Controversy
And Other Essays in Journalism 1950–1975
William Manchester
Copyright
Controversy
And Other Essays in Journalism 1950–1975
Copyright © 1952, 1956, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1974, 1975, 1976, 2013 by William Manchester
Cover art, special contents, and Electronic Edition © 2013 by RosettaBooks LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover jacket design by Alexia Garaventa
ISBN Mobipocket edition: 9780795335624
This book is for Don Congdon, who has been my literary agent for twenty-eight years, and the late Harry Sions, who was my editor for eighteen years. Both men contributed to these essays with ideas, encouragement, criticism, and immense moral support.
A writer works in a ball park all by himself. Sometimes he wonders whether there is anybody watching in the stands. Don and Harry always had season tickets, were always in their boxes, and were always cheering. Their hurrahs meant so much—my gratitude runs so deep—that the language is too feeble a vehicle to convey it.
It may be different elsewhere. But in a democratic society the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.
—JOHN F. KENNEDY
Amherst, Massachusetts
October 26, 1963
Contents
CONTROVERSY
MID CAMPFIRES GLEAMING
The Spanish-American War
The Great War
The Island War
Corps d’Élite
The Man Who Couldn’t Speak Japanese
WAYS AND MEANS
The Treasury Department
The Great Bank Holiday
Slumlord
The Founding Grandfather
AMERICANA
The Tribal American
The New York Times
A Slight Case of McCarthyism
In Defense of Snobs
PUBLIC MEN
Adlai in Defeat
Walter Reuther
Cairo After Farouk
ENVOI
My Old Man—The Last Years of H. L. Mencken
Controversy
In 1961 Arthur Krock reproached me for my enthusiasm over the new President: “Mencken would be mad as hell at you. Didn’t he tell you that a newspaperman should look at a politician only one way—down his nose?” Mencken had, but it didn’t matter; I couldn’t disdain Kennedy. He was brighter than I was, braver, better-read, handsomer, wittier, and more incisive. The only thing I could do better was write. I never dreamed that one day I would write his obituary—the longest presidential obituary in history, and, in the end, the most controversial.
Neither did I dream that the controversy would pit me against old friends, nor that our estrangement would become a newspaper sensation dwarfing the donnybrooks of Mencken, who had at least gloried in them, as I could not. At the time I was hurt, baffled, and, I’m afraid, very sorry for myself. Only much later, when the dust had settled and I had returned to my quiet, donnish life, did I understand what had happened, and why. By then I wanted only to forget it all. I nearly succeeded.
Then, while going through my papers, I ran across the fat files of those years. I save everything, even memoranda of phone conversations, so I was in a position to set down a complete account of precisely what the controversy had been all about. Friends urged me to do it, arguing that the full story should be told. The result follows.
It may remind some of the Sartrian theater of the absurd. Certainly it cannot rank as great tragedy. There are a few hardy figures in it, there are more who were weak. Mostly it is a story of people whose perceptions were still warped by grief. “Do you think you’ve suffered more than Jackie and me?” Bob Kennedy cried out to me in anguish at one point during that dreadful summer of 1966. Of course I hadn’t. That was why I was slightly—but only slightly—more rational than they were.
So there were no stalwarts in the controversy. There were no villains, either. The only villain lay in a Texas grave. Even today I cannot willingly set down his name. His crime robbed us of everything which would have made the controversy impossible—not only the central fact, but the mind-set which followed. Norman Mailer summed it up the day after the assassination in Dallas. “It was our country for a while,” he said. “Now it’s theirs again.”
Afterward there were stories that I was not the Kennedys’ first choice to write an authorized account of President Kennedy’s death in Dallas, but I have been unable to verify any of them. The most persistent report was that an approach had been made to Theodore H. White, who had won the family’s approval with The Making of the President 1960. Later I asked White; he had no memory of it. It is true that an aide to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy sounded out Walter Lord. Lord was interested, and the aide promised to get back to him. Before this possibility could be explored with the family, however, Jacqueline Kennedy decided that she preferred me.
In the chaos after Dallas the President’s survivors kept few records of their deliberations, but I know that his widow had made up her mind on this issue before Christmas, 1963, because Ed Kuhn, then editor-in-chief of McGraw-Hill, was in Washington the week before the holiday trying to win the assignment for one of his writers, Robert J. Donovan, author of PT 109. A Kennedy assistant told Kuhn and Donovan that Mrs. Kennedy had concluded that she wanted William Manchester to do it.
Kuhn telephoned me at my office on the Wesleyan University campus in Middletown, Connecticut, saying that he would like to publish the book I was going to write about the murder of the President. I told him that he was misinformed; I had no intention of doing any such thing. I had recently returned from Germany, where I had been researching a history of the Krupp munitions dynasty. The Krupp project, I said, would keep me busy for the next two years. Kuhn rang off without further explanation. It wasn’t until February 5, 1964, after I had signed a contract for the Krupp book with Little, Brown and Company, my publishers, that Pierre Salinger phoned me, relaying the widow’s request. I was noncommittal. Hanging up, I said to my secretary, “Mrs. Kennedy wants me to write the story of the assassination. How can I say no to her?” She said, “You can’t.”
Nor, I felt, could I, though I did wonder why she had chosen me. At that time I was forty-one, with a university appointment and what a New York Times reporter called “a small but secure literary reputation”—the qualifications, in short, of a considerable number of writers. None of my seven books had been on any best-seller list. I hadn’t even met Jacqueline Kennedy; I knew only the men in the family.
Bob Kennedy subsequently told me that after one of my evenings alone with his brother at the White House the President had told his wife of his regard for me, and that she had recalled that in the days which followed his funeral. It is a good story, but I don’t believe it. John Kennedy hadn’t liked me that much. I think Jackie picked me because she thought I would be manageable. I had written a short book about her husband while he was still alive. National security not then being a discredited phrase, I believed that an incumbent President should have some control over the publication of remarks he had made privately, and so I had submitted galleys to him, specifying that he could alter only his own words. As it happened, he reque
sted no changes, but Jackie may well have concluded that the incident proved that I would be infinitely obliging. It was a natural mistake.
Later I compounded it by giving the Kennedys manuscript approval of the assassination book, agreeing that it should not appear until the family or its representatives had read it and given me a green light. That is not how studies of historical events are ordinarily published, but this was not an ordinary publishing venture. It was conceived at a time when millions, me among them, were still mourning John F. Kennedy. None were more stricken than those who had been close to him. When I flew to Washington on February 26 for preliminary discussions with Bobby at the Justice Department, I was shocked by his appearance. I have never seen a man with less resilience. Much of the time he seemed to be in a trance, staring off into space, his face a study in grief.
Bob said of the book that the family was anxious to avoid flamboyance and commercialism. I replied that he should let me know what was acceptable to him. I did suggest that since the project had apparently originated with Mrs. Kennedy, it might be wise for me to discuss it directly with her. That would be unnecessary, he answered; he represented her. Later, when I came to know her, she was to tell me the same thing in other words: “Deal with Bobby.” “Work it out with Bobby.” “Let Bobby take care of it.”
One of the things he took care of was the publisher. He wanted me to secure an option release from Little, Brown. Instead the book would be issued by Harper & Row and edited by Harper’s chief editor, Evan Thomas, who had brought out John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage and Bob’s The Enemy Within. In this, as in virtually everything else, I consented. Reluctantly but gracefully, Little, Brown agreed to let me go. At the same time, I resigned my post at Wesleyan and prepared to move my wife and three children to Washington.
At the end of our talks, Bob and I decided to set down the details of the project in a memorandum of understanding. At that point we assumed that Salinger would draft the memo, but when I returned to the capital on March 22 at Salinger’s invitation, I discovered that he had flown off to California to run for the Senate. By phone he suggested that I draw up the memorandum myself. With Bobby’s wishes in mind, I typed out a version in my room at Washington’s University Club. This became the basis for revision during conferences between Bob, me, Evan Thomas, Ed Guthman, and Don Congdon, my gifted, debonair agent.
These were my first meetings with Guthman and Thomas. Ed, who had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his exposure of labor union racketeering in the late 1940s, was a kind of Jewish Abraham Lincoln. I have seldom admired a colleague more. Evan also left a first impression of candor, though as I came to know him better I learned that he was a highly complex man. The son of Norman Thomas, he was dour, sardonic, and possessed of a mordant wit, yet his air of crusty independence was misleading. Under it he was eager to be accommodating toward celebrated men and women, a trait which won him many famous friends but which could create problems if conflicts arose between his goals and those of the celebrities.
By March 25 the five of us believed that we had taken out insurance against every possible misunderstanding. The project, we agreed, would probably take from three to five years; publication was tentatively scheduled for November 22, 1968, with the understanding that the date might be advanced by two years if I finished earlier. The provision for manuscript review seemed to eliminate the possibility of luridness. To guarantee my independence, I would accept no money from the Kennedys. Instead I would pay all my own expenses. Safeguards against commercialism were more complex, not because there were any disagreements but because we had no way of knowing how popular the completed book might be. Evan proposed that Harper limit its profit to $35,000 and provide me with an advance, after commissions, of $36,000. Author’s royalties after the first printing would be contributed to the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library.
Don Congdon was unhappy about this. I was giving up a great deal—my job, my plans for other books, my income from magazine writing—and it was obvious, even then, that my outlay for this new project would come to more than $36,000. Accordingly, the memorandum provided that I would receive royalties from a British edition and foreign translations, if any; one-quarter of any book club or paperback money; and, should there be any magazine serialization, the proceeds from that. The clause covering this specified that magazine rights “may be disposed of by William Manchester, with the approval of Mrs. John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, though it is not the intention to prevent the sale of serial option rights to a responsible publisher.” Don was still pensive—as a literary agent he thought that the reading public’s interest in President Kennedy might have waned by the time I finished the book—but I told him I didn’t want to bargain over a national tragedy, and he returned to New York.
On Wednesday, March 25, 1964, Bob and I signed seven copies of the memorandum. I asked for one of them but didn’t get it; later a Xerox copy was mailed to me. Thursday morning Jackie and Bob flew to Sun Valley, Idaho, on a skiing vacation, and at 3 P.M. the Attorney General’s office announced the project to reporters. “Because versions of what occurred November 20–25 already have appeared and because it is understood other articles and books are in the course of being prepared for later publication,” the announcement read, “these arrangements have been made with Mr. Manchester in the interest of historical accuracy and to prevent distortion and sensationalism.”
Friday Don received a telegram:
LOOK MAGAZINE WISHES TO DISCUSS POSSIBLE TERMS FOR WILLIAM MANCHESTER BOOK ON THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY. PLEASE TELEPHONE DAN MICH AT MU-9-0300 AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. MIKE LAND BOOK EDITOR LOOK
Don quite properly replied that Look was premature. There was no need for him to consult me about the offer, and besides, I was too busy. I had leased an apartment at 800 Fourth Street SW in the capital and was commuting to New England weekends while signing up a house in Washington’s Cleveland Park for my family. Meanwhile I had begun my research. My first two calls were on Bill Moyers at the White House and Chief Justice Earl Warren. It was essential that the new President, whose confidence Moyers enjoyed, know what I proposed to do. It was equally important that the presidential commission which the Chief Judge headed understand the nature of my inquiry. Warren recognized that while the lines of the two investigations might occasionally intersect, they were very different. The commission was conducting an inquiry into a crime. I was exploring the full sweep of events in late November 1963. They were focusing upon the assassin of a President, I upon the Presidency itself.
During the months which followed I approached every person who might shed light on those autumn days. I retraced President Kennedy’s last journey from Andrews Field in Maryland to San Antonio, Kelley Field, Houston, Carswell Air Force Base, Fort Worth, Love Field, Dealey Plaza, Parkland Hospital, back to Love and back to Andrews, over the ambulance route to Bethesda Naval Hospital and then to the White House, the great rotunda of the Capitol, St. Matthew’s Cathedral, and Arlington. Some evenings in Washington I worked in the Warren Commission offices on Maryland Avenue. In Texas I went over every motorcade route, searching for men and women who had been spectators. In Dallas I walked from Love Field to the famous overpass, looking for potential sniper’s nests as well. Every scene which I would describe in the book was visited: the rooms in the White House, Bob Kennedy’s home at Hickory Hill, Brooks Medical Center, the presidential hotel suites in Houston and Fort Worth, the Houston Coliseum and ballroom, the Paine garage and bedroom where Lee Harvey Oswald stayed, Marguerite Oswald’s house, her son’s tiny room in Dallas, Parkland’s Major Surgery and Minor Surgery areas, Bethesda’s seventeenth-floor suite and basement morgue, the pavements of Washington, the pews of St. Matthew’s.
Jim Swindal, the pilot of Air Force One, led me back and forth through the compartments of the presidential aircraft. I crawled over the roof of the Texas School Book Depository and sat in Oswald’s sixth-floor perch. I rode his Dallas bus, watch in hand. Before taxi driver Bill Whal
ey died in Dallas he picked me up at the spot where he had picked up Oswald, drove me over the same route in the same taxi at the same speed, and dropped me off at the same curb. I stood where Officer J. D. Tippit died. I darted over the last lap of Oswald’s flight to the Texas Theater. In Dallas police headquarters I sat where the assassin had sat, rode down in the same elevator accompanied by Dallas patrolmen, and took notes in the headquarters garage while standing where Oswald was killed. With a Secret Service agent and Dallas eyewitnesses as my guides, I went over the stretch of Elm Street where the President was shot. I watched the so-called Zapruder film of the assassination seventy times and then went over it frame by frame. In Washington, Hyannisport, and elsewhere I studied each relevant office, embassy, and home—over a hundred of them. I even had the damaged Dallas-to-Bethesda coffin uncrated for inspection. And I interviewed Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, hour after hour, with a tape recorder in her Georgetown home on N Street.
***
“Mr. Manchester!” she said in that inimitable, breathy voice as she stepped into the living room, closed the sliding doors behind her with a sweeping movement, and bowed slightly from the waist. It was a few minutes before noon on April 7, 1964, the date of our first meeting. She was wearing a black jersey and yellow stretch pants, she was beaming at me, and I thought how, at thirty-four, with her camellia beauty, she might have been taken for a woman in her mid-twenties. My first impression—and it never changed—was that I was in the presence of a very great tragic actress. I mean that in the finest sense of the word. There was a weekend in American history when we needed to be united in our sadness by the superb example of a bereaved First Lady, and Jacqueline Kennedy—unlike Eleanor Roosevelt, a more extraordinary woman in other ways—provided us with an unforgettable performance as the nation’s heroine. One reason for this triumph was that her instincts were completely feminine. If she met your plane at the Hyannis airport, she automatically handed you the keys to her convertible. Men drive, women are driven: that was the logic of things to her, and it is impossible to think of her burning a bra or denouncing romantic love as counterrevolutionary.
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