garry Wills made clear that the Kennedys’ selection of Manchester to write about Jack was driven by the hero-worship the author displayed in Portrait of a President, written (based on interviews with JFK) while the President was still alive. Wills doesn’t list Manchester among the “honorary Kennedys”—the network of worshipful academics, journalists and other “courtiers” of the family—but he might as well have been. Manchester seemed a great alternative to Jim Bishop, author of The Day Lincoln Was Shot, whom Jackie Kennedy regarded as a "hack." (Predictably, Bishop's take on the assassination, The Day Kennedy Was Shot, did appear, but one year after Death of a President, and handicapped by lack of access to family members and aides which Manchester was given.) In short, no President could have been assured of a friendlier reception from a journalist until Sidney Blumenthal beat the drum so relentlessly for Bill Clinton in The New Yorker that the President decided to eliminate the middlemen and simply put him on his staff.

That last paragraph, while true about the family’s attitude, probably denigrates Manchester more than he deserves. As I mentioned previously, he was unflagging in his research. To save on taxi fare so he didn’t exceed his modest advance, he walked miles a day, in 90-degree-plus heat in humid Washington and Dallas, so that he ended up losing 20 pounds by the end of the summer of 1964. He eventually landed in the hospital after a collapse from nervous exhaustion—and still finished the book while there.

Second, Manchester could write about important figures not merely because he could bond with them, but because he had the soul of a fiction writer. His novels are little known today, but crafting them taught him how to shape narrative and how to place oneself inside the heads of subjects.

When Manchester delivered his manuscript, his editor, Evan Thomas, sensed its great potential. But trouble also soon cropped up, centering around these points:

·         * Fear of the negative portrayal by Kennedy family and friends of Johnson. Manchester, as an unabashed admirer of JFK, not only portrayed LBJ as boorish, but as representative of a culture of violence endemic to Texas—even from the opening scene, where the Vice-President insisted on taking his squeamish boss hunting. Additionally, LBJ came off as unduly eager to assume the Presidency on Air Force One, even before he had returned to Washington.

·         * The Kennedys had final approval of the manuscript. Robert had included this proviso as part of Manchester’s contract. If the Kennedys objected to anything, there would be issues.

·         * Neither Jackie nor Robert wanted to read the manuscript. Both felt it would only open up painful memories, so they delegated the vetting process to close aides. Jackie’s personal secretary, Pam Turnure, made numerous objections to personal details provided by her boss during interviews with Manchester. 

·         * Unexpected serial rights for Manchester. Aside from a $36,000 advance (against income from the first printing), all other earnings from the book publication itself would go to the Kennedy Memorial Library. But Manchester’s agent had separated a side deal with Look Magazine for first serial rights of $650,000. Mrs. Kennedy was incensed, feeling that the money should go to the JFK Library, too. At her urging, Robert—who had earlier indicated that no obstacle would stand in the way of the book’s publication in January 1967—now refused to grant permission for publication to proceed. Mrs. Kennedy grew increasingly insistent not only on making the cuts suggested by Turnure, but on voiding the Look rights. “It’s us against them,” she said in her whispery, intimate voice. “Anyone who is against me will look like a rat,” she threatened, “unless I run off with Eddie Fisher.” In November 1966, three years after her husband’s murder, she met with Thomas and told the editor, who had not only published Profiles in Courage but Robert’s The Enemy Within: “I’m going to ruin you.”

At the 11^th hour, with Manchester refusing to renege on his agreement with Look and struggling with a host of last-minute editing changes insisted on by the Kennedy camp, Mrs. Kennedy filed an injunction to halt publication of the book, claiming that she had “an absolute right to decide what may and what may not appear therein” because of the assistance she provided Manchester in her own interviews and in facilitating those of her aides.

All hell then broke loose, with news headlines such as, “bitter new row on book—Manchester vs. RFK, Jackie—Words Fly.” For the first time since the assassination, Mrs. Kennedy’s image as a saintly widow was smudgeded. 

In January 1967, just before Robert was due to testify on her behalf, she agreed to settle out of court. The timing was, in all probability, not coincidental: the realization had, at last, come to her that embroilment in the case would bring Robert unwelcome publicity. Moreover, Robert—now Senator from New York, and eyeing a possible run for the White House at some point—was regretting getting involved at all in the dispute between Manchester and his sister-in-law. With Manchester agreeing to cut 1,600 words out of the Look serialization and 7 pages out of the book’s 654 pages--deletions he regarded as unessential to the narrative—the book was at last ready for publication. 

By summer, Death of a President had sold more than a million copies. Though reviewers criticized the worshipful treatment of the fallen President, praise was widespread for its depth of research and vivid presentation. Readers gained an insightful view of the raw emotions felt by participants in the Dallas tragedy (e.g., Mrs. Kennedy “struggled with a nurse who tried to bar her from the operating room”).

Emotions were raw as well among members of the warring camps in the Death of a President controversy. According to Sam Kashner’s account of the imbroglio in the October 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, Thomas—with Manchester feeling that his interests had not been adequately defended against Mrs. Kennedy, and astonished at the anger the widow had poured on him—left Harper and Row a year after publication of the book, and soon his case of multiple sclerosis, which had been in remission, returned.

Manchester was annoyed that, though royalties from the book—reaching more than $1 million by 1970—had, in effect, made him one of the JFK Library’s most significant donors, the Kennedys tightly controlled scholars' access to his manuscript and research materials, even though these were ostensibly returned to Wesleyan University, where he served as writer in residence. (Sadly, the book has also been allowed to go out of print.)

Loyalty can be a powerful thing, however. For all the stress that Jackie and her brother-in-law visited upon him in late 1966, Manchester soon reconciled with Robert, even agreeing to serve as honorary chair of his local Citizens for Kennedy group when the senator made his fateful 1968 run for the Presidency.