Spreading Controversy

Even as the dispute over William Manchester's The Death of a President appeared headed for resolution, ripples caused by the controversy spread wider and wider.

Manchester lay ill last week in a Connecticut hospital, the victim of "reactive depression" and pneumonia induced by strain and fatigue. Jackie Kennedy vacationed in the British West Indies, and Bobby Kennedy still skied in Sun Valley -- yet that did not stop defenders and detractors from choosing up sides.

While Manchester was receiving get-well telegrams from the Kennedys (said Jackie's: "Please know how disturbed I am to know that you are sick, and how much I hope you will be better soon"), he was attacked in Manhattan by -- of all people -- Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whose intimate revelations of the Kennedy years had already caused their own furor. So many people were getting into the dispute, in fact, that Lyndon Johnson, who is unfairly treated in the book, seemed the very model of decorum; he kept quiet himself and ordered his staff to stay totally out of the controversy.

Fresh as Beowulf. Revelations about the contents of the Manchester manu script, the Harper & Row book and the Look magazine serialization have grown so numerous and detailed that official publication promises to be about as fresh as the story of Beowulf. Items leaked last week from the Look serialization, which will be put on sale Jan.

10, included the fact that 1) Jackie Kennedy sent a letter expressing hope for freedom from nuclear terror to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev after the assassination, 2) John Kennedy was planning, after being elected to a second term, to sack Dean Rusk, appoint Defense Chief Robert S. McNamara the new Secretary of State, and move Robert Kennedy, at his own request, from his post as Attorney General to Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, 3) J.F.K. was taking French lessons so that he could negotiate directly with President Charles de Gaulle, 4) Kennedy's Bible, which was used to administer the presidential oath to Johnson, was taken moments after the ceremony by a man whom Federal Judge Sarah Hughes thought to be a security agent and has been missing since, and 5) Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

asked Kennedy's Democratic National Chairman John Bailey if the party could deny the 1968 presidential nomination to Lyndon Johnson and was told that the Democrats would lose the election if they tried.

Look-Like Settlement. Those footnotes to history were hardly as enticing as the intimate details that the press had already reported as cut from the Look series at Jackie's insistence--but no difference. Despite protests from Look, which pruned 1,600 words from the 60,000-word text, Germany's Der Stern, the Holland weekly Revue and the Danish daily Berlingske Tidende are going ahead with plans to publish the uncut original, which will certainly appear shortly thereafter in the U.S. Even so, attorneys met daily in Manhattan to work out a Look-like settlement with Harper & Row, publishers of the 300,000-word manuscript. Reporting "steady progress," they agreed to postpone until mid-January last week's scheduled hearing on whether Harper & Row should be temporarily prevented from publishing the book. If no agreement has been reached by then, the matter will go to trial. In any case, the publishers promised that the book will not be placed on sale before April.

Meanwhile, the evidence grew that Manchester's unfavorable picture of Lyndon Johnson is distinctly onedimensional. The portrayal, say close friends of the Kennedy family, comes not from Jackie but from Kennedy partisans and from Manchester's own judgment--or lack of it. The record indicates that Lyndon Johnson was every inch the gentlemanly sympathizer during those tense moments in Dallas and later in Washington. Jackie wrote several letters to Johnson after the assassination, reported the Chicago Daily News, that "contradict the account of Mr. John son's behavior toward the grief-stricken widow." In addition, Johnson's statement to the Warren Commission shows his sensitive concern for Jackie at a time when he still was not sure about his own safety or the country's.

Despite urgings that he fly immediately from Dallas to Washington, the President testified, "I did not want to go and leave Mrs. Kennedy in this situation. I said so, but I agreed that we would board the airplane and wait until Mrs. Kennedy and the President's body were brought aboard the plane. I suppose, actually, that the only outlet for the grief that shock had submerged was our sharp, painful, and bitter concern and solicitude for Mrs. Kennedy. We were ushered into the private quarters of the President's plane. It didn't seem right for John Kennedy not to be there.

I told someone that we preferred for Mrs. Kennedy to use these quarters. I shall never forget her bravery, nobility, and dignity."

Schlesinger's Sally. While Johnson kept silent about the dispute, old Kennedy partisan Schlesinger sallied into the fray by attacking Manchester at the annual meeting of The American Historical Association. Disclosing that it was he who had urged Jackie to submit to Manchester's interview, Schlesinger said that he had advised her to hold nothing back because she "was making a deposition for the historian of the 21st century." He never imagined, he said, that Manchester would freely use the material. The relationship between husband and wife is a private matter, said Schlesinger, that "is not necessary to the historian writing in her lifetime." Coming from Schlesinger, the observations were particularly odd. Only a year ago, he was defending both his untimely disclosure that Kennedy planned to remove Dean Rusk as Secretary of State and his maudlin scene between J.F.K. and Jackie after the Bay of Pigs debacle--a scene that drew so much criticism in its LIFE appearance that he cut it out of his bestselling history because, he admitted, it "sounded sob-sisterish."

Emotional Strain. Manchester, who last week demanded an apology from yet another critic, Theodore H. White (The Making of a President), for accusing him of breaking his word with the Kennedys, was at week's end recovering and under orders by his physicians to take a vacation. Psychiatrist Dr. Asher L. Baker explained that the author's mental condition was "just reactive to fatigue. Throughout his work on the book he was reliving the assassination.

It's something that puts a person under terrific emotional strain."

In Antigua, Jackie discovered to her sorrow that as a result of the battle of the book she was more than ever fair game for the curious. While swimming one day, she had to stay in the water for 15 minutes eluding photographers until Secret Service agents shooed them away. Shortly afterward, police guards showed up at the rambling Mill Reef Club home of the host, Art Collector Paul Mellon, to keep outsiders away.

"Mrs. Kennedy is irked," said one spokesman. "She has demanded complete privacy"--something that she can probably never have again.

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