The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  The best way to delay and mute reports on the mood in and after Dallas was to find a sufficiently pliant writer, to exact submissiveness to censorship from him, and to prevent him from publishing for almost five years (till after the 1968 election). The Kennedys were especially worried by the prospect that Jim Bishop would do one of his “day” books—The Day the President Was Shot. Bishop liked drama and conflict; and the “us against them” mood of the Kennedy aides would lend itself well to his skills. He must be prevented from interviewing the more outspoken members of the Kennedy entourage.

  A cooperative author was ready to hand, respectable enough, but with a record of accommodation to the Kennedys. In 1961, William Manchester sent Pierre Salinger a request for interviews with the President, to be turned into articles and then a book: “I should be eager to have you review the facts in the completed articles.” When Manchester finished typing his Portrait of a President, the publisher sent proofs to Salinger for review—but not a word had to be changed in a White House very touchy about its image.

  To Manchester’s credit, it must be said that his adoration was sincere. He had been smitten by the glamour of the Kennedys, and his 1961 book records this case of puppy love:

  Dwight Eisenhower, the painter, declared that he wasn’t too certain what was art, but he knew what he liked, and Harry Truman, the pianist, said of something he didn’t like that if it was art, he was a Hottentot. Jacqueline Kennedy, the connoisseur, makes both look like Hottentots, if not outright clods. She has a rare visual eye.… Cultivated families admire elegance, and John Kennedy sets great store by good form. His circle doesn’t include men who wear clocks on their socks, or call Shakespeare the Bard, or say budgetwise.

  Manchester was thoroughly dazzled after interviewing the President: “It is an encyclopedic performance, and any writer who has condescended to climbers on the political ladder (while he himself has remained in journalism, which is more of a trampoline) is likely to feel a bit contrite.” The President is “frank as St. Augustine,” a writer with imperfect spelling “like Fitzgerald,” who has “more than ideas in common with” William James, and shared traits with “Caesar and Napoleon”—“and, for that matter, with Tacitus.” Jacqueline Kennedy’s poetry appears in fragments “like Emily Dickinson’s.”

  Both the President and his wife liked this performance—a proof that they would accept incense from the tinniest thurible. Caroline Kennedy was praised for showing her “membership in the Quality,” and Jacqueline because “she has moved from the trivial to the aesthetic, and is, in her comme il faut way, just as U as her husband.” Finally, “her fastidiousness has been endorsed by Russell Lynes”—a man, it must be presumed, without clocks on his socks.

  There could be no problem in manipulating such a man. Indeed, when Salinger mentioned the assassination book early in 1964, Manchester anticipated demands on him by a preemptive surrender. He wrote to Robert Kennedy: “I agree that it is important that Mrs. Kennedy and you should review the manuscript. If you had not suggested this, I would have. I also agree that no film should ever be made from the book. That would be unthinkable.” To manage all aspects of the book’s production, Robert demanded that Manchester be released from an option clause with his own publisher and issue the book from Harper & Row, where Evan Thomas would be its editor. Thomas had worked with John Seigenthaler on Robert’s The Enemy Within. Harper & Row, whose president, Cass Canfield, was related to Jacqueline Kennedy by marriage, had published several books by and about John Kennedy. Members of the firm were themselves honorary Kennedys. Further, most of the American book royalties would have to go to the John F. Kennedy Library. Manchester was, in the Kennedys’ eyes, being hired for a task, not contracting for a book whose reward would be his because the resources marshaled for it were his from the outset. He signed an agreement which stated that “the final text shall not be published unless and until approved” by Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy.

  It would seem that Robert Kennedy had covered every contingency, binding his author down to an official account of his brother’s death. But each effort he made at a totality of control became self-defeating. Kennedy wanted to maintain good relations with President Johnson, and the book became a sore point between them just as the 1968 campaign was taking shape. He wanted to keep the book out of electoral politics—it was not to appear until the end of November in 1968, after the votes were in—but it came out, to sounds of controversy, in 1967. He wanted a dignified account, and was drawn into a sordid squabble. He wanted to protect the President’s widow, and the book affair caused the first dip in her popularity polls since the assassination. He wanted a compliant author, yet Manchester’s very devotion made him protect his literary “eternal flame” to President Kennedy’s memory.

  Manchester, to his delight, felt promoted to the position of honorary Kennedy by the 1964 commission. He was allowed access to the family and to family retainers; was invited to social affairs with them; compared notes on “their” Kennedy books over lunches with Arthur Schlesinger. This access led to emotional identification and excess. When he turned in his manuscript, Evan Thomas had the grace to be embarrassed for the Kennedys (who had not been embarrassed by Manchester’s first effort). The editor wrote to Kennedy’s designated censors (Justice Department associates John Seigenthaler and Edwin Guthman) that the book turned John Kennedy into “the child of Arthur and Guinevere.” Jacqueline Kennedy appears “born of elves in a fairy glade and dressed in such magic cloth of gold (chosen by Prince Jack) that the Texans in their polka dot dresses and bow ties are seen as newly arrived scum—plucked from the dung heap by magical Jack.”

  That last point was the crucial one. Thomas, while praising the work as potentially “a great book,” wrote the Kennedys that it was “gratuitously and tastelessly insulting to Johnson,” just what they wanted to avoid. On other matters Manchester had been very obliging. He understood that Robert did not welcome conspiratorial speculations about the murder, and he suggested the book’s publication be moved up to counter them:

  I’m convinced that our appearance early next year [1967] will eliminate most of the problems created by irresponsible books about the tragedy. For example, Epstein’s Inquest, a really poisonous book, needn’t trouble us any longer. With the help of Dr. Burkley and Howard Willens I think I’ve knocked out what, at first reading, appears to be the one strong point in Epstein’s version.

  But on the subject of Lyndon Johnson, Manchester had absorbed all the grievances, real or imagined, of the honorary Kennedys he interviewed. Even in the earlier book, it should be remembered, his tribute to Kennedy involved a contrast with the “Hottentots” Eisenhower and Truman. In his first draft of the 1967 book, Johnson became a type of the murderous obtuseness that struck down the graceful ruler. While admitting he had gone to excess, Manchester clung to his hatred and wrote Mrs. Kennedy: “Though I tried desperately to suppress my bias against a certain eminent statesman who always reminds me of somebody in a Grade D movie on the late show, the prejudice showed through.”

  When various Kennedy deputies started picking at his manuscript, Manchester felt they were inexplicably whittling at the dead President, with whom he now identified his work and himself. When Robert Kennedy joined the attack, Manchester seemed to go to pieces. Evan Thomas felt the situation was getting out of control and urged Robert Kennedy to send the emotional author a telegram—which was later used to show Robert had approved the manuscript. Even after Manchester had altered many references to Johnson, and dropped things that Mrs. Kennedy said would embarrass her (like the search in a mirror for wrinkles on the day her husband was shot), various honorary Kennedys weighed in with contradictory criticisms of the book. Their loyalties were separately engaged. Arthur Schlesinger, writing his own semiauthorized book, wanted to defend its historical claims by muting any charge that Kennedys censor their authors. Richard Goodwin had first inserted himself into the process with a few minor suggestions, implying they were all that was needed; but then M
rs. Kennedy made him her agent, and he took a much harsher line on what must be altered.

  The Kennedys were not used to having their courtiers rebel—and certainly not in the name of a higher loyalty to Kennedyism. The serialization of the book had been arranged in America and foreign countries—an aspect of publication that had no royalties earmarked for the Kennedy Library; so Robert accused Manchester of trying to profit from his brother’s death. It was a charge as unwise as it was unfair. It convinced Manchester that Robert just did not see the issues involved. He told others, “This is not the brother of the man I knew.” Manchester would have to defend the President alone, if necessary. At last he understood how the ruthless “Bobby” had set out to get Jimmy Hoffa. The old stories of federal agents knocking on newsmen’s doors at night seemed confirmed when Kennedy showed up at the hotel room where Manchester was hiding under an assumed name and pounded on the door, demanding that he open it. (He didn’t.) The Kennedy who had shed some of his reputation as a McCarthyite now seemed a book-burner, vindictive in the treatment of his own chosen author. Sorensen concludes: “The poisonous fallout from this controversy did more than anything else to affix the image of ruthlessness on Bob Kennedy.”

  Most shocking to Manchester was the way his fairy princess showed her claws. She told others she had “hired” Manchester and could fire him. She threatened him with court action, and said he had no chance against her at the peak of her postassassination popularity: “Anyone who is against me will look like a rat unless I run off with Eddie Fisher” (as Elizabeth Taylor had). Esquire ran on its cover a composite photo of Mrs. Kennedy carrying Fisher off on a sled. Mrs. Kennedy told her assistant that she had “the right to destroy the entire transcript” of her interviews with Manchester. She summoned Michael Cowles of Look magazine to Hyannis Port and told him to kill the serialization of the book. When he refused, she said, “If it’s money, I’ll pay you a million.” When he said it was not money, she pointedly remarked, “You’re sitting in the chair my late husband sat in.”

  The Kennedy courtiers rallied to her. Arthur Schlesinger told William Attwood of Look, “There will never be another Kennedy byline or my byline in Look.” The Kennedy lawyers descended to the kind of pettiness they had exhibited against Hoffa. Mrs. Kennedy’s lawyers told Manchester he could not give credit to any Kennedy people in the acknowledgments to his book—or, for that matter, to anyone else. “Not even my wife?” Manchester asked. “Not even your wife.” The mobilization of high-powered lawyers and advisers—Goodwin, Sorensen, Burke Marshall—drew further attention to the conflict. The very passages marked for criticism came out isolated, harsher than in context. Rumor exaggerated the hostility to Johnson, till the book, even before publication, was known as an anti-Johnson tract. John Connally attacked it as such. Everything the Kennedys did by this time just hurt them more. The crisis management team proclaimed the importance of the crisis. It was called a literary Cuban missile affair, since so many of the same minds were at work on it. The overreaction forced Evan Thomas to defend his writer against his former patrons, causing a split with his friend Seigenthaler. As John Corry wrote, in his account of the affair, “It is a fact that a good many people who got involved in the fight on both sides had inscribed pictures of President Kennedy in their homes and offices.… Ultimately, the battle of the book involved only old friends and neighbors, which was inevitable since only old friends and neighbors were ever invited to participate.”

  This was entirely a squabble between and among honorary Kennedys—a thing that was once considered unthinkable. There were too many cadres of loyalists, with loyalties variously engaged. The Kennedys had relied on the emotions they could arouse; but emotions are often unstable. Charisma dazzles, and flashbulbs woo the lightning bolt. The whole charged circle of electric fascinations was shorting out. The honorary Kennedys, once a source of power, were becoming liabilities. There were too many of them now, and too few real Kennedys. In attempting a totality of control over the image of his brother’s death, Robert Kennedy made sure that if anything went wrong, everything would. And it did.

  9

  The Prisoner of Family

  The danger of betraying our weakness to our servants, and the impossibility of concealing it from them, may be justly considered as one motive to a regular and irreproachable life. For no condition is more hateful or despicable, than his who has put himself in the power of his servants.

  —SAMUEL JOHNSON, Rambler No. 69

  Family servants became honorary Kennedys of a lower sort—John Kennedy inherited his older brother’s black valet from Harvard days, and acquired another black valet from Arthur Krock when he entered Congress. (“This big fat colored boy,” as Krock put it in his oral history, accompanied Kennedy to the White House.) But strangers brought onto the White House staff had to be disciplined by more than loyalty: they were all required to sign a pledge not to write or give interviews about their period of service with the family. At the time this pledge became known, it was taken as evidence of the Kennedys’ superior taste. There would be no undignified dog-walker’s account of “John John” in cute moments. Now we know the odd living arrangements of John Kennedy had to be concealed. One way or another, hundreds of people were bound to silence around the private life of the President.

  The Kennedys later thought they had bound William Manchester with a double tie, of loyalty and of legal obligation. They did not realize that the two are at odds. Loyalty truly binds only if freely given. To add the note of legality is to absolve, in some measure, from free tribute. Not that Manchester ever thought he was disloyal. But outsiders blamed him less, the more the Kennedys relied on legal technicalities.

  There is a middle echelon of Kennedy retainers that plays an important role in family history. William Douglas and James Landis were honorary Kennedys in the family patriarch’s eyes. But his “Four Horsemen”—the business operatives who accompanied him—were glorified “gofers.” They had a variety of roles, most of them subservient. The Blairs write: “When the Ambassador took a girl out on the town, he brought along bachelor Joe Timilty. If they were seen, the assumption was supposed to be that the girl was with Timilty.” Timilty was a man whose silence did not have to be bought.

  Wealthy people acquire a penumbra of errand-running “friends.” They are a luxury that soon becomes a necessity. What if a wealthy young man wants to sail, and his serious contemporaries are at work, are following their own projects? It is good to have a school chum who stands by on more or less instant call to crew for him; to take the boat back when the young heir must fly to his next appointment; to supervise the boat boy’s shopping for the next sail. If Jacqueline Kennedy needed an escort to the theater, it was nice to have a safe and reliable one she could call on. For years, Truman Capote served this function for New York ladies, observing the code of the attendant—not to gossip to outsiders. (Gossip within the women’s own circle is one of the services he was expected to provide.) The fury of the escorted women was so intense, when he broke the code, because the code was so uniformly assumed. One reason for having elegant gofers is to keep outsiders away—just as Manchester was commissioned to keep other authors away. People with a clamorous public need buffers to protect them from paparazzi, autograph-hunters, people who might sit down at one’s table or join one’s walk. Designated escorts fend off competitors for the escort role. Anyone who took Mrs. Kennedy out had the undoubted virtue, in her eyes, of not being Gore Vidal.

  To some extent the Secret Service performed the role of gofer for the Kennedys in office. But a Secret Service agent cannot play golf or raise a jib or join a bridge hand, and at the same time keep his eyes out for potential assassins. So, John Kennedy made his old Navy friend “Red” Fay an Undersecretary of the Navy. This brought him to Washington where he could play golf, tell jokes, and sing “Hooray for Hollywood.” Ben Bradlee could not understand the endless appetite of the Kennedys for this latter distraction. But Fay had other services to perform—Kennedy made him the e
scort for Angie Dickinson on his inauguration night. Fay endlessly obliged, and obligingly ran a picture of himself hooraying Hollywood in his book on the Kennedy years.

  Fay was regularly addressed as “Grand Old Lovable” by Kennedy, who understood instinctively how one asserts ownership over another by renaming him. Thomas Broderick told the Blairs: “Jack was always giving people nicknames. He called me Tommie or the Thin Man.” To serve its purpose, the name had to be made up by Kennedy himself. Thus men normally called “Jim” by their family and friends became “Jamie” to John Kennedy. “Ben” Bradlee became “Benjy.” Inga Arvad was both claimed as a lover and trivialized as one when Kennedy addressed her, invariably, as “Inga-Binga.” Kennedy was a Steerforth in the way he could attract people by putting them in their place, expressing superiority and affection in a single name. Steerforth, remember, makes David Copperfield proud that the school hero is familiar enough with him to call him “Daisy.” Only shrewd Miss Dartle sees how the name flatters and unmans at the same time:

  “But really, Mr. Copperfield,” she asked, “is it a Nickname? And why does he give it you? Is it—eh?—because he thinks you young and innocent? I am so stupid in these things.”