The Presidency: Battle of the Book

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At Parkland Hospital, she tried to enter her husband's room, but was blocked by a nurse until a doctor appeared and told the nurse to let her in. Through the day, Jackie refused to change from her blood-spattered clothes so that, as Manchester quotes her, "they can see what they've done." Another section that disturbed Jackie was Manchester's account of her feeling of emptiness and despair when she went to bed at the White House on the night of the assassination. In helpless, futile anguish, she tore at the pillow that night.

Jackie wanted at least three other things deleted from the manuscript. One is an emotionally charged account of how the children, Caroline, then 5, and John, 2, learned of their father's death. Another was a letter that she had placed in her dead husband's casket before it was sealed. A third was a series of letters she had written, often in conjunction with her daughter Caroline, to Jack; she was particularly upset at the inclusion of a letter that she had sent him from Greece the month before his death.

Adoring Tribute. The roots of the current controversy were put down in the weeks just after Nov. 22, 1963. Besieged by requests for interviews, the Kennedys decided that, as a close friend says, "we had to choose a writer who would be given exclusivity—then Mrs. Kennedy would have to go through the painful process only once."

The family approached two authors —Theodore H. White (The Making of a President) and Walter Lord (Day of Infamy). Both declined, mostly because the Kennedys were asking for final-review rights of the book. Someone recalled that Jack Kennedy had spoken favorably of Manchester, whose 1962 Portrait of a President was a glowing—one reviewer called it "adoring"—tribute to J.F.K. Manchester, 44, an exMarine, agreed to the conditions laid down by the Kennedys.

On March 26, 1964, he and Bobby Kennedy signed the eleven-point "Memorandum of Understanding." The key paragraph said that "the completed manuscript shall be reviewed by Mrs. John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, and the text shall not be published unless and until approved by them." Another said that "the book may not be published before Nov. 22, 1968," unless the family agreed. A third ruled that "no motion picture or TV adaptation shall ever be made based on the book," and gave the Kennedys the right of approval over sale of other rights—including magazine serialization.

Harper & Row, something of a Kennedy "house," was chosen to be the publisher. Harper Executive Vice President Evan W. Thomas II, son of quadrennial Socialist Presidential Candidate Norman Thomas, had edited Jack Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, Bobby's The Enemy Within, ex-Presidential Speechwriter Theodore Sorensen's Kennedy. Thomas foresaw trouble, at first declined the offer to edit and publish the book. But Bobby finally persuaded him. All profits after the first printing were to go to the John F. Kennedy Library at Harvard. Manchester got an advance of less than $50,000 for expenses from Harper, and there was a vague understanding that he might make $150,000 from the book.