On the face of it, this was not only reasonable; it was a moving appeal which anyone would have been callous indeed to ignore. I suggested that Peter and I go over the galleys and then meet Cass and Evan that afternoon in my room at the Connaught. They departed in a swish of raincoats; it was nasty as only a raw day in London can be. Alone in Pepys’ old plank-floored study, we set to work studying the key proofs. It was then that Peter discovered what the controversy was all about. On the first clipped galley a description of Lyndon Johnson as having been bored by the Vice Presidency had been marked “cut.” At the next paper clip the comment that for LBJ the shortest distance between two points was “a tunnel” had been crossed out. Next the heart of my account of Johnson’s first Cabinet meeting had been deleted. A little later there was an effacement of a quotation from Dwight Eisenhower portraying LBJ as confused during his first full day in office. Peter sat motionless for a long time. Then he said, “You know, this is really extraordinary.”
Over the next hour we found that Goodwin had requested changes on twenty-nine galleys. Of these, sixteen could be legitimately described as personal, and I made almost all of them, together with a large number of others which, though unrequested, had seemed to me on reflection during my New York-to-Southampton voyage to be legitimate questions of legality. That left thirteen Goodwin demands which were political and therefore unacceptable. Now we were ready to talk to Evan and Cass. Before their arrival in London, Don had written Peter, “Evan has given me to understand that Harper’s position is that Manchester will have approval and will have the final say regarding any of Mrs. Kennedy’s requested changes. Evan also tells me Harper’s position is that the present manuscript has been approved by the Senator, speaking on behalf of the family.” That seemed pellucid to Peter. Under those circumstances, he couldn’t see why two busy executives had found it necessary to fly to London or, for that matter, why this afternoon’s meeting was essential. He was scheduled to enter a hospital for minor surgery the next day. Could he spare me?
I begged him to come along anyhow. He had only glimpsed one passage of a Byzantine labyrinth, I said; if he remained with me he might find other surprises. In my hotel room I handed Cass the proofs he had brought me, now rolled into a cylindrical bundle and secured with heavy rubber bands. Next I typed up a two page memorandum, noting that I had made changes on pages xiii, 3, 4, 9, 10, 25, 43, 44, 45, 61, 83, 97, 99, 102, 103, 114, 117, 120, 135, 157, 164, 228, 272, 273, 291, 296, 298, 313, 328, 333, 340, 341, 343, 379, 413, 418, 419, 422, 426, 434, 445, 452, 453, 472, 476, 477, 482, 493, 498, 514, 519, 523, 527, and 614. The operative clause in the memo was modeled on the one in my agreement with Mike Land the previous week: “In the Harper’s interpretation of Goodwin’s memorandum he had recommended changes on 29 pages. The author has altered the text on 16 of these pages. It is understood that these constitute the final suggestions that Harper & Row will consider from any source whatsoever (barring only issues of factual accuracy or legal import), and that no further suggestions or demands will be forwarded to the author.” All four of us signed it and initialed each clause. Peter gave me an owlish look—plainly he felt vindicated—and purred off in his Rolls-Royce to pack for the hospital. I accompanied Cass and Evan to Heathrow as a farewell gesture. That was a mistake. My cold was settling in my chest; I was running a fever; sweating in the airport traffic was no help. Dropping them off, I rode back to Mayfair, went straight to bed, and summoned a Harley Street physician. He told me my temperature was 104 and left me with a vial of influenza pills. I was aching, hacking, sneezing, and generally wretched when, at 9 P.M., my phone rang. It was Evan. He and Cass were at the airport hotel. One of their 707s engines had broken down in Munich; there wouldn’t be another plane till morning. While Cass dozed, Evan had been reviewing my changes on the galleys. He said they were unacceptable.
“You can’t understand them?” I asked, unwilling to hear what I was hearing.
“Oh, we understand them. But they’re not enough.”
“Evan, less than five hours ago you signed an agreement promising that you would make no more demands of me.”
“We can’t accept the book in this form.”
“Cass signed that agreement, too, in this very room. My God, this is unbelievable!” And for a moment I did in fact suspect that I might be delirious.
“Cass associates himself with every word I’m saying. He’s nodding at me right now.”
“Let me talk to him.”
Cass came on and confirmed everything Evan had said. Then Evan came on again.
“I won’t do it,” I said. “I can’t. Those Johnson things—”
“They’re slurs.”
“They are not—they’re history. Taking them out would be a falsification of history. They’re bound to come out eventually. And my grandchildren would have to live with the fact that I distorted the record. Evan, I refuse.”
“Then Harper won’t publish the book,” he said.
Suddenly suspicious, I asked, “Who have you been talking to in New York?”
“No one.”
“Listen, I’m sick,” I said. “I need a night’s sleep. Let’s meet here in the lobby at nine.”
They rang off, and I phoned Peter. He was incredulous, but said he would postpone admittance to the hospital until after the morning meeting. Evan arrived alone, Cass having flown to New York on an earlier flight to meet, Evan said, other commitments. Peter snorted at that; it seemed likelier that Cass couldn’t face his old friend. If so, he was wise, for Peter’s scorn was awesome. Flourishing the signed memorandum in one hand and slapping the back of his other hand on the galleys, he said in his starchiest voice, “Mr. Thomas, in my entire life I have never witnessed such shocking conduct by members of what I have always looked upon as a gentlemen’s profession. Harper’s has been making books since 1817. It has a long and honorable career. And now two of its highest officers have cynically broken their signed pledge before the ink could scarcely dry. And all for political expediency! Or do you have another explanation?”
Even had none, or offered none. Twice he started to speak, thought better of it, and shrugged. Then he gathered up the bulky galleys and departed wordlessly. Peter, still red-faced, entered his Rolls, leaving me his hospital phone number, and I went back to bed. Meantime Cass was landing in New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. His first act, as I later learned, was to phone Jackie and ask for a prompt meeting in the office of her lawyer. There Cass triumphantly declared, “I have applied the ultimate sanction that is in the power of the publisher to apply”—that unless I capitulated he wouldn’t bring out the book. She was overjoyed. Later Goodwin, disillusioned with Cass, said bitterly that “Canfield was the hero of the hour.” Arm in arm, Cass and Jackie left the office.3
The next morning, Friday, December 2, Cass and Evan, who by now were also back in New York, cabled an ultimatum to the Connaught: either I agreed to all demands for fresh changes “within 48 hours of receipt” or book publication would be stopped. At that point I threw in my hand. My flu had turned vicious, and I was becoming afflicted with that most ignoble of emotions, self-pity. Under these circumstances the exercise of good judgment was almost impossible, and on Saturday I cabled Don and his senior partner, Harold Matson, delegating my editorial authority to them:
CANFIELD THOMAS HAVE CABLED ME ARE AIRMAILING KEY PROOFS AND DEMAND FINAL AGREEMENT WITHIN FORTY-EIGHT HOURS OF RECEIPT TO RESOLVE PROBLEMS WHICH PARTLY ARISE FROM MY TOTAL DISTRUST OF EDITOR SUGGEST HAL AND DON REVIEW PROPOSED CHANGES AND LETTER FROM MRS. KENNEDY DATED NOVEMBER 28 BEARING IN MIND THAT THOSE CHANGES APPLYING TO LBJ CANNOT BE CALLED PERSONAL FOR MRS K STOP THEN SEND XEROXES TO ME WITH YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS WHICH I RESPECT AND I WILL ACT STOP PETER AGREES MANCHESTER
This was a turning point. While I had lost faith in Harper’s, I trusted Don more than any man in the world, and when he phoned Monday to recommend twenty-eight changes, I accepted all but two, on pages 270 and 452, dealing with Johnson. Simultaneously, Mike Cowles was t
alking to Cass. They and their staffs conferred throughout Monday and Tuesday, comparing proofs, my responses as relayed by Don, and possible approaches to Jackie. Judging by the results, Mike was putting steel in Cass’s backbone. By late Tuesday he had persuaded him that all legitimate objections made in Jackie’s name had been met. Accordingly, both publishers wrote her on Tuesday, December 6, that they had decided to go ahead. Cass never made his letter public, but presumably he took much the same approach as Mike, who concluded, “I realize that you may not be entirely happy about all particulars but I feel we have gone the limit to try to be fair and thoughtful of everyone’s feelings and yet consistent with accuracy.”
Jackie read the letters, phoned her lawyer, and told him to sue.
***
Marie Antoinette, of whom Jackie sometimes reminded me, is reported to have replied to her countrymen’s appeal for bread by saying, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” a remark which has been held against her ever since. It was the misfortune of both women to be misunderstood. The queen wasn’t being heartless; she really thought there was plenty of cake out there in the provinces. And Jackie wasn’t trying to censor the history of her husband’s assassination. Others were doing that in her name, probably without her knowledge, but her position was much simpler. She just didn’t want any history on that subject at all. She wanted it to go away. Afterward Bill Attwood, Look’s editor-in-chief, said, “The whole affair was senseless. Jackie Kennedy could have had anything she wanted if she hadn’t sued.” Attwood was wrong. The only thing Jackie wanted, and the one thing she couldn’t have, was no magazine series, no book; just one big blank page for November 22, 1963. Her decision to go to court was impulsive, and it was inspired, ironically, by the gallant Cass. On Friday, December 2, the day after he had announced his application of “the ultimate sanction” against me, she had been resigned to Look’s serialization. At one o’clock that afternoon Mike Cowles had received a handwritten letter from her which said, “I have considered bringing a lawsuit to halt your printing of the book. However, to sue would only dramatize and increase the attention on the most offensive parts.” As late as December 10 she inspired a Pete Lisagor story in the Chicago Daily News which said that although she felt I had abused her confidence and was about to reveal her most intimate thoughts to the world, she would not resort to litigation.4 And the night before she made her irrevocable move, Bob Kennedy, entertaining four editors at Hickory Hill, assured them that there would be no lawsuit. The next day one of them called and asked him how he felt now. He said he was “appalled.” He had a lot of company.
Cass had touched it off with his letter to her affirming his decision to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Cowles. Feeling sold out by her closest ally, by the one publisher she had entrusted implicitly, she gave Si Rifkind his marching orders. She wanted a courtroom battle; the longer the casualty list, the better. She didn’t care what kind of papers Si filed, she said, as long as he filed something. Of course, the law is not that haphazard. Writs, briefs, and show-cause orders had to be prepared, opposing counsel must be warned, and the appropriate affidavits and supporting documents had to be delivered to the chambers of the appointed magistrate, in this instance a sixty-five-year-old Supreme Court Justice named Saul Seymour Streit, a lifelong Democrat who had risen through party ranks as a loyal Tammany worker and who, that Hanukkah, must have been the unhappiest Jew since Job.
During all this I was literally at sea, sailing homeward on the Queen Mary. Apart from my persistent case of the flu, which I was treating with massive doses of antibiotics, I thought my troubles were over. This delusion vanished when I came ashore; Look and Harper’s had been served summonses, and somewhere, it was assumed, a process-server was waiting for me. It occurred to me that he had better be a pretty good physical specimen, because he was going to have to fight his way through a lot of newspapermen. Reporters followed me everywhere; when I stopped at Look, three editors had to accompany me every time I used the men’s room, to assure me of some degree of sequestration even there.
For me the lowest point of those precourt maneuvers came when a friend phoned me at Look and read me a statement which had just been issued in Jackie’s name. It accused me and my publishers of disregarding “accepted standards of propriety and good faith,” of violating “the dignity and privacy my children and I have striven with difficulty to retain,” and of writing “a premature account of the events of November 1963 that is in part both tasteless and distorted.” I was accused of “inaccurate and unfair references to other individuals”—meaning Lyndon Johnson and his aides—and was blamed for the blinding publicity the suit had triggered: “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.” Finally: “I am shocked that Mr. Manchester would exploit the emotional state in which I recounted my recollections to him early in 1964, and I’m equally shocked that reputable publishers would take commercial advantage of his failure to keep his word.” I remembered her saying at the Cape, “Anybody who is against me will look like a rat unless I run off with Eddie Fisher.” Well, she hadn’t run off with Fisher, and now I was going to look like a rat.
The worst of this, the real twist of the knife, was the identification of the statement’s real author as Ted Sorensen. Ted—with whom I had sat up when he was suffering through his own book on Kennedy—later confirmed this to me at a Gridiron Dinner in Washington. I had always known that politics was rough. I just hadn’t thought of myself as a politician.
Luckily for my spirits, that savage attack was followed by a hilarious act of opéra bouffe. The reason I was hanging around Look’s editorial offices that afternoon, being shadowed in toilets and insulted over telephones, was that I was waiting for that summons. Ordinarily, serving a writ on a person who is not reluctant to be so approached is a straightforward matter. This case was complicated by what would become enshrined during the Nixon years in the acronym PR. Appearances were important, because the controversy was neither legal nor literary; it was political. How I was summoned had become a matter of concern to the other side. If I seemed to be welcoming service, they reasoned, points would be lost. Points would be gained if I appeared to be elusive—hiding, say, in Connecticut. Since the surge of publicity was turning me into a surreptitious creature anyhow, their goal seemed attainable.
When the afternoon ended without process servers inquiring after me, I made arrangements to return home in a rented Carey Cadillac. To avoid the press, now in full cry, Look editors led me down a maze of corridors, through another building, across an alley, down more halls and across another building to a freight-loading platform, where my hired chauffeur waited. It fooled the reporters, but it didn’t fool the gumshoes employed by the other side. They had an unmarked cruiser equipped with a two-way radio, and they tailed the Cadillac all the way to Middletown. I know that because of what followed. I wasn’t headed for my home, which might have been staked out. My wife and I had agreed to meet at the home of Derry D’Oench, publisher of the Middletown Press, for a small dinner party. Five minutes after I arrived and was sipping gratefully at a large martini, the doorbell rang. Derry went to the door, where he was confronted by two uninvited guests. Not only were they strangers; their profession was obvious to anybody who has spent time covering police courts, as Derry had. They said they wanted to see me. My host, who is familiar with the U.S. Constitution, told them to stay right where they were. He then reentered the drawing room and whispered to me that there were hawkshaws on his threshold.
Using the telephone in his library, I reached my lawyer at a Manhattan cocktail party, who then reached Rifkind at another cocktail party, who agreed that my legal firm could accept service in my behalf the following morning in its Pan-Am Building offices. Rifkind, or a member of his staff, then ordered their dicks back to New York over the two-way radio. But all this took time. And the sleuths, meanwhile, were going thr
ough hell. The D’Oench mansion is in a quiet suburban neighborhood.5 It is not the sort of turf on which private eyes usually operate. For one thing, there was no place to hide the unmarked cruiser. They tried driveways, but the people who live on Phedon Parkway do not encourage the presence of unidentified automobiles, and the householders always knew about the intruders because the busies were relentlessly pursued by a pack of sixteen-year-old informers—my son John, Peter D’Oench, and their tenacious gang. Every time the flatfeet thought they had found a safe house, their lair was spotted by these merciless boys on bikes, who rang doorbells, spread the word, and then circled the cruiser, threatening the men inside with calls to—the unkindest cut of all—the Middletown police. I’m sure the beagles were glad to be recalled.
That weekend I studied the affidavits Jackie and Bobby had filed. They were almost unbelievable. Jackie—who had issued a statement that same day calling the book “tasteless and distorted”—swore that “I have never seen Manchester’s manuscript. I have not approved it, nor have I authorized anyone else to approve it for me.” She declared that neither Look nor Harper’s had allowed her to see the proofs of the material it would use. All this was right through the looking glass. Jackie hadn’t seen the manuscript or the galleys because she hadn’t wanted to see them; the offers had certainly been made, and in writing. Both manuscript and galleys had been shown to her representatives, at her request. The matter of approval could be contested only if she chose to take the line that Bobby had not been representing her, an argument which could be countered by submission in court of the original memorandum of understanding between him and me, supplemented by the correspondence between the three of us since then.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 7
