Tuesday I drove my family to Maine, and all the way to the Belgrade Lakes I wondered what had gone wrong. In the months to come, as the controversy grew, an increasing number of people would join my speculation. The obvious explanation was that Jackie must be objecting to the tone or content of my book. But during most of the ensuing uproar she hadn’t even seen it. (The ultimate irony was that when she did read it, she liked it.) My first guess was that she recoiled from the idea of magazine serialization. That was right as far as it went, but it didn’t reach the heart of the problem. Eventually I was to conclude that she didn’t really want any book, that at most she would accept only a dull, obscure volume. (“I thought,” she would tell me in September, “that it would be bound in black and put away on dark library shelves.”) Three years earlier she had shuddered from the prospect of the Bishop book. I had been called in to stop Bishop. Now she was determined to stop me.
Long afterward, when I grasped this, I thought it understandable. Knowing the horror she had been through, one could only sympathize. But she was hardly being realistic. The book was now finished. I had scrupulously observed the guidelines established by Bobby, who had acted as her representative, with her consent. The manuscript had been approved and Harper’s had set it in type—I was reading galleys in Maine. Look’s typesetters were doing the same thing, while other Look men were selling foreign serial rights to periodical publishers in forty-two countries. Blowing the whistle now would touch off lawsuits all over the world. Moreover, the suitors would have collected. Commitments had been made, contracts were being signed, obligations incurred. And the first commitment had been made to me, in writing, by Bobby, on her instructions. She was always distrustful of lawyers. Raising legal questions incensed her. But there was another way of putting it. At her request I had spent two and a half years researching, writing, and revising a manuscript. Surely I was now entitled to see it published.
Except on one occasion, and then only half-heartedly, the issue of outright suppression was never joined, because that level of candor was never reached. Instead, objections were raised about this or that aspect of publication, until, when all other approaches had failed, attempts were made to mutilate the text so that it would become unreadable. And all these dreary maneuvers had their origins in August 1966, when I was camped on a Maine lake and air transport was crippled by a machinists’ strike.
My Maine phone rang for the first time on our second day there, Wednesday, August 3. The caller was Homer Bigart of the New York Times, an old friend. He had heard about the Look sale and was writing a story for tomorrow’s paper. His piece appeared Thursday, and Friday another ring awoke me. It was Evan. He, too, had heard from Homer, and the conversation had troubled him. He had wired Bob:
HOMER BIGART OF TIMES IS ON TO BOOK AND SERIAL STORY AND HAS GATHERED MANY FACTS INCLUDING PRICE OF SALE. WE HAVE BEEN EVASIVE IN OUR REPLIES REGARDING MONEY. UNDER EXISTING TERMS WE EXPECT BOOK TO BE LARGEST SINGLE CONTRIBUTOR TO LIBRARY AND ARE DELIGHTED WITH THAT PROSPECT. IN THE ABSENCE OF ANY FURTHER DISCUSSION WE MUST ASSUME THAT ORIGINAL SIGNED AGREEMENT PREVAILS.
Bobby hadn’t liked that. Since the weekend, as I later learned, he had been subjected to further reactions from his sister-in-law. Now, he had felt, Evan was needling him. He had telegraphed him a startling reply:
RE TELEGRAM WHERE YOU SAY QUOTE IN ABSENCE OF ANY INSTRUCTIONS SIGNED AGREEMENT PREVAILS UNQUOTE. AGREE, AND THAT PROVIDES THAT MRS. KENNEDY AND I MUST GIVE PERMISSION FOR PUBLICATION OF BOOK AND THAT HAS NOT BEEN GIVEN.
Alarmed, Evan had telephoned Bob, who had said he didn’t mean that, exactly; he merely thought that the author was making too much profit from magazine rights. Evan had a compromise in mind, and he had put it in writing for Angie Novello: “I am sure we can work it out so that the Look money goes directly to the library…. I will be happy to make a specific proposal and to invite an accountant nominated by Bobby Kennedy to discuss it with me should he wish.” To me he now suggested that I contribute the $665,000 to the library and accept a straight royalty on the book. How, he asked, did that appeal to me? I replied that it didn’t. In the first place, magazine rights were, as noted, none of Evan’s affair. In the second place, Don and I had estimated—correctly, as it turned out—that book royalties would be twice as profitable as the magazine sale. The compromise would earn me twice as much money, a clear violation of the spirit of my original understanding with Bobby. I didn’t spell out the third place, because I didn’t want to hurt Evan needlessly. The fact was that I believed Look was spunkier than Harper’s, and I wanted Mike Cowles, Look’s, rocklike publisher, at my side during what began to look more and more like a stormy period ahead.
That afternoon the telephone rang again, this time with a telegram for me from Evan:
SPENDING MONDAY WITH PAM TO GO OVER PASSAGES WHICH PAM QUESTIONS. THEN SPENDING TUESDAY IN NASHVILLE WITH SEIGEN-THALER SINCE HE WANTS TO RECHECK POLITICAL PASSAGES. REREADING ENTIRE MANUSCRIPT THIS WEEKEND IN PREPARATION.
It was then that I realized that I had made a mistake in coming to this wilderness, that I should have driven to New York instead and camped in Evan’s office, to restrain him. We had an approved manuscript; why was he clearing the way for further revision? “Political passages” had an ominous ring. Considering editorial directives from Pam was worse. Earlier Evan had acknowledged that Jackie’s secretary was not qualified to edit a historical work. Now I reminded him in writing: “You and I agreed that once we have approval, no suggestion from Pam Turnure was to be even considered.”
Then I called Arthur Schlesinger, who had offered his good offices should I have need of them. Bringing him up to date, I told him that I hadn’t heard from Bobby since the Look sale, hadn’t heard from Jackie since spring, and would be grateful for his advice. As it happened, Arthur was about to leave for a weekend in Hyannisport. He promised to find out what he could and call me back on Monday. He did, and like Ethel before him, he was reassuring. He had spoken to both Bob and Jackie the previous evening, he reported, and the money was not an issue with either of them. Both had been calm. To be sure, Jackie was a trifle “jittery” over the prospect of serialization, but on the whole she seemed “reconciled and tranquil.”
In fact it would be a long time before any of us knew tranquillity. The story was out. Newspapermen had wind of dissension between me and the Kennedys, and they were speculating about the reason. Bigart called me that noon with an ugly report. There were rumors, he said, that Bobby was trying to suppress the book until the next election so that its appearance then could enhance his presidential prospects, and that he was having the book censored to improve his status with Johnson. The first report was never true, and the second wasn’t true then. I persuaded Homer that there was no story, but it was typical of that sad summer that when Bobby heard the gossip he concluded it was an attempt by me or my publishers to blackmail him into reaffirming his endorsement of early publication.
Those were difficult days for Bob. Jackie was, a Times reporter put it, “raising hell.” Her stature in the country was still such that a break with her would have been a political calamity for him. With good reason, he felt frustrated and resentful of the developing impasse. Jackie blamed him for it—the following month she told me that he was behaving “like a little boy who knows he’s done wrong”—and on Wednesday, August 10, he tried to cut the knot. This was the one instance in which an attempt was made to quash the book altogether. He telegraphed Evan:
UNDER PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCES, WITH THE SITUATION AS DIFFICULT AS IT IS, I FEEL THE BOOK ON PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S DEATH SHOULD BE NEITHER PUBLISHED NOR SERIALIZED. AS YOU KNOW ONLY TOO WELL, THIS HAS BEEN A TRYING SITUATION FOR EVERYONE AND I UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEMS THIS HAS CAUSED YOU AND THE AUTHOR. IT JUST SEEMS TO ME THAT RATHER THAN STRUGGLING WITH THIS ANY LONGER WE SHOULD TAKE OUR CHANCES WITH JIM BISHOP.
Plainly this required a confrontation. Northeast was the only East Coast airline not on strike. My wife drove me to the Lewiston airport, where I took a North
east flight to New York. There Evan and I chartered a plane for Washington. The two of us met Bobby and Seigenthaler in Bob’s office on Capitol Hill. For three hours we conferred, fumed, shouted, and glared—and settled nothing. Bobby was at his most abrasive; at various times he threatened to take Look to court, insisted that I give more money to the library, and demanded that I stop the serialization, all the while assuring Evan that he wanted the book to be published. When I asked whether it was his wish that I alert Look to the possibilities of a lawsuit, he withdrew that threat. He said that his telegram and special delivery letter of July 29 were not meant to release the manuscript. I asked what they did mean, and he ignored the question. He charged that my publishers and I were “in too much of a hurry.” Toward the end he remembered that Look had, at my request, granted me editorial control over the series. He importuned me to “shred and emasculate” each installment so that it would be unprintable. I replied that I couldn’t do that, that it would be unethical. He chuckled. “Then give them to John,” he said. Seigenthaler smiled weakly. Evan looked embarrassed. I sat very still. I remembered that Evan was entertaining John’s suggestions for fresh changes in “political passages.” As we broke up, Bob, now quieter, asked me to appeal to Look for cancellation of the series, or at least for postponement. In New York I asked Mike Cowles to delay it, and he agreed.
On August 24 Jackie summoned Cowles and his general counsel to Hyannisport, where they were confronted by her, Bobby, and her lawyer, Simond Rifkind. That meeting was also fruitless, or nearly so; the most Mike would concede was a reduction from seven installments to four.1 Meanwhile, up at Belgrade Lakes, I was being inundated with demands for changes—111 from Seigenthaler and 77 from Pam. John’s editing was no longer professional. It was frank distortion and resembled the scrawled comments Evan had made the previous spring—I was, for example, asked to rewrite my account of Johnson’s first Cabinet meeting so that I would be depicting the relationship between him and Bobby as completely amicable. Pam, as she told me in a strained phone conversation, was reacting “as a woman.” Whereas others had regarded the portrayal of JFK in my first submitted draft as too romantic, Pam felt that it was too earthy; e.g., that I shouldn’t describe him as strolling around in his underwear before going to bed. She disliked my account of Jackie peering in a mirror, looking for wrinkles. And she had also marked great chunks of the text for the wastebasket. Here, as John Corry of the Times later observed, “the problem” lay in “Miss Turnure not being a professional editor or writer. Manchester had raised a structure, building scenes, creating moods, telling a story. It was simply too delicate a task to yank large sections of copy from the structure; it would have collapsed.” Corry continued: “There were at least 25 areas in the book to which she had truly strong objections, and many of the objections could not be met by changing a word here and a word there. They demanded major revisions. Even more, they demanded that the author find a new orientation, a new approach to his work.”
Evan, during all this, was tergiversating. His position with me was that he was receiving suggestions from John and Pam as a “courtesy” to the Kennedys, that he was making a sincere effort to “minimize the intense friction” that was developing, and that he had no doubts that we were dealing with an “approved manuscript.” What I didn’t know was that, at the same time, he was writing Pam and Nancy Tuckerman, another of Jackie’s secretaries: “I have told Manchester that while I cannot be the last word in his editing of the largely political material that I absolutely refuse to publish the book unless he pays exact attention to Pam’s wishes on this other material.” These two statements were irreconcilable, of course, and before the month was out he had begun to take a harder line with me, writing of one passage that although he saw nothing objectionable in it, “Pam insists, so of course it must go.” I replied that “should any letter reach me from Jackie with specific suggestions, I shall naturally reply immediately,” but I couldn’t submit to history being blue-penciled by a private secretary.
By mid-August the friendship and mutual trust which had bound me to most advisers of Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy was rapidly vanishing.2 On August 15 a note was placed in Bobby’s Washington files reporting that Pam had
talked with Jackie and then with Evan Thomas. Passed the message that it would be unwise for her to send anything in writing to Manchester. However, Evan was to tell Manchester emphatically that she had agreed to be interviewed by him only on the basis that she should have the right to destroy the entire transcript… or decide what should be edited out. Manchester knew this will be breaking his agreement with her, if he does not agree to the changes she wants.
Of course, I knew no such thing, and the notion that I did was of a piece with the fantasy that I had been “hired” to write the book. Had I known of the note I would have said so, but that would have solved nothing; looking back through the correspondence of those months, including memoranda of which I was then unaware, I realize that I had now come to be regarded as a temperamental writer who needed humoring. That was probably the explanation for a call I received August 21 from Dick Goodwin. Dick was phoning from Martha’s Vineyard. He said that Jackie had talked to him twice about me, that she was distressed about the three-hour scene in Bobby’s office, and that she wanted to reach me by phone and say so. I told him that I would be delighted to hear from her. The call never came.
Goodwin, however, was destined to play a key role in the controversy. In many ways his designation as a literary broker made sense to the Kennedy advisers. His Middletown home and mine were a short walk from one another. Jackie trusted him. His dedication to Bobby’s ambitions for national office was absolute, and he had no love for Look, which had curtly rejected a piece he had written on Vietnam the previous spring. Of course, he was unfamiliar with recent developments in the struggle over the book he had titled, but other members of the Kennedy team quickly brought him up-to-date, briefing him, among other things, on their new disenchantment with me. That week Seigenthaler wrote Goodwin: “Since you are now the ‘reader,’ I think I should alert you to the difficulties I had in dealing with Bill Manchester. He is a great writer, but in my opinion he has very bad judgment and is extremely sensitive when faced with the prospect of editing his work.”
Like so much else that was being passed back and forth, I was ignorant of that letter’s existence. All I knew, from my talks with Dick in that last week of August, was that the President’s widow seemed to be about to take a personal role in resolving the differences which had arisen, and I wrote Evan: “Please, for the time being, don’t write any letters about the book or talk to anyone about it. I’m convinced Jackie and I can work this out.”
On Thursday, September 1, the same day that Look took a full-page ad in the New York Times to announce the forthcoming serialization and print my foreword to the book, I reloaded vacation gear atop the Ford station wagon, closed the Maine camp of which I had seen so little, and headed south toward Connecticut. Goodwin having left the Vineyard that same morning, we were following the same course. That would not be true for long.
***
Richard Naradof Goodwin, summa cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and a former law clerk to Felix Frankfurter, forsook a brilliant legal career to follow the star of John F. Kennedy, and since Dallas his hopes for further public service had depended upon the fortunes of Robert Kennedy. In pursuit of his goals, Goodwin’s mind was his greatest asset. His appearance and his brusque manner were liabilities. Someone had described him as looking like an Italian reporter with a hangover. Jackie once told me that he always reminded her of a radical agitator shaking his fist at the sky and shouting, “Sacco and Vanzetti!” Hirsute, craggy-faced, tireless, coarse, and shrewd, Dick was a harsh figure in any setting, but he was as convinced as I was that any issues between Jackie and me could be easily settled.
He and I spent Friday morning together going over my carbon of the manuscript. He had found nothing objectionable in it in April, nor did he now. He sa
id he shared a suspicion of mine: that overzealous go-betweens, eager to excise anything which Bobby and Jackie might conceivably regard as controversial, had marked for cutting passages that wouldn’t really bother any member of the family. After a sandwich in a downtown Middletown restaurant, we phoned Jackie, who said she would set aside the following Wednesday for us. That evening I wrote her:
Dick Goodwin and I had breakfast and lunch together today, and in between, I think, we cleared up a great many misunderstandings. I’ll be on my way to the compound as soon as I’ve finished [a] meeting at Harper’s. It is scheduled to begin at 3:30 P.M. Tuesday. I don’t know when it will be over, but the instant we adjourn I’ll head for the Cape, bringing with me a comb, a toothbrush, and all the fidelity and good will in the world.
The Tuesday meeting ran overlong, necessitating an overnight stay in New York. Held in Harper’s Manhattan boardroom, it was attended by Evan, Cass Canfield, Don Congdon, me, and Harriet Pilpel, a lawyer representing Harper’s. The conference had been called at my request; I felt a growing concern over Evan’s behavior. He had written an unfortunate letter to a foreign publisher who was interested in the manuscript (“At the present time there is tremendous confusion as to whether or not the book is or is not actually released by the Kennedy family….”), had given my Maine phone number to reporters, had discussed the controversy with members of the press himself, and had sent galleys to political figures who had heard that they were mentioned in the book, wanted to know what had been said about them, and demanded revisions when they found out. Don and I were grim, Cass and the lawyer propitiary, Evan subdued. Afterward I wrote Evan a confirming letter noting that we had all agreed that
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