(1)
William Manchester, The
Death of a President (1967)
There was
a sudden, sharp, shattering sound. Various individuals heard it
differently. Jacqueline Kennedy believed it was a motorcycle noise.
Curry was under the impression that someone had fired a railroad
torpedo. Ronald Fischer and Bob Edwards, assuming that it was a
backfire, chuckled. Most of the hunters in the motorcade - Sorrels,
Connally, Yarborough, Gonzalez, Albert Thomas - instinctively identified
it as rifle fire.
But the
White House Detail was confused. Their experience in outdoor shooting
was limited to two qualification courses a year on a range in Washington's
National Arboretum. There they heard only their own weapons, and
they were unaccustomed to the bizarre effects that are created when
small-arms fire echoes among unfamiliar structures - in this case,
the buildings of Dealey Plaza. Emory Roberts recognized Oswald's
first shot as a shot. So did Youngblood, whose alert response may
have saved Lyndon Johnson's life. They were exceptions. The men
in Halfback were bewildered. They glanced around uncertainly. Lawson,
Kellerman, Greer, Ready, and Hill all thought that a firecracker
had been exploded. The fact that this was a common reaction is no
mitigation. It was the responsibility of James J. Rowley, Chief
of the Secret Service, and Jerry Behn, Head of the White House Detail,
to see that their agents were trained to cope with precisely this
sort of emergency. They were supposed to be picked men, honed to
a matchless edge. It was comprehensible that Roy Truly should dismiss
the first shot as a cherry bomb. It was even fathomable that Patrolman
James M. Chaney, mounted on a motorcycle six feet from the Lincoln,
should think that another machine had backfired. Chaney was an ordinary
policeman, not a Presidential bodyguard. The protection of the Chief
Executive, on the other hand, was the profession of Secret Service
agents. They existed for no other reason. Apart from Clint Hill
- and perhaps Jack Ready, who started to step off the right running
board and was ordered back by Roberts - the behaviour of the
men in the follow-up car was unresponsive. Even more tragic was
the perplexity of Roy Kellerman, the ranking agent in Dallas, and
Bill Greer, who was under Kellerman's supervision. Kellerman and
Greer were in a position to take swift evasive action, and for five
terrible seconds
they were immobilized.
Hill, though
mistaken about the noise, saw Kennedy lurch forward and grab his
neck. That was enough for Clint. With his extraordinary reflexes
he leaped into Elm Street and charged forward.
(2)
Pat Eaton Robb, The
Guardian (1st June, 2004)
Manchester
and JFK became friends in 1946 while both were recovering from debilitating
war wounds. During the 1950s and the "Camelot'' years, Manchester
was a confidant and companion to Kennedy, and a frequent visitor
to the family's compound in Hyannisport, Mass.
The friendship
helped provide Manchester with material for his breakthrough book
- the 1962 ``Portrait of a President,'' the first of three he wrote
about the late president. The shattering experience of the Kennedy
assassination the following year and an exhaustive, controversial
investigation led to ``The Death of a President,'' published in
1967.
Jacqueline
Kennedy made an unsuccessful attempt to block the publication, saying
it revealed intimate family details. Manchester eventually agreed
to drop certain passages. Still, the book sold more than a million
copies.
Explaining
the Kennedy mystique in "The Death of a President,'' Manchester
wrote: "The nub of the matter was that Kennedy had met the
emotional needs of his people. His achievements had been genuine.
His dreams and his oratory had electrified a country grown stale
and listless and a world drifting helplessly toward Armageddon.''
In a 1999
New York Times interview, he said he thought so many people believed
Kennedy was killed in a conspiracy because of ``that dreadful Oliver
Stone movie'' (``JFK'') and because people felt someone as insignificant
as Lee Harvey Oswald couldn't have done such a momentous thing.
``If you
put the murder of the president of the United States at one end
of the scale, and you put that waif Oswald on the other end, it
just doesn't balance,'' he said. ``And you want to put something
on Oswald's side to make it balance. A conspiracy would do that
beautifully. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever of that.''
(3)
Richard Severo, New
York Times (2nd June)
In 1964
Mrs. Kennedy commissioned Mr. Manchester to produce an account of
the assassination. She was familiar with Mr. Manchester's work mostly
through his book "Portrait of a President: John F. Kennedy
in Profile." Published two years earlier, it was an account
of the president's first year and a half in the White House, one
that many reviewers found to be adoring. Mr. Manchester had met
and grown to admire Kennedy when both were recovering from war wounds
in Boston.
Mrs. Kennedy
promised him exclusive interviews with members of the family. The
book agreement stipulated that his manuscript would be reviewed
by Mrs. Kennedy and by the president's brother, Robert F. Kennedy,
then attorney general and soon to become a United States senator
from New York. As part of his agreement, Mr. Manchester would receive
an advance of $36,000 but only against the income from the first
printing. All other earnings would go the Kennedy Memorial Library.
"The
Death of a President" was completed in 1966, and Mr. Manchester
turned his manuscript over to his publisher, Harper & Row, and
to the Kennedy family for review.
In the interim
Mr. Manchester received an offer of more than $650,000 from Look
magazine for first serial rights; his agent had obtained an agreement
that payments for a serial would go to the author.
But Mrs.
Kennedy balked at the serialization plans, saying that they smacked
of rank commercialization, that she had not given her final approval
and that she would seek a court injunction to block publication
of the book.
Mrs. Kennedy's
decision was a bombshell in the publishing world, and for weeks
newspapers were filled with articles about her decision and speculation
about the contents of "Death of a President," which had
been eagerly awaited. Mrs. Kennedy did not say it publicly, but
it was widely believed at the time that she feared that some passages
in the book unsympathetic to Johnson might increase political tensions
between him and Robert Kennedy, endangering Robert Kennedy's political
aspirations.
In the weeks
that followed, the Kennedy family resolved whatever problems it
had with Mr. Manchester's book. Some deletions were made, trims
that Mr. Manchester said were minimal.
Harper &
Row published "Death of a President" in the spring of
1967. It became a best seller and later was given the Dag Hammarskjold
International Literary Prize. It has sold more than 1.3 million
copies in hardcover.
(4)
Adam Bernstein, Washington
Post (2nd June)
William
Manchester, 82, whose riveting books about men in military and political
life made him one of the greatest popular historians of the 20th
century, died June 1 at his home in Middletown, Conn.
His slow
death, after two strokes, brought a poignant end to one of the most
productive and scrupulous writers of best-selling tomes about outsized
modern historical figures and contemporary culture.
Fueled by
yogurt and brief naps in his office, the sinewy Mr. Manchester could
withstand 50-hour writing sessions in his heyday. In recent years,
he was grief-stricken by his inability to concentrate even on simple
television programs, much less his final, three-volume project,
a biography of Winston Churchill. He had to relinquish control of
his career-capping work.
"Language
for me came as easily as breathing for 50 years, and I can't do
it anymore," he told the New York Times in 2001. "The
feeling is indescribable."
