If her position was specious, his was indefensible, even hazardous, exposing him to charges of perjury:
I categorically state that at no time did I ever give my approval or consent to the text of the manuscript, to any publication thereof, or to any time of publication; nor did I ever say or do anything from which the defendants could reasonably have believed that I did…. The fact is that no one who read the manuscript had authority to approve it on behalf of Mrs. Kennedy or me.
There were at least twenty witnesses who could testify that this simply was not so. “And we don’t need any of them,” said Mike Cowles’ general counsel, who offered to resign if he lost such an open-and-shut case. “There is just no way he can walk away from that telegram and that special delivery letter to Harper’s.” Bob knew this, of course. Her decision to sue had confounded him. It could only add—as it did—to his reputation for being ruthless. But the political risks in an open break with his sister-in-law were ever greater. He did refuse to join her as co-plaintiff, an act which suggested some courage.
The fact, obvious from the outset, was that nobody could win this suit, in PR or any other R. The judge, a good party man who had reached his position during President Kennedy’s second year in the White House, was bound to displease powerful men. Jackie would—already was—creating the very sensationalism which my project had been meant to diminish. Publications in two-score foreign countries, including the London Sunday Times, Paris Match, Italy’s Epoca, and Germany’s Der Stern, stood to lose immeasurable goodwill. And the perils threatening Mike Cowles boggled the mind. While the court was drawing up its trial calendar, Mike faced very different legal obligations to his subscribers. He was running the first excerpt from my book in the issue which would reach the newsstands January 10. It had already closed. Skipping an issue, his accountants told him, would cost between three and five million dollars. Nor did his risks stop there. All of us in the suit needed staffs of attorneys, and because the issues were momentous we had to have prestigious, which is to say expensive, legal talent. Both Jackie and Harper’s had former judges. I wasn’t important enough to attract a judge—several were approached, but none would take me as a client. Still, one I finally retained was illustrious. Afterward I calculated that my legal fees from three legal firms came to just under $100,000.
The trial was scheduled to open on Monday, January 16, 1967, with Robert F. Kennedy as the first witness. Meanwhile the real struggle continued to be waged in the press. Some old friends from the Kennedy years declared themselves to be on my side. In Los Angeles Ed Guthman told reporters, “History is never monkeyed around with in the book,” and that any hostility between the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson was explained well and “with compassion.” Ben Bradlee and Red Fay wrote me warm supportive letters. Evelyn Lincoln, who had been the President’s private secretary, wired, REST ASSURED THAT I AM IN YOUR CORNER ALL THE WAY, and Jim Swindal wrote, “Anyone who has known you, even for a short while, would be confident that you could never ‘betray a trust.’ I would testify to this any time.” The big guns on the other side were Pierre Salinger, who challenged me to a debate over the Canadian Broadcasting System; Si Rifkind (“I don’t know about literary integrity, nor the matter of history. They don’t concern me for a moment. But I believe strongly in a man keeping his word, particularly when it is in a written memorandum of understanding.”); the Reverend Dr. Donald S. Harrington of New York’s Community Church, who recommended that no one buy the book if it was published over Jackie’s objections; and Dick Goodwin.
The problem with Goodwin was that he was in Middletown. Reporters and commentators, many of them old friends, were arriving every day to solicit statements from me, but I couldn’t say anything—my lawyer told me that if I wanted my book published in the United States, I must work toward a legal settlement, which entailed avoiding the press—so they walked around the corner to Goodwin’s house, where they were always received hospitably. His unfriendly comments about me were carried in local newspapers and on local television newscasts. They contributed to the general misery of those days, as did attacks from anonymous Kennedy “spokesmen.” It occurred to me for the first time that there was something inherently unfair in the journalistic tradition of allowing celebrities to have privileged spokesmen. I wasn’t entitled to one, and so, since I was remaining silent on the advice of counsel, the public was largely unaware of my views. Yet those of Jackie, who was swimming off Antigua, and Bobby, who was skiing in Sun Valley, filled columns every day. John Seigenthaler, Frank Mankiewicz, or Pam Turnure, each a spokesperson, would brief the press, and unattributed condemnations of me would be heard on the evening’s telecast, and read in the next morning’s newspaper. As one thoughtful journalist wrote afterward, friends of the Kennedys “popped up all over the place. Many of them knew reporters and magazine writers. Many of them were reporters and magazine writers. Manchester, Look, and Harper & Row were simply outnumbered.”
***
Part of the problem, it seemed to me at the time, was that not much else was happening in the world. There were days when I prayed for some earth-shaking event which would shift the spotlight somewhere else. (Goodwin appreciated this aspect of the controversy. He asked an editor whether he had noticed how Bobby’s argument with J. Edgar Hoover over FBI wiretapping had been pushed off the front pages.) The New York Times devoted a lead editorial to an admonishment of Jackie: “History belongs to everyone, not just to participants…. having made her original decision [asking that the book be written], she cannot now escape its consequences.” The story was not only big in the United States; it was big everywhere. Chiang Kai-shek, apparently having nothing better to do, interested himself in rumors that copies of the unedited manuscript had found their way to Formosa, which had never joined the international copyright convention. The generalissimo let it be known that if the book had in fact reached Taipei, it would not be published there. In Hamburg, Henri Nannen, editor of Der Stern, announced that since any new revisions by me would be made for political reasons, he, as an old anti-Nazi, felt compelled to disregard them. Thereupon the Chairman of the Committee for Science, Culture, and Publications in the German Bundestag solemnly declared that he could find no persuasive reasons for disregarding Mrs. Kennedy’s wishes.
As in any political dispute, the principals displayed certain symptoms of paranoia. Everybody was vigilant for spies from the other side, suspicious of inquisitive acquaintances, often distrustful of old associates. One evening Mike Cowles called Evan Thomas from his office. Next morning an account of the conversation appeared in a morning newspaper. Dismayed, Mike phoned Thomas and asked if he had discussed their talk with a newspaperman. Evan, shocked at the suggestion, denied it. That convinced Mike that his office was being bugged, and he called in electronic surveillance experts to check it out. No devices were found, and the newspaper story was of no consequence. It is merely indicative of a state of mind, a mild insanity which had most of us in its grip.
The eye of the storm was Middletown. At night my home, a 176-year-old farmhouse, was bathed in floodlights, with television crews standing vigil on the sidewalk. By day, reporters interviewed my children returning from school, or questioned local citizens, one of whom proudly said of me, “He put this town on the map.” (One of the reasons I liked the town was that it wasn’t on the map.) Upstairs the householder was crouched furtively over a telephone extension, whispering to his agent; downstairs his wife, who doesn’t really go for this sort of thing, was functioning as a harassed press secretary. One afternoon she was dealing with an affable man from the New York Post, who told her that he understood I used to be a newspaperman myself, when the back door opened and in walked a Middletown cop, who disclosed that he had just been hired as a stringer for the New York Daily News.
If we weren’t using the telephone, it rang constantly. Bigart wanted me to tell my side of the story to the press and public. Roger Mudd was calling from a phone booth on the Merritt Parkway; he’d heard that I was about t
o issue a statement, and had cameramen with him. Harvard wanted me to lecture there. (Yale had stolen a march on its ancient rival when Bennett Cerf told a New Haven audience that he had seen a copy of the manuscript and predicted it would “sell a million copies if it is allowed to be published, and although the Kennedys are kicking, I think it will be.” Cerf found himself on the front page of the New York Times and in trouble with everybody’s lawyers.) King Features wanted me to write three columns a week. Attleboro, Massachusetts, where I was born and from which I had escaped at an early age, wanted to hold a “Bill Manchester Day”—schools closed, kids waving tiny American flags, me riding down Main Street in an open car.6 To elude the telephone sometimes I would slip away through the backyard and roam the town, but even there my status was changing. In the drugstore, in the barbershop, and at the filling station, I had always been “Mr. Manchester.” Now it was “Bill” everywhere. People like to be on a first-name basis with a celebrity, which was what I had temporarily become.
What was so depressing about this was that I was being celebrated, not because people had read my book—it hadn’t even been published yet—but because I was notorious, which is not the same thing as famous. During those weeks at least a dozen friends checked in with reports that at various New England parties they had met alumni of my university, each of whom had introduced himself as having been my college roommate. Like moths making for a flame, they seemed to be fleeing their own anonymity by identifying with what they conceived to be my distinction. If only they had known. I felt naked. I wanted a place to hide and didn’t have any.
New York, I thought; New York’s the place to go. Don wanted me there anyway to confer over pacificatory overtures from Jackie. I rode down in a Carey Cadillac and registered at the Elysée Hotel under the ludicrous nom de guerre of Jack O’Rourke. That evening, though I didn’t know it, CBS-TV News ran my interview with Trout. The next morning I crossed the street for a cup of coffee in the Chock Full O’Nuts shop at the corner of Madison and Fifty-fourth. A blonde sat on the next stool, put her hand on my forearm, and said, “I want you to know I’m on your side.” Where, I thought frantically, have I seen her before? The answer was, nowhere; she had seen me on the tube. Upset, I left my coffee unfinished and hurried down Madison Avenue toward my agent’s office. Three times I was stopped by people coming the other way who recognized me. In great distress now, I darted into a drugstore and bought a pair of dark glasses. I was in such a state, however, that I didn’t notice that the frames were studded with rhinestones, which, in those pre-unisex days, meant they were for a woman. Reemerging on the sidewalk, I was accosted by a homosexual.
I hadn’t really recovered from the flu when I left London, and under these new strains I began to feel wobbly again. Repeatedly each night I coughed myself awake, the coughs reaching even deeper in my chest. Back in Middletown, I promised my family a normal Christmas. That morning I awoke with a fever, which climbed all day. When it reached 104.2, my wife called our doctor, who discovered pneumonia in my lower left lung, summoned an ambulance, and sent me to Middlesex Hospital, where I was put on the critical list. After placing me under intensive care and waiting till I slept, the doctor took an elevator to the ground floor. The elevator doors opened, and he found himself looking into television cameras from NBC, CBS, and ABC. Until then his encounters with the communications industry had been confined to reporters for the Middletown Press. Now he was asked to provide the networks with a full-scale medical briefing. Among the interested members of the mass audience were a skier in Sun Valley and a swimmer in Antigua, both of whom sent me get-well messages. Later a Kennedy adviser told the New York Times, “Christ, I thought we’d killed him.”
The first member of the family to predict an out-of-town settlement was Ted Kennedy. Four days after Jackie filed suit, Ted told a television interviewer that he was “hopeful.” That same day Bob called a reporter from Idaho to say substantially the same thing. The source for their optimism was their litigious sister-in-law, who had already read the 60,000 words of the Look installments and requested the deletion of only 1,600 words. Cowles referred the decision to me, but it was an easy one. The passages were harmless, none was political, and they confirmed my suspicion that the expurgators representing her had been far freer with their blue pencils than she would have wished. Look was able to stick to its press schedule and save at least three million dollars, all of it well earned.
By December 31, when I was released from the hospital—leaving through an underground tunnel that led to the adjacent nurses’ home, thereby foiling reporters again—the only issue left was the book. To be sure, this time we were dealing, not with 60,000 words, but with 340,000—a 710-page book. And neither Cass nor Evan had stood quite as tall in the saddle as Mike. At that same time, we had a lot going for us. The book was less horrendous to Jackie than the serialization; book readers were more understanding, more discerning. Then there was the identity of the intermediary. The Look deletions had been weeded out by Dick Goodwin and Bill Attwood. Everybody on the Kennedy team liked Attwood; he had been one of them, JFK’s ambassador to Guinea. But they had even greater faith in Don Congdon, who had been straightforward with all of them since the launching of the project three years earlier. Dick wound up by asking Don to be his agent. The two of them would bargain an adjective here for an adverb there, keeping score to some extent so that afterward it would be possible to say that Jackie’s staunchness had forced a lot of alterations. (Once I substituted “vanished” for “disappeared”; that counted as a change.) In reality, a total of seven pages was cut, about one percent of the text. No one could be absolutely sure that this was not in vain until the plaintiff in the suit had finished her own reading of the manuscript. That happened in the small hours of January 16. Later I was told by a reliable informant that as she laid aside the final page she murmured one word: “Fascinating.” Then everybody went to bed.
A few hours later Justice Streit issued a judgment and decree setting forth the terms of the settlement. There had been a few amusing maneuvers in that last week. Rifkind wanted me to promise that I would never again write about the assassination. Fine, said my lawyers; that clause would read, “William Manchester will never again write about the assassination, nor could he.” At that point another lawyer flashed a sign to Rifkind, and the demand was withdrawn. Another time, Jackie insisted that neither she nor any member of the Kennedy family could be thanked in the foreword of the book for their cooperation with the author. Her attorneys, going her one better, said I couldn’t acknowledge the help of anyone. “Not even my wife?” I asked. “Not even your wife,” I was told. I dug in my heels; I was allowed to thank my wife—but no one else.
Once the papers had been signed, all the principals went into seclusion. The president of Cowles Communications had arranged for me to rent a house in Lyford Cay, near Nassau, owned by a paper company executive. It was all done secretly. Only four people knew about it, including my wife and I, who would travel under the names of “Mr. and Mrs. William Phillip Templeton.” Murray Kempton rode with us to the airport, but even Murray didn’t know where we were going. Our fourth day there I spotted a copy of the New York Daily News. The front page head was: AUTHOR IN HIDING. Expecting diversion, I opened it and read: “Author William Manchester is in seclusion in heavily guarded, exclusive Lyford Cay, a few miles from Nassau on New Providence Island, the News learned yesterday. He has been there since last Friday, and reportedly is a guest of one of the plush private homes near the Lyford Cay clubhouse.”
That was pretty good reporting. Actually we were a hundred yards from the clubhouse, which was where I had seen the News. That evening my picture occupied a full page in the Nassau newspaper, and since I saw that paper in the kitchen of the house we were renting, I realized that we owed an explanation to the woman who ran the staff. So we called her in. “I have to tell you,” I began, “that I’m not really William Phillip Templeton.” She rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, you’ll always be William P
hillip Templeton to me.” “No, really,” I insisted. “Yes, really,” she insisted right back. This went on for awhile, until both my wife and I realized that the woman knew I was Manchester, all right, but figured my companion to be Mrs. William Phillip Templeton. It seemed too rich to spoil, so we left it that way.
What wasn’t so funny was a 3 A.M. phone call to the Connecticut home of my family physician ten days later. He heard the staccato found on teletype machines; then a man came on and identified himself as a wire-service night editor. The voice said, “Are you Mr. Manchester’s doctor?” My doctor said he was. “He just died,” the voice continued. “Would you care to comment?” After a shocked pause, the physician asked, “Are you sure?” “Oh, yes,” the man said confidently. “He died in Mexico City.” “No comment,” my doctor said firmly, and hung up. He had just remembered that although I hadn’t told him exactly where I was going, I had said the Bahamas, not Mexico.
Doubtless such occurrences are not uncommon in the lives of permanent celebrities, and I suppose they learn to live with them. I could not. It seems to me that a writer should be less renowned than his books. I returned to Middletown trusting that the limelight would eventually recede. It did, but it took time. Obscurity was impossible as long as my name was on every newsstand. A few hours after Look’s first installment went on sale, 4,000 copies had been sold in Times Square alone, and twenty-four hours after United Airlines bought 1,800 copies for its planes, passengers had stolen all of them from their binders. Gallup later found that seventy million people read one of the magazines’ four excerpts; fifty-four million read all four.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 8