My printer, Don Chenoweth, had been going for his doctorate in clinical psychology, but he went into the printing business instead. A socialist intellectual, he specialized in civil rights, pacifists, and radical periodicals and leaflets. He often disagreed with material in The Realist. I once offered him the same opportunity typesetters had during an early phase of the Cuban revolution—to state his disagreements in boldface type at the bottom of each column—but he never took me up on it. He did much of the typesetting himself, and he took the manuscript of “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book” home with him that Saturday evening.
On Sunday morning his phone call woke me up. He tried to persuade me not to publish the material, but I had already done my soul-searching, and any decision to be made at this point would have to be his. So, he insisted that I find another printer. On Sunday evening, his wife, a law student, called to ask how I would feel if Jackie Kennedy were to commit suicide as a result of what I published. On Monday morning he called and suggested that I could be charged with incitement to the assassination of Lyndon Johnson. His wife had consulted her professor of constitutional law, and he argued that even liberal Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would finally be forced to draw the line concerning freedom of the press.
Chenoweth asked me, “What do you think is the worst thing that can happen to you if you publish this?
“I don’t know. I guess I could be assassinated?”
He assured me that I would automatically go to prison for criminal libel. He urged me to consult an attorney. Martin Scheiman had committed suicide a few months previously, and I hadn’t been up to “replacing” him, but now I sought out a constitutional lawyer, Ernst Rosenberger, sent him a copy of the manuscript, asked whether he thought I should publish it, told him I would publish it regardless of what he thought, and asked if he would defend me anyway. He said yes.
But first I had to find a new printer. It wasn’t easy. One after another refused to typeset the material. Even the company that printed the Communist Daily Worker turned down the job. Bob Abel tried to convince me to publish an issue without “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” so as not to interrupt The Realist’s continuity, but I was determined to find a new printer.
I finally found one in Brooklyn and, in April, after a two-month delay, the May 1967 issue went to press, featuring “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book” as our cover story. Every issue of The Realist had a slogan, such as “The Fire Hydrant of the Underdog.” The slogan for this issue was “Irreverence is Our Only Sacred Cow.” And an editor’s note requested, “When canceling your subscription, please be sure to include your zip code.”
In 1965, I had been invited to moderate a symposium about “The Style of the Sixties” at Princeton University. On the panel were Günter Grass, Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Wolfe. I had a slight disagreement with Wolfe. He said that an artist ought not to get involved in any causes, and I said it was okay as long as responsibility to oneself and the audience wasn’t compromised in the process. As if to confuse my point, I thrust myself into a bizarre situation. Günter Grass gave his opening statement in German, and the audience applauded. Then an interpreter, Albert Harrison, translated it to English, and the audience applauded even louder.
“Thank you, Günter Grass,” I said, “and thank you, Albert Harrison, for translating Mr. Grass’s bar mitzvah speech.” The entire audience started hissing me in unison. One big, loud, long, disapproving ssssssssssss . . . Finally I said, “For two months I’ve been hearing rumors that God is dead. I’m very much relieved to see he only sprung a leak.” And the hissing stopped.
Tom Wolfe would write that I looked like “a manic troll.”
And so I was a little surprised to be invited back to the Princeton Symposium in 1967. It took place on the weekend that the issue of The Realist with “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book” was due to hit the newsstands. I found myself on a panel with Evan Thomas, editor of The Death of a President for Harper & Row.
He passed me a note: The passage you quote from Manchester was never in the manuscript. I asked how he could have seen The Realist already. He told me that their lawyers had obtained a Photostat of our galley proofs. I was in no position to complain since I had pretended to obtain a Photostat of their manuscript. I offered him a copy of the actual issue.
He grimaced and said, “No, thanks.”
That night I shared my dormitory bed with a young woman I met at the symposium. In the morning I rushed off to catch the bus back to New York. I just had to actually see that issue on the newsstands. My excitement was mounting. But first I stopped by to see Jeanne and Holly at their apartment.
When I kissed Jeanne hello, she said, “I smell pussy.”
I had been in such a hurry to leave Princeton that I didn’t even wash my face. How insulting to Jeanne. A sense of personal shame now tainted the editorial pride that I felt in publishing the Kennedy piece. On the way to my loft I stopped at a bookstore, and there it was—a pile of Realists—and people were already arguing about whether these were actual omissions from the Kennedy book.
One fellow said, “It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s true or not, because that’s really where they’re at.”
I figured that Harper & Row had no grounds to sue The Realist. Nor did Look magazine, although their legal staff had certainly discussed the possibility. “Criminal fraud,” spouted Editorial Chairman Gardner Cowles, but they didn’t sue me. It was extremely unlikely that Jackie Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson would bring suit, if only because they would have to concede that what I had published was believable.
Indeed, one of LBJ’s favorite jokes was about a popular Texas sheriff running for reelection. His opponents had been trying unsuccessfully to think of a good campaign issue to use against him. Finally one man suggested spreading “a rumor that he fucks pigs.” Another protested, “You know he doesn’t do that.” “I know,” said the first man, “but let’s make the son of a bitch deny it.”
William Manchester was probably the only one in a position to sue.
Then came a phone call: “This is Bill Manchester.”
“Yes, sir.”
“My attorneys told me not to call you, but I wanted to talk to you.”
“Well, here I am.”
“Let me ask, did you talk to any of my people?”
“Only to Evan Thomas, but that was after the fact.”
“Look, the late president meant a great deal to me.”
“I’m aware of that. We all show our loss in different ways.”
“I know you didn’t write that article. I’ve read The Realist before, and I know you’re a moral man.”
“It’s irrelevant whether I wrote it or not, because it was my decision to publish it, so the moral responsibility is mine.”
“That’s true. But what was the purpose?”
“To satirize certain things about the assassination—its aftermath, the hypocrisy, the exploitation, the cover-up, the quest for power.”
“Was it necessary to include that introduction?”
“Well, I had to establish verisimilitude. When Jonathan Swift wrote his Modest Proposal, he didn’t say, ‘Hey, folks, I’m only kidding. I don’t really mean that we can solve both the famine and overpopulation problems by eating newborn babies.’ It wouldn’t have had the same impact.”
“That’s very abstract. Look, your readers are mostly intelligent, literate people, correct?”
“I suppose so.”
“They’ll know that what you published isn’t true. But other people are going to pick up this issue and they might believe it.”
“And then what? Then what?”
“Are you working on your next issue yet? Could you mention something to the effect—I know I shouldn’t ask—”
“I really respect you. Why did your attorneys tell you not to call me?”
“I’ll find that out in ten minutes.”
“Give ’em my regards. I’m not making any actual commitmen
t, but I appreciate your man-to-man confrontation, and I really will consider—”
“I’ll be looking forward to your next issue.”
“So will I.”
In Hollywood, an attorney made several wagers with friends about the authenticity of the article. He wrote to Manchester, who replied: “The material in The Realist, as described to me by my attorneys, is pure fabrication and was never in my manuscript.” I couldn’t understand why Manchester was now implying that he hadn’t read the issue himself. I wrote a letter, reminding him of our talk.
He wrote back: “You and I never had a telephone conversation. Indeed, I believe that such a conversation would have been impossible. My telephone number is unpublished and is used for personal purposes, and until today I did not know your number. Of course, I would never have called you.”
Later on, Truman Capote told me that I had been the victim of a hoax myself. He claimed that the phone call I’d gotten, ostensibly from William Manchester, had actually been faked by Richard Goodwin, a speechwriter for Bobby Kennedy who was involved in the Harper & Row manuscript battle and had a reputation for mischief. According to Capote, Goodwin made a tape of our conversation which he supposedly replayed for Kennedy intimates at the drop of a crown. According to Goodwin, however, the call was made by an eighteen-year-old hippie.
The most significant thing about “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book” was its widespread acceptance—if only for a moment—by intelligent, literate people, from an ACLU official to a Peabody Award–winning journalist to members of the intelligence community who knew that sort of thing actually does go on.
Daniel Ellsberg told me, “Maybe it was just because I wanted to believe it so badly.”
Except for the call from “Manchester,” I never admitted to perpetrating a hoax. I insisted to those who called—and the phone rang continually with requests for verification—that they would have to decide for themselves if I had published an authentic document. One caller claimed that he could determine, by feeding the article into a computer, whether Manchester had written the portions I published.
Several individuals queried that final arbiter of truth, the Playboy Adviser. One reader “went out and bought the original Death of a President just to see if your parts would fit into the book—they did. Amazing!”
I got a call from a San Francisco radio talk show host, Joe Dolan, who asked me on the air to confirm his belief that I had published a “literary forgery.” When I refused, he went into such a rampage I could practically hear the veins on his temples pulsating.
Finally, he shouted, “Why did you publish it?”
I answered calmly, “To separate the men from the boys.”
He hung up. It was on Dolan’s show that Mark Lane told how he had been on the same London TV program on which Gore Vidal described the incident which had been deleted from the text of the Manchester book—that Jackie Kennedy, during the transfer of her husband’s body from Dallas, had moved to the rear of the plane where she saw Lyndon Johnson leaning over the casket and chuckling.
Consequently, I received a call from Ray Marcus, a critic of the Warren Commission report. He had discovered a chronological flaw in my article. How could Manchester leave something out of his book which was itself a report of something that he’d left out of his book? Marcus deduced that The Realist must have been given the excerpts by a CIA plant in order to discredit valid dissent on the assassination.
I received this letter from Gore Vidal:Dear Paul,
You remain forever my role model, but . . . I do wish you’d get that story straight. I never said a word on British TV about LBJ chuckling, etc. I did chat with Mark Lane before I went on. He was spinning theories. I recalled that someone—Goodwin?—had told me that Jackie had gone back to the presidential suite on the plane to find him, alone, chuckling. That’s it. The coffin was in the luggage compartment and anyone who got in there would have been frozen to death. Anyway, (1) I never went public with this story, but Mark Lane had me in headlines as having got it from Jackie—all untrue; (2) If it was Goodwin who told me, he is, as source, permanently tainted.
Buona fortuna,
Gore
A London scholar wrote: “The body of JFK was supposedly in a casket. Therefore, short of lifting out the corpse, an act of inverted parafellatio would be physically impossible.”
George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi party, called. “You got balls of steel,” he said. “For a Jew, you shoulda been a Nazi.”
(It reminded me of the teenage Nazi I had once published in The Realist.
“Suppose I were a Jew,” I said. “If your dreams came true, I guess you’d have me thrown into the oven too, wouldn’t you?” He pondered a minute. “No,” he replied, “I like you. I’d merely have you undergo sterilization.”)
And a note, signed William Blake, stated: “May I call to your attention a remark I made 174 years ago when I marred Heaven and Hell: ‘Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.’”
Look magazine ordered two hundred copies of that issue of The Realist, but when an employee of Harper & Row tacked it onto a bulletin board, he was suspended for four weeks without pay. An editor at Holiday magazine threatened to beat me up.
Bob Scheer, who was now managing editor of Ramparts, complained that I had destroyed faith in the veracity of The Realist so that articles like the one on CIA involvement in the murder of Malcolm X would no longer be taken seriously. But Ramparts editor Warren Hinckle sent a telegram reading, simply, brilliant dirty issue. There were several anonymous death threats, and this letter from a producer of the TV series I Spy: It was my misfortune to have read the article about the Manchester book in the May edition of The Realist, which is laughingly known as a magazine. Not only do I reject that article as pure fabrication, but I am convinced that only a diseased and perverted mind could conjure up such rubbish. I trust that someone will put an end to your sick and perverted brain and thus stop you from sowing the seeds of lies in the brains of the American public. Hopefully, another sick human being will put a bullet in your throat and end your short, unhappy life.
A close friend of Manchester’s vowed to work very hard to cost The Realist its second-class mailing privilege. A man sputtering with anger called Lee Leonard on NBC radio and swore he would make a citizen’s arrest of me. One man decided to start a petition to put The Realist out of business. I asked for one so that I could sign it too.
A lawyer complained to the local police precinct, and a lieutenant visited my office. I explained the concept of obscenity as appealing to the prurient interest of the reader. He agreed that I hadn’t violated any law—“but don’t you think editors should have some standards?”
“Well, everybody has standards,” I said, “even the Hell’s Angels.”
“What magazine do they publish?”
A plainclothes officer from another precinct also came by. His visit was the result of an anonymous letter to the mayor which had been channeled to the chief of detectives. He asked if I had any psychedelic posters. They were for his son, who had a rock-and-roll band called Orange Moose. The Realist was removed from newsstands in Cambridge, and when an attempt was made to give out free copies at a Boston love-in, police confiscated them.
The McGill Daily, an undergraduate newspaper in Montreal, asked for permission to reprint the piece. I said okay, if they wouldn’t take anything out of context, and I warned them that they’d most likely get in trouble. The reprinting turned into a catalyst for a student power struggle that made the front page of Canadian newspapers, which described me as a “professional agitator.” I was invited to speak at McGill and other campuses, and to appear on several radio and TV programs.
One interviewer asked, “Do you really condone necrophilia?”
“Oh, sure,” I answered, “but only between consenting adults.”
When Walt Disney died in December 1966, I remembered two things that he had said. One was, “I love Mickey Mouse more than any wo
man I’ve ever known.” In 1945, Aldous Huxley was a consultant on the filming of Alice in Wonderland, and there were rumors that Huxley had turned him on with magic mushrooms. A year later, Disney said, “If people would think more of fairies, they would forget the atom bomb.”
There was an urban myth that his body had been frozen, although it was actually cremated. Somehow I had expected Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and all the rest of the gang to attend the funeral, with Goofy delivering the eulogy and the Seven Dwarves serving as pallbearers.
After his death, I went to Disneyland with a couple of friends, one a lawyer whose dog jumped into the car as we were leaving his home. Dogs weren’t allowed in Disneyland. Neither were male humans who had long hair or beards, except for musicians, so the Beatles and Jesus Christ would not have been permitted to enter Disneyland unless they were performing there.
We bluffed our way in with the dog by convincing a ticket-taker that the manager had given us permission earlier on the phone inasmuch as the dog was needed to guide my friend with impaired eyesight. Inside, we continued to fake it by explaining that the dog had already been cleared by the ticket-taker, until a large man with a small walkie-talkie approached us, offering a choice of putting the dog in the Disneyland kennel or leaving altogether. My friend complained that this exception to their rule had been arranged two weeks ago, and he asked to speak to the chief of security.
“I am the chief of security.”
“Just the man I want to see.”
Of course, the canine in question was not a Seeing Eye dog, not even a German shepherd. There was no metal brace for the owner to hold onto, just a rotting, knotted leather leash. And the dog was an old bloodshot-eyed basset hound that kept stumbling all over the ground looking for a place to pee. Apparently, no dog had ever previously peed in Disneyland, not even Pluto.
We decided to leave. But we were entitled to a refund. So, while the others waited at the gate, I was escorted to a building called City Hall. Inside, a woman was requesting that her lost child be paged over the loudspeaker, but she was refused because this wasn’t considered an emergency. I asked an administrator if there had been any special ceremony when Walt Disney died.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 20