Chapter II - or Finis?

Like many another woman before her, Jacqueline Kennedy last week got her way by stubbornly insisting on her rights. In her reluctant but aggressive battle to prevent publication of numerous personally embarrassing passages in Manchester's The Death of a President, she scored a victory over Look magazine, which plans to begin serializing the book in its issue out Jan. 10, and appeared likely to win a similar capitulation from the book's publisher, Harper & Row.

By threatening a costly lawsuit over the "painful" passages, Jackie forced Look either to delete or drastically tone down every last one of them. The magazine went out of its way to emphasize that the changes involved only 1,600 words out of 60,000, and Editor in Chief William Attwood of Cowles Communications, the magazine's publisher, told New York Post Columnist Murray Kempton: "We gave up some slush; a little gingerbread's off the top, but the structure's intact." The fact remained, however, that Look's editors had fought hard to preserve the gingerbread--and that, in the end, Jackie took it away from them. After the Look negotiations, a spokesman for Harper said that the company "will be very glad" to settle Mrs. Kennedy's suit along the lines of her agreement with Look.

Such lofty phrases as "historical accuracy" and "the right to know" were tossed about freely during the dispute, but they were not really at issue. Neither was "the book's right to live," as Harper Executive Committee Chairman Cass Canfield put it. The central point of the dispute was whether the author had violated an agreement guaranteeing the Kennedys' control over Manchester's final account of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Whether or not the Kennedys should have demanded such an agreement was also beside the point. "Manchester made a promise," said Jackie's attorney, former Federal Judge Simon Rifkind, "and now has not lived up to his part of the bargain."

Deadly Dozen. The settlement followed a week of politely barbed name calling--some of it conducted at long distance. In Washington, Senator Edward Kennedy chided Manchester for refusing to cut out the offending passages "despite the pain he knows it will give Mrs. Kennedy." In Manhattan, Canfield said that the row "has been the most trying and distressing one in a 40-year publishing career," added that if either Jackie or Senator Robert F. Kennedy had read the book, "the present situation might have been avoided." In Sun Valley, Idaho, a vacationing Bobby Kennedy paused on the ski slopes long enough to blast the publishers. "We didn't want to go through with a suit," he said, "and we spent a lot of time trying to avoid that. But they drove us to that point."

While the words flew cross-country, representatives of the Kennedys and Look were at work in Manhattan searching for a way out. At a weekend meeting in Manhattan, Jackie read key sections of the serialization. With former Presidential Speechwriter Richard Goodwin at her side, she pointed out twelve passages that she considered to be invasions of her privacy, demanded their deletion. The passages included:

> An account of how President Kennedy personally selected the pink wool suit that Jackie wore that day in Dallas because, according to the New York Daily News, he wanted to make sure she would show up "the cheap Texas broads."

> An unnecessarily personal and detailed recounting of Jackie's conversation with her husband on their last night together.

> In the description of the actual assassination, the "clinical, gruesome detail" of the President's injuries, as one reader described it, and of Jackie's attempts to cover the wounds.

> A passage describing how Jackie used petroleum jelly in order to slip her wedding ring on Jack's finger after he had been pronounced dead at Dallas' Parkland Hospital.

> A report of her reaction on learning the identity of her husband's assassin. "That's absurd," she cried when she was told that it was not a right-wing fanatic but Lee Harvey Oswald. "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little Communist." To her mother, Mrs. Hugh Auchincloss, she later said: "It robs his death of any meaning."

> An account of a dispute over where Kennedy should be buried. Most of the family favored his native Massachusetts, but after Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara entered an eloquent plea for Arlington, Jackie chose that site.

The day after Jackie spelled out her objections, Goodwin and Editor Attwood met in Bobby Kennedy's 14th-floor apartment at United Nations Plaza to see what could be done. "What Jackie wanted," said one publishing executive, "was simply to chop the twelve points out. She wanted to use a meat ax. Instead, Goodwin agreed that a scalpel could be used."

Wielding scalpels--and occasionally surgical saws--Goodwin and Attwood carved away until sundown. They cut out most of a passage describing how Caroline Kennedy, then nearly six, learned of her father's death from her nanny. They condensed her reaction into two words: "She cried." There was considerable paraphrasing where Jackie's own words had been used. Direct quotes from two letters that Jackie had written to Jack--one while she was holidaying in Greece a month before his murder, the other written after his death and placed in his casket--were reworded and trimmed drastically. Cuts were made in all four installments of the Look serial, the bulk of them in the last two, which deal with the immediate aftermath of the assassination, the flight to Washington and the funeral.

Attwood and Goodwin continued to perform minor incisions and excisions for the next three days. At midweek, they met in Rifkind's Madison Avenue offices to thrash out a final understanding. For 71 hours, eleven participants painstakingly examined every word of a four-page draft agreement. What held things up, as one of them acidly put it, was the fact that Bobby Kennedy was off skiing in Idaho, where he narrowly escaped injury in a bad fall, and had to be consulted by telephone on every point at his "Sun Valley command post."

Off the Hook. When the locked doors swung open, Attwood was the first to step up to an array of five television cameras and eleven microphones to issue a statement. According to his tight-faced account, Look had hardly given away a thing. The changes, he said, "in no way affected the historical accuracy or completeness of Mr. Manchester's manuscript." Added Attwood unconvincingly: "We are satisfied with the outcome of the discussions."

In his statement, Rifkind made it clear that the Kennedys, too, were satisfied--and with better reason. "Every passage of a personal nature under contention was either deleted by Look or changed to her satisfaction," he said. Therefore Mrs. Kennedy "has withdrawn her suit." Both sides emphasized that the serial could in no way be considered an authorized version. As if that were not enough, the Kennedys rubbed an added pinch of salt into Look's wounds. Possibly to get the family off the hook for what is said to be a highly unflattering portrayal of Lyndon Johnson, Jackie deplored what she described as "historical inaccuracies and unfair references in this book."

Ironic Upshot. Though Jackie's separate suits against Manchester and Harper had not been withdrawn at week's end, the defendants' deadline for filing arguments was delayed until this week to give both sides more time for negotiations. Deletions from the book, which runs to 300,000 words, are likely to be much more extensive.

Ironically, the upshot of the dispute has been to draw attention to the very sections of the book that, in Jackie's view, most threatened her privacy. There was some fear that the deletions might be ignored by publishers outside the U.S. In Hamburg, Editor Henri Nannen of West Germany's sensational weekly Der Stern said that he intended to publish the unexpurgated version of the serialization, for which he paid Look $72,500. "There is nothing in our contract with Look about changes and deletions," he said. Because Look is responsible for the contents of foreign serializations under last week's agreement with Jackie, the magazine plans to fly an agent to Germany to try to "get Nannen to change his mind.

Though a few untidy loose ends remained, the dispute seemed to have run its course. Observers were already wondering whom it helped and whom it hurt. The publishers, for one, seemed unable to resolve the sort of questions of taste and discretion that commonly confront magazines and newspapers when they explore stories in depth. Manchester's material passed through innumerable filters; yet not one of those who read it screened out the passages that ultimately triggered the battle of the book.

For two who did not read the book--Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson--the political implications were ambiguous. Almost all of the deletions concerned Jackie and her children, not the hostile appraisal of the President. Weeks before Look was to hit the newsstands, months before the book's scheduled April appearance, there are already signs that the shabby treatment of Lyndon Johnson might create a backlash of public sympathy for him. Said Malcolm Kilduff, who was Kennedy's press secretary on the trip to Texas and who came back to Washington on Air Force One after the assassination: "I can't help but feel that Johnson showed the utmost concern for Mrs. Kennedy and the whole Kennedy party that was with us. Once he got off the plane, he continued to show that concern. There was no grossness on his part, as has been implied by others."

As for Jackie Kennedy, having comported herself with regal mien in the days following the assassination, she apparently lost some of her composure during her ten hours of interviews with Manchester. Her usually impeccable taste deserted her, as did the judgment and discretion of her interviewer. At week's end, with a settlement in sight, Jackie prepared to fly with her children to Antigua in the British West Indies. There she planned to rent a cottage at a hotel for eleven days of rest and--she hopes--complete privacy.

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