This was baffling to me, and for a significant reason. Evan was making changes in the text without my knowledge. Ordinarily the relationship between an editor and author is a privileged one. Now I began to realize—it was only a beginning; the full realization would take months—that Evan and I were not on that footing. Looking back, I can see three reasons why it was impossible for us to be so. I was a Little, Brown author. Harper’s would be publishing no more books by me, and so as a practical matter there was less reason to weigh my judgments carefully. Secondly, Evan felt an obligation to defend Bobby, who was a Harper’s author. In this instance that meant not offending a powerful and hypersensitive Democratic President who was well aware that the book had been written at the request of the Kennedys. Lastly, Evan could not help regarding Johnson himself as a potential author of his. Harper’s was the traditional publisher of Democratic statesmen, just as Doubleday was the publisher of Republicans. Evan would have been insensitive indeed if he hadn’t wanted to avoid alienating an incumbent Chief Executive who might otherwise appear one day on his list. The fact that I was slow to appreciate this is suggestive of obtuseness on my part, or the fatigue which followed a long book.
***
Much later, after the book was out, I was shown letters that Evan was then sending to Seigenthaler and Guthman, and I realized just how hard my editor had fought to eliminate anything which Johnson might resent. I had, for example, felt it necessary to note the hostility between Johnson and Kennedy aides during the flight back from Dallas, and I thought it a historical fact that relations between Johnson and his Attorney General had been difficult at the new President’s first Cabinet meeting. Evan took a different view. “Frankly, gentlemen,” he wrote John and Ed on May 16, “I am deeply disturbed by some of this. It’s in part, I guess, an ambition to make sure that Bob Kennedy is not hurt by association (an association which he cannot escape) with the book which is, in part, gratuitously and tastelessly insulting to Johnson, and for that matter, the memory of the late President Kennedy, while at the same time being a really considerable piece of work, one might almost say a great book.”
After eleven weeks of studying suggestions from readers and reworking the text, I sat down with Evan in a Manhattan apartment at 36 East Thirty-sixth Street to go over the manuscript page by page, and it was then that I began to understand the depth of his feeling on this issue. He had conferred with Guthman in Los Angeles and Seigenthaler in Nashville; both had recommended early publication to Bobby, and all that remained, I thought, were editorial odds and ends. In fact, Evan and I were to remain in session for nearly 36 hours. Our first exchange was a signpost to what lay ahead. On page two of the manuscript I had described LBJ as a practitioner of political tergiversation. “What does tergiversation mean?” Evan asked. “Evasiveness, equivocation—running a broken field,” I said. “That goes,” he said, and struck it out with a pencil. I promptly rubbed out his pencil strokes with a gum arabic eraser. We eyed one another thoughtfully and turned back to the manuscript. Further on, using a metaphor to describe Johnsonian guile, I had written that “To him the shortest distance between two points was a tunnel.” Evan was offended by the image. He said that it was a slur on the Presidency.
This sort of thing is negotiable between an editor and an author, and in fact these two points were later resolved amicably, with tergiversation going and the tunnel staying. A knottier problem was my description of the Vice Presidency as a weak office, and Johnson as frustrated in it. I had written of this sympathetically, pointing out that other Vice Presidents—and particularly strong, gifted men like LBJ—had felt thwarted by the job. An understanding of that was essential to a grasp of why Kennedy had taken his fatal trip to Texas. He went to patch up an intramural feud (Connally vs. Ralph Yarborough) within the state’s Democratic party, a rift which Johnson had been unable to mend because, as Vice President, he lacked a political power base.
In expecting Johnson to end the Connally-Yarborough vendetta, I wrote, Kennedy was being unreasonable because he had never occupied LBJ’s barren office himself. I cited JFK’s observation that “the three most overrated things in the world are the State of Texas, the FBI, and political wizardry of Lyndon Baines Johnson.” (Evan, as I later learned, wrote Seigenthaler and Guthman that he was “especially unhappy” about this, that “I’d very much like to get this out, and if you agree, we will get it out.”) I wrote that few Americans understood how unsubstantial the authority of a President’s understudy is (Evan: “I don’t much like the business about ‘ersatz prestige’”), that Johnson pined for his role as Majority Leader of the Senate (Evan: “I don’t like the lines about there being so little for Johnson to do, and his vitality being sapped”) and that for all the talk about Air Force Two, which became important in the turmoil that accompanied the presidential party’s return from Dallas, there really was no such aircraft—that the President had at his disposal a fleet of planes, one of which might or might not be made available to the Vice President on any given occasion, at the discretion of the White House staff. (Evan: “I don’t at all like the business about Johnson having to apply to the President’s Air Force aide for a plane on page 4. It’s just somehow unnecessarily demeaning, as is the line earlier in the page about his phone number not attracting the slightest attention.”)
There were other differences between author and editor. Evan had undertaken to rewrite the opening paragraphs of the book, using phrases which were not characteristic of me. For example, he had declared that the Johnsons planned to entertain the Kennedys at their ranch with Thanksgiving turkey “and all the fixin’s,” which I considered unacceptable. However, it would be wrong to suggest that we were at loggerheads during all, or most, of our session. For the most part we were dealing with the comments of Guthman and Seigenthaler, and I left New York believing that I had resolved all of their objections. I was wrong. Evan was still distressed. He was convinced that publication of the book would put Bob Kennedy in an impossible position because Bobby had authorized it; that Johnson, offended, might make things difficult for Bob at the 1968 Democratic convention. After reflection he called Bobby and said so. Bob then instructed Seigenthaler and Guthman to make a fresh, complete review of the manuscript.
At the end of June, John, Ed, and Evan met in Washington’s Jefferson Hotel for what they called a “marathon editing session.” On July 9 Evan flew to Nashville and Los Angeles for final checks with them. I accepted the last of their recommendations during a conference call with Evan and John on July 14. At last, after sixteen weeks of revision, we had an approved text. Speaking for Bob and Jackie, Seigenthaler declared toward the end of the call that the revised manuscript was acceptable. It could be submitted now to magazines for possible serialization, he said, and published by Harper’s in January. Evan commented that he thought this verbal sanction was enough, but I, acting on Don Congdon’s advice, replied that it wasn’t. Bobby and I had signed a memorandum of understanding. Any modification of it, I said, should be in writing. Seigenthaler agreed; he assured me that a letter from Bob amending our agreement would be mailed to me promptly.
That was a Thursday. Until then I had scrupulously refrained from communicating with the Kennedys during the period of revision, feeling that protocol should be rigidly observed until the editorial process was complete, but that Sunday I wrote Bob and Jackie, expressing my relief that it was all over and spelling out my understanding of where we were. Seigenthaler phoned me at 1 A.M. the following morning to say that the amending letter would be delayed; Joe Kennedy had just suffered a heart attack in Hyannisport, and Bob was rushing to his side. John reaffirmed the approval of the manuscript, however, and urged me to proceed with magazine submissions. Accordingly, Don sent Thermofaxes of the text to six editorial offices later that day. Each copy bore heavily inked deletions marked “JS” and “EG” for Seigenthaler and Guthman, and each was accompanied by a letter from Don, asking editors to treat it with discretion. Bids were due at 5 P.M. July 29, 1966, eleven da
ys later.
Each morning during the last two weeks of July I expected the mailman to bring me an envelope bearing Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s frank, and day after day I was disappointed. At first I wasn’t alarmed; he had always been dilatory. I would have been disturbed if I had known that Evan was urging Angie to send it to him, not me—Evan explained to her that he would keep it in his safe and use it only when he thought it “appropriate”—but mercifully I was deep in the Krupp book once more. Among other things, I was unaware of the intense maneuvering among magazine editors which Don’s submission had triggered. The big moves were being made by Life and Look. Both were determined to get the book. Life’s editors had asked Teddy White, as an old Luce reporter, to approach the Kennedys in their behalf. Look sent its Washington correspondent, Warren Rogers, directly to Bobby. In a subsequent affidavit, Rogers swore that Bob told him I had volunteered to turn the proceeds from the book over to the Kennedy Library, that my only real profit would be from the serialization rights, and that “Manchester is entitled to get whatever he can from it.” He added that President Kennedy had “thought highly of Manchester” and that he, Bobby, took a “favorable” view toward Look acquiring the serialization rights. Bob also talked to Marquis Childs, who was later prepared to say under oath that Bobby had told him he wanted the book published in 1966, not 1968.
As the magazine submission entered its second week, the feeling grew in Manhattan that bidding was going to be high. Evan thought that about $150,000 would win it, but he wasn’t in the magazine business, and this really had nothing to do with him; Harper’s role was limited to publication of the book in Canada and the United States. For my part, I was growing anxious as the mailman continued to show up empty-handed. When the morning of July 29 arrived and I still hadn’t heard from Bob, I telephoned Hickory Hill. He apologized, and before noon this telegram arrived from him:
SHOULD ANY INQUIRIES ARISE RE THE MANUSCRIPT OF YOUR BOOK I WOULD LIKE TO STATE THE FOLLOWING:
WHILE I HAVE NOT READ WILLIAM MANCHESTER’S ACCOUNT OF THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY, I KNOW OF THE PRESIDENT’S RESPECT FOR MR. MANCHESTER AS AN HISTORIAN AND A REPORTER. I UNDERSTAND OTHERS HAVE PLANS TO PUBLISH BOOKS REGARDING THE EVENTS OF NOVEMBER 22, 1963. AS THIS IS GOING TO BE THE SUBJECT MATTER OF A BOOK AND SINCE MR. MANCHESTER IN HIS RESEARCH HAD ACCESS TO MORE INFORMATION AND SOURCES THAN ANY OTHER WRITER, MEMBERS OF THE KENNEDY FAMILY WILL PLACE NO OBSTACLE IN THE WAY OF PUBLICATION OF HIS WORK.
HOWEVER, IF MR. MANCHESTER’S ACCOUNT IS PUBLISHED IN SEGMENTS OR EXCERPTS, I WOULD EXPECT THAT INCIDENTS WOULD NOT BE TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT OR SUMMARIZED IN ANY WAY WHICH MIGHT DISTORT THE FACTS OF OR THE EVENTS RELATING TO PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S DEATH.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY
I wired Don: LONG AWAITED RFK TELEGRAM OF RELEASE HAS ARRIVED AND IS PERFECT IN EVERY RESPECT. Later in the day I learned from Angie Novello that a special delivery letter, identically worded and signed by Bobby, was on its way to Harper’s. By then the magazine bids were in, and at 5:15 P.M. Don called me with the details. The top two offers were astounding. Look was prepared to pay $405,000 for world rights and Life $500,000. However, there was more to it than that. As I was learning, nothing about the publication of The Death of a President was going to be simple. Knowing that Jackie and Bob would be concerned about the possibility of sensationalism, I had asked for absolute control over pictures, layouts, advertising, and even the captions that accompanied the serialization. Look was willing to grant me that; Life was reluctant. Don and I discussed this awhile and then decided to give each of the top two magazines twenty-four hours to reconsider its position.
After we hung up, I returned to my typewriter. I was up to the Krupps’ role in the First World War, which seemed more real to me than the conversation I had just held. To me, $50,000 was a lot of money, but $500,000 was simply preposterous. It did not remain so. After an hour of writing about Big Berthas, the 420-mm. Krupp howitzers which had pulverized Liége and Verdun, I cleaned off my desk with the pleasant realization that I had good news for my wife—that a project from which I had not expected to make much money would, under the terms of my memorandum of understanding with Bobby, make me financially independent. First, however, I had to telephone Bob.
That afternoon he had flown to Hyannisport for the weekend, and I reached him there. He was uneasy over the fact that Life had submitted the larger bid. “If you pick Look you don’t have to check with me,” he told me, “but if it’s Life I want to talk about it.” As things turned out, there was no contest between them. Late the following afternoon Don phoned to say that the editors of Look not only consented to give me editorial control; they had now raised its offer higher than Life’s, to $665,000. I immediately called Hyannisport to tell Bob that the bidding was closed and Look had won. “Great!” he said; “isn’t that a record?” I replied that I didn’t know (actually it was), and then he said with satisfaction, “Look has been so nice to the family and Henry Luce has been such a bastard.”
I spent Sunday, the next day, packing suitcases and strapping them in a luggage rack on the top of our Ford station wagon. We had rented a Maine camp on the Belgrade Lakes for the month of August. It would be our first vacation in four years. We planned to leave early Tuesday morning, which gave us a day to get ready. After that, I thought, I would be inaccessible until Labor Day. What I didn’t know, or had forgotten, was that the Maine camp had a telephone.
Evan Thomas had been less pleased with the final text than the rest of us, and on July 18, four days after the conference call in which it was approved, he had written John and Ed that he continued to be unhappy over the treatment of Lyndon Johnson. I was unaware that on July 28, the day before the magazine bids were due, he had telegraphed Bob in an unsuccessful attempt to arrange an appointment for discussion of this. Nevertheless, I knew that his protective attitude toward LBJ was undiminished. Late in July he had sent me a note reaffirming his feeling of “responsibility since there is so much concern about any undertone of disrespect, or whatnot, for Johnson.”
Disrespect, or whatnot, seemed irrelevant now that we had an approved manuscript. What I failed to realize was that the political issue was a potential threat to the entire book. Given the tremendous publicity which attended all Kennedy activities, and given the huge sum that Look was paying, The Death of a President was bound to become big news soon. President Johnson was at the crest of his power. A great many people in the Washington community were going to be extremely interested in my treatment of him. If the Kennedys, the author, Harper’s, and Look maintained a solid front, political pressures could be successfully resisted. Should the front waver, however, those pressures could become a real menace. Evan was already wobbly. Now, for reasons which had nothing to do with politics, he was about to be joined by an important companion.
Monday afternoon, returning home from some last-minute, pre-vacation errands, I found a note to call Don. Calling him, I learned that Evan had received an anguished call from Bobby. Calling Evan, I was told the source of that anguish. Jackie, notified about the sale of serial rights to Look, was perturbed, apparently because the money was not going to the Kennedy Library. I was bewildered. I had, of course, been writing to her, and I had assumed in any event that since Bob was representing her, he must be keeping her informed about our progress. Now I discovered that neither was true—she had neither read my letters nor talked to him. She had returned from a Hawaiian vacation on July 28 to celebrate her thirty-seventh birthday at a party given by Bunny and Paul Mellon. She had been in Hyannisport during the Look-Life negotiations, but hadn’t known about them until they were over. Evan sounded distraught. I gathered that Bobby was distraught, too. I decided to phone him in Hyannisport.
Instead I reached Ethel, who brought me up to date. The previous evening she and Bob had been expecting guests. Before the visitors arrived, he had crossed the Kennedy compound lawn to the President’s house, to tell Jackie about the Look sale. He didn’t return until the guests appeared, and since
they were there, he couldn’t talk, but Ethel knew that something was wrong. His face was strained and white. After the company had left, he told her that Jackie was very upset about the serialization. Talking to me, Ethel said she was convinced that the storm had now passed. Jackie had driven Bob to the Hyannis airport in the morning, and they had talked in the car while Awalting the plane. Then she had spent the day with Ethel and Jean Kennedy Smith, the President’s sister, who had calmed her down. I asked whether it was the $665,000 figure which had distressed her. No, Ethel answered; she had been disturbed because she hadn’t understood what the Look serialization was all about; now that it had been explained to her, and she understood, the crisis was over. Ethel stressed that giving me permission to publish had been a family decision, that Bob had been acting as the head of the family, not as an individual—that he fully understood the significance of the telegram he had sent me and the special delivery letter to Harper’s. She added that she herself had read the manuscript, which I knew, and that she thought it fine.
Yet I wasn’t altogether reassured. I still wanted to talk to Bobby, who was now in Washington, so I called his secretary. Angie explained that he was in a committee meeting. She said she could pass him a note telling him of my anxiety and call me back, which she presently did. Bob had written on the back of the note, “Tell Bill I always keep my word and mean to in this case.” I felt a little better, but only a little. That evening I wrote him that “the time for intermediaries has passed. Though invaluable at times, they have one weakness. The chain may lead to unintentional distortion. Therefore I suggest we adopt the following procedure. If any question arises regarding the understanding between us, let it be resolved by direct communication. I call you or you call me.”
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 3