Battle of the Book

(7 of 9)

Mail Now. In a final effort to reach agreement, Goodwin sent Look and Harper a memorandum indicating ten personal passages about Jackie that the Kennedys were anxious to delete; at that point, they were not even attempting to change the book's tone toward Johnson, despite their alarm at it. Two Harper executives flew to London, where Manchester was working on his interrupted Krupp book, to discuss the changes. Later they said that some changes had been made, but refused to show the galleys to the Kennedys. Look also refused to show them its galleys. Jackie finally decided to sue. Bobby would have preferred avoiding a court case, but once Jackie made up her mind, he went along with her.

Her first step was to notify Look and Harper—which had never expected her to go to such lengths—that she intended to take court action to stop publication. That threw both companies into turmoil—not to mention the London Sunday Times, Paris Match, West Germany's Der Stern and Italy's Epoca, which had paid Look nearly $300,000 for European rights and had launched promotion campaigns. Look similarly was flooding the mail with warnings that "the only way you can be certain of reading every installment is to mail your introductory Look subscription now." Moreover, eight pages of the first installment were already being run off in Chicago for Look's Jan. 24 issue, due on newsstands Jan. 10. "It would cost a lot of money to stop it now," groaned Cowles Editor in Chief William Attwood, who had been Jack Kennedy's ambassador to Guinea and Kenya. "I don't see any way it can be stopped."

Five Remedies. Jackie did. The woman who had enchanted Manchester with her "camellia beauty," as he once described it, now showed a broad vein of Carborundum beneath it. Calling newsmen to her Park Avenue office, she did not show up herself, but sent over a statement composed by Ted Sorensen, who wrote her husband's most memorable speeches. The book, it said, "is in part both tasteless and distorted." It was replete with "inaccurate and unfair references to other individuals"—obviously, Johnson—"in contrast with its generous references to all members of the Kennedy family." Most important, to expose "all the private grief, personal thoughts and painful reactions which my children and I endured in those terrible days does not seem to me to be essential to any current historical record." Jackie's statement concluded: "As horrible as a trial will be, it now seems clear that my only redress is to ask the courts to enforce my rights and postpone publication until the minimum limits of my family's privacy can be protected."