The Presidency: Battle of the Book

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Pivotal Interview. Manchester immediately went to work, focusing on the period of Nov. 20-25, 1963. The author of two well-received biographies (of H. L. Mencken and the Rockefeller family) and four indifferently received novels—none of which came close to bestsellerdom—he halted work on a book about Germany's vast Krupp industrial empire, set up shop in a cubicle in Washington's National Archives building. Next door was Evelyn Lincoln, J.F.K.'s White House secretary.

For as many as 15 hours a day for the next 21 months, Manchester gathered material, accumulating 45 volumes of tapes, notes and documents. From Cape Cod to Dallas, he conducted 1,000 interviews with 500 people. He spent a day in Gettysburg with Dwight Eisenhower, 31 hours over lunch with Chief Justice Earl Warren. In Dallas, he retraced on foot the route of Kennedy's motorcade. A meticulous reporter, he scoured hungrily for the small details that help illuminate the larger ones: how a flock of pigeons took wing from the roof of the Texas School Book Depository when Lee Harvey Oswald fired his first shot; how an undertaker, before driving Kennedy's body to Love Field, asked a reporter whom he should ask about payment. Manchester saw the film of the actual assassination no fewer than 75 times.

The pivotal interview was the one with Mrs. Kennedy. For more than ten hours during two days in April 1964, Manchester taped her recollections at her Georgetown home in Washington. In his foreword he wrote: "Mrs. Kennedy asked but one question before our first taping session. 'Are you just going to put down all the facts, who ate what for breakfast and all that, or are you going to put yourself in the book, too?' I replied that I didn't see how I could very well keep myself out of it. 'Good,' she said emphatically." As a friend of Jackie's told Chicago Daily Newsman Peter Lisagor, she thereupon "poured out her soul to Manchester as if he were a psychiatrist." Jackie, who was then thoroughly obsessed with the assassination, spared no details.

Though Lyndon Johnson had an inkling that Manchester was no friend and refused to see him, most of the principals spoke at length with the author—and with nobody else. When Jackie learned that Jim Bishop (The Day Lincoln Was Shot) was working on a book, she sent him a handwritten letter begging him "to please not go ahead with your intended book, The Day Kennedy Was Shot." Wrote Jackie: "I hired William Manchester to protect President Kennedy and the truth. If I decide the book should never be published, then Mr. Manchester will be reimbursed for his time. Or if I decide it should be known, I will then decide when it should be published." Said Bishop angrily: "She's trying to copyright the assassination."