Newspapermen contacting Harper’s… are to be told that the author will have no statements to make on this subject until the book is published. No copies of manuscripts of the book and no sets of galleys will be sent to anyone outside Harper’s without written approval from the author. Any questions about first serial rights or foreign publication should be referred to the author’s agent without comment.
Wednesday morning Goodwin and I breakfasted at New York’s Stanhope Hotel and went over ground rules for the coming meeting on the Cape. During our Friday phone conversation Jackie had agreed that there would be no lawyers present, no other Kennedys, and, above all, “no emotionalism.” Dick assured me that she was determined to be reasonable. But I wanted something more to come out of the trip, nothing less than an end, or the promise of an end, to the whole imbroglio. It would be pointless, I said, to spend a pleasant day together if we resolved nothing. We needed an answer which would be acceptable to everyone, and I believed I knew a way to find one. What bothered Jackie, as far as I could tell then, was the tremendous wave of publicity which would accompany the appearance on the newsstands of each issue in Look’s serialization. Mike Cowles having reduced the number of excerpts to four, he was adamantly opposed to any further shrinkage. However, there was a chance that I might be able to persuade him to run two of the installments after the book had been published, when they would lack any news value. Look would thereby lose its exclusivity for those two, and the serialization would be worth less to Mike, but I was prepared to take a substantial cut in the price he was paying me.
Dick was enthusiastic. At the very least, he said, it would be a basis for negotiation. After the events of the past month I was more skeptical. As we rode to La Guardia I had a pleasant sense of anticipation—my relationship with Jackie had always been excellent—but I cautioned Dick that we had to come back with something, that the proposal of no serialization whatever would be unacceptable to Look and could not, therefore, be a starting point for any productive discussion. It is my recollection that he agreed.
The Caroline carried us to Hyannis. It was to be my last ride on that lovely plane, and the weather was heavily handsome, as September days on the Cape can be. Jackie was waving to us as we came down the ramp. I remember that she was wearing sunglasses and a green miniskirt; she looked stunning. In the compound we drank iced tea on the porch of President Kennedy’s house. Then Dick strolled off in the direction of Squaw Island and Jackie and I changed to bathing suits. I sat on the back of a towing boat with young John on my lap while she waterskied behind—Jackie at her most acrobatic, at one point holding the tow rope with one foot and zipping along with the other foot on a single ski. After she had tired of this, I dove in, and the two of us struck out for shore. Wearing flippers, she rapidly left me far behind. Wallowing and out of breath, I momentarily wondered whether I would make it. I remember thinking: What if I drowned? Would that be good for the book or bad for the book?
Back on the porch, with the three of us seated at a luncheon table in dry clothes, I slowly realized that nothing good for the book could possibly come out of this meeting. The atmosphere was completely unrealistic. My breakfast proposal was never presented because coherent discussion was impossible. Jackie was hostile toward Look, bitter about Cowles, and scornful of all books on President Kennedy, including Schlesinger’s. Repeatedly she expressed affection for Goodwin and me, saying “It’s us against them,” and, to me, “Your whole life proves you to be a man of honor.” She was going to fight, she said savagely, and she was going to win: “Anybody who is against me will look like a rat unless I run off with Eddie Fisher.”
Friday she had promised that there would be no emotionalism, but whenever Dick or I tried to review the facts we were answered by tears, grimaces, and whispery cries of “Jesus Christ!” She digressed into a long, rambling account of the President’s monument in Arlington and her anguish over the fact that public awareness of the tragedy seemed undiminished. Once she said to me, “I’ll say that your foreword as it appeared in the Times is a lie, because I’ll read every word of the book. Everybody’s telling me not to read it. I’m a lot tougher than they think.” I forebode pointing out that the foreword had not mentioned the fact that she had not read the book. In her present mood, it was clear, any open disagreement with her would have purposelessly ruptured the thin membrane of civility.
Twice she fled into the house to compose herself, and returned drying her eyes with Kleenex. Early in the discussion Goodwin had attempted an objective discussion of background events, but he abandoned it: these disappearances were unnerving for both him and me. During the first of them he and I silently rolled our eyes at each other. During the second I said, “I don’t know what to do.” He said, “I don’t either. I hadn’t counted on this irrationalism.” After her second reappearance it was obvious that the outbursts had affected him. To Jackie’s delight, he abruptly declared that in his opinion there was no approved version of the manuscript, that Bobby’s telegram granting approval had been misunderstood, and that if I pointed this out to Cowles, he would have to withdraw, because his case would be too weak. If Cowles persisted in publishing, he said, I should seek an injunction. Cowles would have to sue me, and I would be backed by Jackie. She clapped her hands together elatedly and said again, “It’s us against them!”
I despaired, and my despair deepened when Jackie said that she eagerly looked forward to early publication of the book by Harper’s and was delighted that it had been designated a major selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. As gently as possible I pointed to what seemed to be a basic inconsistency. How could the manuscript be approved for Harper’s but unapproved for Look? The circumstances were entirely different, Goodwin said. Look published journalism; Harper’s, literature. I was no lawyer, but this seemed to me to be an extraordinarily tenuous legal position. It would put me, I said, in an impossible position. I had reached a contractual agreement with Look based on a written authorization from Robert F. Kennedy, acting on behalf of the Kennedy family. Dick shook his head. I had no obligation to Cowles, he said: “Look has no feelings. They are only interested in selling magazines. Of course, I would do the same if I were a magazine editor.”
At that point I decided that I had to leave. Northeast flight 772 was departing from Hyannis in twenty minutes; I asked them to drive me to the airport. Dick stayed at the wheel while Jackie accompanied me into the terminal. To my dismay I saw that at least twenty people were waiting at the airline counter, but I had forgotten who my companion was; she walked straight to the head of the line, where the clerk dropped everything else to sell me a seat. At the gate she embraced me warmly. I felt like Judas. I knew that eventually she would come to think of me that way, too. But I had to do what I had to do.
In New York the following morning I formally requested a meeting with Mike Cowles. Good faith required this; Jackie had made a proposal, and however absurd it seemed to me, I felt I owed it to her to lay it before him without comment. The publisher and his lawyer received Don Congdon and me in Look’s offices at 488 Madison Avenue. I transmitted her request that Mike not run any installments. He reaffirmed his decision to go ahead, saying, “We’ll stand pat.” Then, in the flattest possible voice, I raised the possibility that I might ask a court to issue an injunction against magazine serialization. Mike held a brief, whispered conference with his attorney and then turned back to me. If that should happen, he said, he would file suit against me for “at least several hundred thousand dollars.” Don volunteered that he felt such a suit would be justifiable, and we left.
Heartrending as it had been, that day of anguish on the Cape provided the controversy with a sequel of comic relief. On our way to the airport I had explained that under my contract with Look I would have five days, upon receipt of the galleys for each installment, to alter it. Even then Jackie must have sensed that her battle against serialization might be doomed, because she asked me if—if—Cowles wouldn’t knuckle under, would I consider suggesti
ons from Goodwin during those five days? I agreed, and my first act, once I was back in Middletown, was to request two sets of galleys for the Look installments, one for me and one for Dick.
What made this entertaining was his response, or lack of it. In Hyannisport her tears had dissolved his resolve, but in the early days of his brokerage he obviously wanted nothing to do with bowdlerizing history, and so, during each five-day period, he simply absconded. This was no small feat. Disappearing in a small college town is impossible, and since I knew his wife, Sandra, his secretaries, Barbara Satton and Tania Senff, and most of his friends, his vanishing acts required considerable ingenuity. But they were successful. He couldn’t be located in Connecticut, on the Vineyard, in the Stanhope, or the Plaza, or in Washington. Sandra said she was mystified; if I turned him up, she would be appreciative if I let her know where. Like Evan, Dick was now tergiversating. It was frustrating for me, but I appreciated his dilemma. In a way I was grateful; as a consequence of it, I was doing everything possible to accommodate Jackie’s wishes without, at the same time, being compelled to reject impossible demands outright.
Twice in September I was out of town during the day, conferring with Harriet Pilpel over the possibilities of libel in certain passages of the manuscript, but I was never away overnight, and I tried repeatedly to educe what new suggestions, if any, Dick had for possible improvement of my text. As each batch of galleys arrived from Look, I would carry the duplicate set to his office and leave it there with a covering note. The first two installments reached Middletown together. He returned them to me after more than a week had passed. His recommendations were inconsequential, affecting 568 words, but that didn’t matter; they were too late. On October 7, after the third installment had come to Middletown and been returned, Mike Land, Look’s book editor, wrote me: “As you know, Bill, under our contract you were required to submit any changes within five days after you received the galleys. We note that Mr. Goodwin’s comments on part one and part two reached us ten days after the galleys were submitted, and part three reached us twelve days after submission.”
Part three had brought a sharp change. Requests for token cuts were now a thing of the past; this time I was being asked to delete 2,737 words, and when the proofs of the fourth installment were returned to me—late, like all the others—there were demands for the removal of 3,177 words. By now Goodwin was back in town, and he explained what had happened. With Goodwin’s set of the Look galleys before them, Bobby and his political advisers had held a series of strategy sessions in his New York apartment on September 30, culminating in a dinner at Twenty-One. Jackie’s intervention had given them a fresh chance to ponder the probable impact of the serialization, and a majority of them decided that Evan Thomas had a point, that some passages in the book might be used against Bob if he should run, as they all assumed he eventually would, for national office. There was the description of Johnson as a man diminished by the limitations of the Vice Presidency, there were the references to discord between LBJ and RFK, and there was the portrayal of right-wing extremists in Dallas on the eve of the assassination, a characterization which might one day lose Texas votes for Kennedy. Later Corry of the Times wrote: “the Senator and his advisers allowed practical politics to determine what the historical record would show. They did not raise the question of truth or falsity…. They wanted a truly authorized history, perhaps not an inaccurate one, but one that just omitted part of the history. Perhaps the advisers were being overzealous. Perhaps they were only capricious, but certainly they were wrong.”
Nonetheless, that was the line they had decided to take. Knowing that word of their meeting would inevitably reach the press, they leaked it themselves in a fashion meant to help their man. Since Bigart’s August stories, the book had become front-page news. Lyndon Johnson was bound to be interested in the details. If the President became convinced that I had treated him shabbily, and that Bobby was doing everything in his power to make me temper my criticism, Bob’s stock might rise in the LBJ White House. Such was the reasoning, and such is the explanation for the accounts, widely circulated that autumn, that I had savaged the President in my manuscript. Four months before The Death of a President was published, Time was reporting that it “paints, in fact, an almost unrelieved portrait of Johnson as an unfeeling and boorish man”—that it was “seriously flawed by the fact that its partisan portrayal of Lyndon Johnson is so hostile that it almost demeans the office itself.” When the book finally appeared, Time’s reviewer recalled that “During the height of his battle with the Kennedys, it was said that Manchester had depicted Lyndon Johnson as a kind of Snopesian boor in the hours immediately after the assassination. LBJ’s portrait in the book is not all that uncomplimentary.” (Corry commented: “Indeed it was not; it never was. Time had been getting its information from the wrong people.”)
Ironically, the tactics of Bobby’s advisers backfired. William S. White, the syndicated columnist who was a close friend of LBJ’s, wrote during the prepublication uproar that since everyone knew that the book was going to “gut Johnson,” and since the Kennedys had authorized it, the attacks could have been inspired only by the Kennedys. The delay in releasing the book, which was a consequence of the controversy, merely fueled such rumors. By the time it was in the bookstores and able to speak for itself, the LBJ-RFK relationship, never warm, was chillier than ever.
The big decision reached at Twenty-One, and relayed to me by Goodwin, was not to sue. The unanimous feeling was that Bobby could not be put in the position of attempting to suppress a book, and the thought of Jackie appearing in a witness box was intolerable. Besides, Look might still be persuaded to yield on changes. Nobody was worried about the book. They were confident that they could handle Harper’s. Evan was their man, and Cass Canfield, Evan’s very gray eminence, moved in Jackie’s social circle. His son Michael had been married to Jackie’s sister Lee, and though the marriage had ended in divorce, Cass had retained his ties to the Kennedys.
All this time I had assumed that Harper’s production schedule was rolling ahead, and that the integrity of the book manuscript was safe. Nevertheless there were continuing sources of friction between Evan and me. Despite our agreement in the Harper’s boardroom he could not bring himself to turn away reporters who came to him. Jimmy Breslin of the World-Journal Tribune appeared in Evan’s outer office with a list of questions about friction between me and the Kennedys. Evan welcomed him. When the story appeared and my agent demanded an explanation, Evan replied, “When Jimmy Breslin shows up in your office, you don’t just tell him to go away, rather you do the best you can to say as little as possible, as politely as possible, blaming no one for anything.”
Relations between Evan and me had now deteriorated to such a point that he proposed differences between us be adjudicated by a third party. He nominated Ed Guthman. It seemed to me that a referee would serve no purpose. The book was finished; Harper’s had only to publish it. Had a mediator been necessary, however, Ed would have made an admirable choice. With the exception of Seigenthaler, no man inspired greater confidence in Bobby, and from the perspective of Los Angeles he saw clearly what was happening. He wrote me:
I can understand your feelings very vividly, and at the same time sympathize with Jackie and Bob. This is a difficult and emotional subject for all of you, and they must come to understand the depth of emotion which you have experienced and endured in these past two and a half years, just as you must allow for behavior, which, as you put it, has been something less than the consideration which President Kennedy showed you…. All three of you have some strong characteristics in common—integrity and sensitivity, particularly. Your integrity and pride have been wounded, probably unnecessarily.
Ed concluded: “As we have already seen, a good-sized effort is going to be made to discredit the book, and the best way that it can be blocked is by the book and the articles speaking for themselves in their own eloquence and accuracy.” That was my wish, too, but the controversy had by no
w acquired a life of its own, and all of us seemed powerless to stifle it. Resignedly I accepted the next development—another encounter with Bobby. On the morning of Monday, October 10, Dick Goodwin and I boarded Allegheny Airlines flight 800, from Hartford to Washington, rented an Avis car at Washington National Airport, and drove to 4700 Chain Bridge Road in McLean, Virginia, where, behind an outsize rural post box, stood the lovely old mansion known as Hickory Hill.
***
The meeting was conceived as a reconciliation, to erase memories of the summer firestorm in Bobby’s office. After the political meeting in Twenty-One, Bob had told Goodwin that he felt contrite about the August scene in his office. He wanted to restore our relationship to an amicable basis. The ostensible reason for the truce was to be a conference on speech writing—I had done a little of that during his 1964 senatorial campaign in New York; now he was contemplating a major address on academic freedom, and wanted me to draft it—but for the most part the occasion was to be a social one. Under no circumstances, Dick told me in relaying the invitation, would we so much as mention The Death of a President. That was, of course, an impossible promise. We could no more have avoided the book than Moses, descending Mount Sinai with his set of tablets, could have evaded a discussion of that other approved manuscript.
Ethel welcomed us and excused herself, and the three of us walked down to the pool. The weather being unseasonably warm, Bobby decided to take a dip. Dick and I sat by the poolside, he smoking a cigar and I taking notes while our wiry host splashed and talked. Whenever an awkward question was raised, he had a disconcerting way of submerging; moments later he would reappear on the far side, blowing out his cheeks and, when he had recovered his wind, changing the subject. But that didn’t happen often. Most of the time, both in the pool and sitting with us afterward over Bloody Marys, he was dignified, low-keyed, and thoughtful—the Bobby the public rarely saw, the one his friends cherished and his family knew best.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 5