The Assassination: Truth v. Death

Like the events it describes in minute detail, William Manchester's The Death of a President has become a source of endless contention. Phase one of the controversy, the author's public clash with the Kennedy family, has given way to dispute over Manchester's accuracy on several substantive points. Last week Manchester's forthcoming $10, 710-page work came under serious challenge from a $1, 128-page paperback titled The Truth about the Assassination.

Truth was written by Charles Roberts, an able newsman who has been Newsweek's White House correspondent since 1954. Roberts was in Dallas the day of the murder and became one of the two newsmen (the other: U.P.I.'s Merriman Smith) to fly back to Washington on the plane carrying the dead President and his successor. And, unlike Manchester, who was originally commissioned by the Kennedy family, Roberts has written his account "without authorization from anyone, not as a Kennedy man or as a Johnson man, but as a reporter who covered both Presidents."

"Correct, Compassionate." Roberts and Manchester chiefly differ in describing the interplay between Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy's bereaved intimates during the hours immediately after the murder. The overwhelming impression created by Death's prepublication publicity is that Manchester condemns Johnson for needless cruelty. In the Look serialization, Manchester writes that "aspects of Johnson's behavior in a very understandable state of shock may have proven exacerbating." To this, Roberts replies that Johnson's assumption of power was "careful, correct, considerate and compassionate."

A major point of friction was the logistical and procedural snarl of returning to Washington. Manchester implies that it would have been much easier on Mrs. Kennedy if Johnson had left the presidential plane to her and the coffin and used the similar vice-presidential jet himself. Says Manchester of the two Boeing 707s: "Each carried the same equipment, both were guarded." On the contrary, says Roberts, U.S.A.F. 26000, the presidential craft, "then contained far more and better communications equipment—transmitting, receiving, coding and decoding—than any of the back-up jets."

"Inevitable Delay." Then there was the question of when to depart. Johnson wanted to be sworn in officially before takeoff. Kennedy aides wanted to leave Love Field as soon as the coffin and Mrs. Kennedy arrived. Manchester, relying on interviews conducted later, reports a tense scene between Johnson and Kenneth O'Donnell, J.F.K.'s appointments secretary, in which O'Donnell "over and over" insisted: "We've got to go, we've got to get out of here, we can't wait." But Roberts says he could detect no "atmosphere of crackling tension." Further, he quotes O'Donnell as saying later: "I realized it was an inevitable delay. So I don't believe I commented on it. I just listened to him."