William Manchester tells it like it was at Camelot-in-exile.

Controversy: And Other Essays in Journalism 1950-1975 By William Manchester Little, Brown, 404 pp., $12.95 Little did William Manchester guess what he was letting himself in for when he agreed, cheerfully enough, to write the “authorized” account of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. That book, The Death of a President, turned out to be a soapy saga of 710 pages whose worth to history probably consists more in Manchester’s prodigious research than in his sometimes prolix judgments on men and events. However, the controversy which resulted from his attempts to placate both the Kennedys and his own conscience in writing it was a kind of backstairs brawl in a displaced Camelot, invested by the press—news was dull at the time —with cosmic significance. Nearly a decade later, the controversy is largely forgotten, but it remains a fascinating story, and Manchester has retold it now in a volume of friendly and agreeable essays spanning 25 years of writing.

Manchester reveals himself as a friendly and agreeable man: that is perhaps the first thing to note in this tale of how the Kennedys, having chosen him as “their” author, came eventually to mistrust and malign him. The question arises: Why Manchester? Why a non-famous non-scholar to undertake the official Kennedy version of the days leading to and following November 22, 1963? “I think Jackie picked me,” confesses Manchester, “because she thought I would be manageable.” After all, when Manchester had written a book about the Kennedy Presidency, he had submitted the galleys to JFK in case presidential quotations needed doctoring. The Kennedys were eager to avoid flamboyance and commercialism in the writing of the assassination story, and Jackie was incensed that Jim Bishop, whose style and personality she detested, was already at work on such a book. What right had Bishop to butt in? Who had asked him? There would be one official account, only one, and it would be written by Manchester, with the family empowered by written memorandum to review and approve the manuscript.

WM

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William Murchison

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Controversy: And Other Essays in Journalism 1950-1975 By William Manchester Little, Brown, 404 pp., $12.95 Little did William Manchester guess what he was letting himself in for when he agreed, cheerfully enough, to write the “authorized” account of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. That book, The Death of a President, turned out to be a soapy saga of 710 pages whose worth to history probably consists more in Manchester’s prodigious research than in his sometimes prolix judgments on men and events. However, the controversy which resulted from his attempts to placate both the Kennedys and his own conscience in writing it was a kind of backstairs brawl in a displaced Camelot, invested by the press—news was dull at the time —with cosmic significance. Nearly a decade later, the controversy is largely forgotten, but it remains a fascinating story, and Manchester has retold it now in a volume of friendly and agreeable essays spanning 25 years of writing.

Manchester reveals himself as a friendly and agreeable man: that is perhaps the first thing to note in this tale of how the Kennedys, having chosen him as “their” author, came eventually to mistrust and malign him. The question arises: Why Manchester? Why a non-famous non-scholar to undertake the official Kennedy version of the days leading to and following November 22, 1963? “I think Jackie picked me,” confesses Manchester, “because she thought I would be manageable.” After all, when Manchester had written a book about the Kennedy Presidency, he had submitted the galleys to JFK in case presidential quotations needed doctoring. The Kennedys were eager to avoid flamboyance and commercialism in the writing of the assassination story, and Jackie was incensed that Jim Bishop, whose style and personality she detested, was already at work on such a book. What right had Bishop to butt in? Who had asked him? There would be one official account, only one, and it would be written by Manchester, with the family empowered by written memorandum to review and approve the manuscript.