The book was published April 7. According to Harper’s 151st annual report, it added three million dollars to the company’s net sales for fiscal 1967. Over the next four years, Harper’s sold 558,419 copies in bookstores; the Book-of-the-Month Club sold another 812,813. To this should be added 314,000 copies from the eleven countries for which figures were available. Paperback sales, on the other hand, were disappointing. This was a consequence of the settlement, which tightly restricted the choice of the reprint house. The result was that, at this writing, no adequate cheap edition has been issued, and the full text has never reached a mass paperback audience.
Inevitably there were political repercussions at the time of publication, though they would probably have been of far less moment had there been no controversy. John Connally, who disliked my treatment of his feud with Ralph Yarborough, said the book was “filled with editorial comment, based on unfounded rumor, distortion, and inconsistency.” Governor John J. McKeithen of Louisiana said, “Kennedy is trying to destroy Johnson, and that’s what Manchester’s book is all about.” Senator John Tower of Texas called me “just another knee-jerk, ultra-liberal.” A Lou Harris poll showed that sixty-nine percent of the American public had followed the controversy. As a result of it, twenty percent of the people “thought less” of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. But Jacqueline Kennedy was a bigger loser; thirty-three percent “thought less” of her.
***
Two periodicals which exploited the controversy were The Realist and Commentary. The first told its readers that it was publishing sections which had been edited out of the book during the negotiations which led to the settlement. The passages had never been published in the book; they were invented by The Realist. Commentary published “Manchester Unexpurgated,” an article by Edward Jay Epstein, a graduate student who had attracted Dick Goodwin’s admiration with Inquest, a book challenging the findings of the Warren Commission. Epstein’s piece is a spirited defense of those who wanted to censor The Death of a President. Among other things, Epstein accused me of creating “fictitious episodes for the purpose of heightening the melodrama.” Three of these are cited.
“Manchester,” he declared, “goes so far as to invent an encounter on the [presidential] airplane between Mrs. Kennedy and the new President. She becomes ‘the first member of the presidential party to discover that Air Force One had a new commander’ when she opens her bedroom door in the plane and sees Lyndon Johnson ‘sprawled’ across her husband’s bed.” Epstein commented: “That this episode is fiction we know from virtually all the other evidence…. Mrs. Kennedy did not first encounter Johnson in her bedroom.” Well, the fact is that she did. The incident was described to me by Jackie during a taping session on May 4, 1964; by Marie Fehmer, Johnson’s personal secretary, who was present in the aircraft’s bedroom at the time, in an interview on November 6, 1964; and by Sergeant Joseph Ayres, an Air Force One steward who was standing in the corridor just outside the compartment, in an interview on September 6, 1964.
Epstein then raised the subject of Maude Shaw, nurse to the Kennedy children, telling Caroline of her father’s death. Some readers found this scene too painful to be borne. Painful it certainly was, but others, Ed Guthman among them, felt that it was of historical importance, and Jackie was persuaded that this was so. Epstein, however, declared that editors tried to remove the incident because it was “tasteless” and, moreover, “appeared to be spurious.” Questions of taste are individualistic and cannot be settled either way. Spuriousness is something else again. Either an account is true or false. This one is demonstrably true, having been based on interviews with Miss Shaw on April 24, 1964 and May 18, 1964, and with Janet Auchincloss, Caroline’s grandmother, on May 21, 1964.
In a final footnote, Epstein charged that I misrepresented J. Edgar Hoover’s demeanor toward Robert F. Kennedy after the assassination as “sphinxlike.” (Epstein really said toward “the Kennedy family,” but here, as elsewhere, he misquoted me.) My sources for the FBI director’s conduct were a taping with Bob on May 14, 1964, and interviews with Ethel Kennedy on April 17, 1964, with Guthman on May 3, 1964, with Angela Novello on May 15, 1964, and with J. Edgar Hoover on June 4, 1964.
At one place Epstein wrote of “other such incidents” for which he was “able to find no actual evidence.” That, of course, was the whole point of The Death of a President. Neither he nor anyone else could find all the evidence I did because they weren’t in the field when I was, researching the event in the months which immediately followed it. Authorized history may be a poor idea, and certainly my experience cannot be considered a testimonial for it, but the project did have one great advantage. It permitted a trained researcher to assemble historical data when it was available—when participants were alive and, equally important, when their memories were fresh. President Eisenhower, no admirer of the Kennedys, told me in the summer after the assassination, “Something like this should have been done after Lincoln’s death. Then we’d have it now.” My tapes and transcribed notes constitute a permanent record of the Dallas tragedy. Their intrinsic value remains, whatever judgment future scholarship forms about the book I wrote based on them—although, as the Epstein case demonstrates, they can be used to support every statement of fact in the book.
***
Some of the principals in the controversy—e.g., Goodwin and Seigenthaler—I never saw again. Others, such as Guthman, Marshall, Salinger, Schlesinger, and Sorensen, were encountered in the natural course of events, and some correspondence with still others was inevitable. It was also cordial. I remembered the strife of 1966–67 with sorrow, but without bitterness. Even as I mourned the declining fortunes and eventual demise of Look, I rejoiced when Evan Thomas, leaving Harper’s, flourished in a new editorial position elsewhere.
Amicable relations with Bob Kennedy were quickly restored, and in the spring of 1968, after he had announced for the Presidency, I was campaigning for him. Late in that season Harper’s sent a check for $750,000, representing the first year’s profits on The Death of a President, to the Kennedy Library in Boston. When Jackie learned about it, she phoned me, wrote me a profoundly moving letter, and, on June 21, issued a gracious statement to the New York Times: “I think it is so beautiful what Mr. Manchester did. I am glad that Senator Kennedy knew about it before he died. All the pain of the book and now this noble gesture, of such generosity, makes the circle come around and close with healing.”
No acknowledgment arrived from the library. A year and a half passed. Out of curiosity I wrote to Boston, asking how much had been received from the sales of my book. Eventually this reply reached me:
JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY LIBRARY
Incorporated
Reply to:
260 Tremont Street Boston, Mass. 02116
February 9, 1970
Mr. William Manchester
Center for Advanced Studies
Wesleyan University
Middletown, Connecticut 06457
Dear Mr. Manchester:
In reply to your letter of February 2nd, please be advised that the Library has received the following revenue from the sale of THE DEATH OF A PRESIDENT:
S/m
That was over five years ago. I have not heard from the library since.
Mid Campfires Gleaming
“War, which was cruel and glorious, had become cruel and sordid,” wrote Winston Churchill after the Armistice in 1918. Even so, war continued for another generation to be, in the famous Clausewitzian definition, “a political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means.” As late as 1945 it was possible for one man, with one rifle, to make a difference, however infinitesimal, in the struggle against fascism.
The Bomb rendered Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege obsolete. In that millionth of a second over Los Alamos thirty years ago superpower warriors were forever emasculated, and the central fact about world history in the three decades since then is that statesmen have been trying, without much success, to
come to terms with that frustration.
These pages are largely concerned with war as it was. They are not meant to glorify combat, but I shall always believe that courage under fire is a virtue, and that most of the survivors emerge strengthened. A very close encounter with death alters a man. It needn’t come on a battlefield. Once I spent an evening discussing this with Walter Reuther, who had been gunned down in his own kitchen. We discovered that in the most important sense our experiences had been identical. Death had invested our lives with new meaning. Each day thereafter was a gift to be cherished and, above all, to be justified. If we were to deserve the years ahead, we had to earn them, deed by deed in his case, page by page in mine.
It would be good if the whole race had been thus transformed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unfortunately, the weakness of individuals for generalizing from the specific is not matched by a capacity for specification from the general. We cannot yet grasp the fact that the bell which tolled for 150,000 Japanese in the high summer of 1945 also tolled, not only for us, but for the whole concept of the autonomous nation-state, without which patriotism is meaningless. It was Toynbee who said that nationalism had become “a sour ferment” in “the old bottles of tribalism.” He meant, among other things, the star-spangled mythology. And whether we like it or not, he was right.
But that wasn’t always true. The wine wasn’t always sour. Once loyalty to the flag was a constructive force; once phrases like “conspicuous gallantry” and “extraordinary heroism” had meaning. To argue otherwise would be chronological snobbery, the assumption that change always brings progress, and that the present is in every way an improvement over the past. It’s not. The devotion inspired by the drums of yesterday deserves respect. One can only add that the highest tribute we can pay to those who marched to their beat is to make sure they never roll again.
The Spanish-American War
In the last, lilac-scented hours of April, 1898, Theodore Roosevelt prepared to resign as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and join the Army. As a Harvard graduate he was entitled to a commission, and since he was also something of a dude, he wired Brooks Brothers for a “blue lieutenant colonel’s uniform without yellow on the collar and with leggings.”
Teddy felt bully. He was convinced that “this country needs a war,” and he had been trying fervently to start one—first with Britain, over Venezuela, and more recently with Spain for Cuban independence. Last month he had despaired. The President had “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair,” he had growled, working off his rage by kicking a football back and forth on a vacant Washington lot. Now all that was past. A joint session of Congress, exuberantly singing, “We’ll hang Butcher Weyler to a sour-apple tree,” had just hoisted our battle standard. America was at war with Spain.
Why? It was unpatriotic to ask. Mute testimony to Spanish treachery lay in a glass outside T.R.’s office—a model of a sleek, white U.S. armored cruiser, her ensign at half mast. At 9:40 on the evening of February fifteenth the ship itself had blown up in Havana Harbor, killing 260 bluejackets. American naval officers hadn’t been at fault; it must have been a mine. The eagle screamed for vengeance. “Nation Thrills with War Fever,” cried William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. “Everywhere over this good, fair land,” William Allen White later wrote, “flags were flying.” The Klondike gold rush was forgotten, and songs, gewgaws, buttons, banners—even candy drops—carried the couplet of the hour: “Remember the Maine! The hell with Spain!”
Few inquired what the Maine had been doing off Havana, although it was pertinent. Officially the ship had been making a courtesy call. In reality its visit had been the sequel to the latest in a long series of incidents over Spanish colonial policy in Cuba. For a generation the island had been torn by rebellion. Like Fidel Castro, the insurrectos had holed up in the rugged mountains, creeping down at night to burn cane fields or collect protection money from American owners. Other Americans in New York had freely contributed funds to the insurgents, and cargoes of arms had been smuggled in from Florida. Spanish reinforcements had been ferried across the Atlantic. Cuba was dotted with blockhouses. They weren’t enough; and in 1896 Captain General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau had taken the desperate measure of herding the sullen population into concentration camps. That hadn’t worked either; the only consequences had been famine, disease and rising American indignation.
Americans were mad because they were reading the details every day. The Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s World had assigned teams of reporters to write incendiary stories, and when the truth paled they invented atrocities. Some of their accounts make grisly reading today. Dispatches described dons playing soccer with hacked-off Cuban heads, and giving their children the severed ears for toys. The cumulative impression was of a new Inquisition conducted by rapists and sadists, by “leering Latins” with “the thirst for blood inherent in the bull-fighting citizens of Spain.” Something must be done, the jingo press insisted. If Washington wouldn’t act, they would. One Journal correspondent actually broke into a Spanish jail, disguised a beautiful political prisoner as a boy, and slipped her back to New York. The country shook with cheers. The governor of Missouri suggested that the paper send five hundred reporters to set all Cuba free, and when Hearst entertained the girl at Delmonico’s 120,000 people stood outside and huzzaed.
In those days New Yorkers did things like that. Much has been made of Hearst’s boast that it cost him three million dollars to start the Spanish-American War; the popular assumption is that newspapers were responsible for the whole thing. They had a hand in it, but the deeper truth is that they reflected the mood of the era. It was another world, that U.S.A. of the 1890s—the heyday of the cigar-store Indian and the barbershop quartet, when men wore high-laced shoes and derbies, and women wore whalebone corsets, and no lady crossed her legs in public.
America was as sophisticated as peppermint. The popular songs of 1898 suggest its sentimentality: “On the Banks of the Wabash,” “Little Annie Rooney,” “Bill Bailey,” “The Old Gray Mare,” Paul Dresser’s weepy “Take Me Back to New York Town if I’m Going to Die,” and the top tune of the year, “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Grown men pondered the clotted piety of such tracts as Little Susie’s Prayer. It was a time of innocence, or artlessness, of vigilant morality; and the yellow press sent knights-errant south because the public wanted a crusade.
Not all Americans were crusaders. TR wasn’t one. In those days he was a bristling militarist, a member of an imperialist clique whose other leaders included Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay, Whitelaw Reid, and Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. When the Washington Post wrote that “the taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people,” it was talking about these people; and the shrewdest and most energetic was the young assistant secretary with the beribboned pince-nez and the fanglike teeth. Teddy was interested in more than one Spanish colony. He was keenly aware that another insurrection was blazing six thousand miles away in the Philippine archipelago. He had quietly arranged the appointment of Commodore George Dewey, a fellow imperialist, as commander of the U.S. Asiatic Squadron, and without consulting his superior he had cabled Dewey to keep full of coal, watch the Spaniards, and, at the first stroke of war, to pounce on the Philippines.
Most of his countrymen, however, weren’t interested in a land grab. They merely wanted to help bleeding Cuba. The average American, like Mr. Dooley, didn’t know whether the Philippines were “islands or canned goods.” Even President McKinley confessed that after the Battle of Manila Bay he had to look them up on the globe.
The President was guileless, sincere and something of a stuffed shirt. He was also sensitive to public opinion; in July 1897, he had taken the first official step toward war by warning Madrid that he would intervene if Weyler weren’t curbed. Spain’s premier was contemptuous, but next month he was dead, and his assassination brought to power a liberal government which sacked the butcher and granted Cuban autonomy. Then, just as the sky was brightening, the Spanish ambass
ador to Washington wrote a vicious attack on McKinley. It was in a private letter, but a rebel spy stole it, and Hearst printed it. Old Glory snapped angrily in the rising wind.
Meanwhile, loyalists in Havana had rioted against home rule. America’s jittery consul asked for protection, and the Maine arrived. The mysterious blast which followed deafened the country. Madrid’s frantic offers to meet every demand weren’t even heard, and on April 25, 1898, the President signed the declaration of war.
He signed it in his bedroom, wearing a dressing gown. It was a fitting touch. America had been speaking loudly and carrying a frail stick. The War Department was hopelessly incompetent, and the hostilities had scarcely begun before its bungling produced a fiasco. Supplies were hurriedly dispatched to Florida, but since no one knew anything about logistics, a jam of 1000 boxcars crammed every siding from Tampa to Columbia, S.C. Vital shipments were buried in warehouses throughout the war; a two-hundred-bed hospital was lost for weeks. Frequently the equipment which seeped through was inadequate. Shoes fell apart on the first march, ponchos in the first rain. Rations were spoiled. Most extraordinary, troops were packed off to sweltering Cuba in heavy flannel uniforms and lined overcoats. Khaki, hastily ordered, wasn’t ready until the onset of winter, and then it was issued to troops in the United States.
***
The supply snafus turned into a great scandal. Several careers were ruined, although the era itself was again mostly to blame. The McKinley years were the high noon of unbridled capitalism. Never has enterprise been freer than in the ’90s. Army equipage was often inferior because contractors were unscrupulous or, in the case of rations, because the packing industry was unregulated. The Tampa embarkation docks were rented from a promoter, who paralyzed troop loading by admitting hordes of sightseers. Troop transports couldn’t be required to observe convoy discipline because they were all chartered, and plans to invade Puerto Rico had to be revised because it had been discovered that privately owned cable companies were permitting orders to fall into enemy hands.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 9