Controversy – William Manchester, 1976 ★★½

History Is His Story

Paul McCartney had a lyric in one of his early albums, Ram. “You took your lucky break and broke it in two…” 

I kept hearing it as I read through the title essay in this collection by the noted historian William Manchester.

Days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his grieving family remembered Manchester as a historian whom the late president admired. That Christmas, Manchester got a call. The Kennedys wanted to get a book out about Kennedy’s murder and thought Manchester was just the person for the job. They offered to cooperate with his research as fully as possible, provide fair compensation, and asked only to review the material before it went to print.

I don’t know about you, but that seems a fair deal. For Manchester, who admits he admired Kennedy to unsafe proportions, it was like thunder from Zeus:

He was brighter than I was, braver, better-read, handsomer, wittier, and more incisive. The only thing I could do better was write. I never dreamed that one day I would write his obituary – the longest presidential obituary in history, and, in the end, the most controversial.

Then something went wrong, something which gives this essay its title. Manchester managed to find himself at loggerheads with the Kennedys, in large part because he couldn’t contain his dislike for Kennedy’s successor. The fact the Kennedys had similar feelings toward Lyndon B. Johnson was besides the point. LBJ had something the Kennedys respected, power. Manchester found himself a casualty of it.

It’s ironic. Power is something Manchester admits to gravitating to in his writings. Originally published in magazines like Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and American Heritage dating as far back as 1950, the articles that make up this collection detail such matters as American power – in wartime, in commercial endeavor, even in setting up fraternal organizations.

“I see people preoccupied with the search for dominance – in politics, in war, in society, in the family – and in the struggle for money,” he explains in an introduction to one of his subsections.

Manchester was a big-L liberal, one who promoted a sense of intellectual elitism and open disdain of middle-class standards very much in the same vein as his mentor H. L. Mencken, of whom Manchester writes a moving reminiscence that concludes this volume. At the same time, like Mencken, Manchester was a liberal of a kind not immediately recognizable today. A former U. S. Marine twice wounded in Okinawa, he calls the Japanese “Japs” several times and writes unabashedly, if defensively, of his patriotic fervor even as he lays in on sacred cows like Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill:

The United States has had plenty of critics abroad, particularly since her emergence as a superpower. But the sharpest prose, damning everything from the banalities of our small-town life and the wretched conditions of the ghettos to the CIA, has been written by citizens of the United States…You will not find much contempt for the republic’s frailties in these pages, but the fact remains that I am free to condemn an evil president, scorn the national anthem, and take to the streets in demonstration against a wicked American war. I have done all of these things, and the certainty that I can continue to do them is, for me, a source of great national pride.

Unlike Mencken, Manchester was no outsider, at least not by choice. He sings the praises of Franklin D. Roosevelt and The New York Times and even includes here an essay “In Defense Of Snobs” in which he defends the liberal aristocracy of his era against the relativist slings of radicals on the left and right. It’s not much of a read, but it is revealing.

Most of the essays Manchester includes here flow well and serve to illuminate some key point he wants to make. At times, these points are rather doctrinaire ones, like small-town southerners pushing a college teacher out of her job because she’s an agnostic who offends local bluenoses. Other times, they have more of a dated feel, like a rambling examination of the various social clubs Americans have joined. It turns out Americans are great joiners, Manchester concludes, rather flatly.

Sometimes, his pieces are more human-centered. A piece on John D. Rockefeller presents the old plutocrat in a warmer light than I expected from Manchester, as a hard worker who was the only white congregant at his church of choice. Another essay recalls a journey to India with Adlai Stevenson, Manchester’s choice for president in 1952, in which Stevenson is seen as a hard-working sort, if less a liberal lion than Manchester would like.

At one point, Manchester hears Stevenson make a crack about New Dealers. He recalls his mortification:

This wasn’t the Adlai Stevenson I had worshiped six months earlier, but of course that Adlai never existed. Had he beaten Eisenhower, those who were bitterest at his defeat would have been the first to be disillusioned with his administration. His eloquence had blinded them – us – to the fact that in many ways he was a middle-aged, conservative Princetonian with the limitations, prejudices, and, yes, the petty conceits of his generation and social class.

Manchester’s other problem for me is actual a strength of his writing: His ability to craft smooth prose while taking you through recognizable milestones. When the Depression was raging through America in 1933, forcing banks to close while FDR waited to be inaugurated, Manchester notes the movie King Kong was being screened at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall, “snarling at empty houses.” Here and elsewhere, his zippy command of facts leaves a reductivist taint. People always seem to move and think as a mass in his writing, like they did for John Reed.

“Controversy” is the standout work in this collection, not only for its length and its prominence but because it clearly pushed Manchester out of his comfort zone while writing it. Instead of depicting the struggles of good liberals in a benighted land, he’s forced to take on the possibility that such people can be sources of misery, at least for himself.

William Manchester in his office at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where his papers, including his original manuscript of Death Of A President, reside today. Image from http://wesleyanargus.com/2010/01/29/university-to-unveil-william-manchester-writings-amid-return-of-jfk-manuscript/

The book Manchester wrote, The Death Of A President, was published in 1967, and was a success on the whole. But getting it published proved painful.

Manchester’s final first draft was initially well-received by the writers within the Kennedy camp. It touched on the right notes and gave the national tragedy a sense of perspective that only added to the fallen president’s legacy.

But it is here Manchester took his lucky break and broke it in two: He couldn’t stop himself from using his platform to insert some subtle, and not-so-subtle, digs at the new man at the White House. Early on, he recalls a conversation with Evan Thomas, one of the Kennedy-assigned midwives for the book. A word in the text catches Thomas by surprise. What, he asks Manchester, does he mean when he describes Johnson as “a practitioner of political tergiversation”?

Manchester explains it is a form of evasiveness, of tacking to prevailing currents, something he sees as characteristic of LBJ’s career.

It was the first warning of Manchester’s future difficulties. Johnson was one of two people who declined to give Manchester an interview for his book (the other, he notes, was the widow of the assassin). LBJ, suspicious of the Kennedys, sensed a hatchet job. In time people like Thomas who wanted to align themselves more clearly with the new president began objecting more and more to phrases in the manuscript that put their new man in a bad light.

This went on for a while. In time, Manchester becomes exhausted by it. “It was an old story with the Kennedy team: you made one concession and instantly you were pressed to make others,” he recalls.

This understandably annoyed Manchester. What happened should be set down, not negotiated out of the record. He also believed that, as a professional historian, he had the right and duty to incorporate his own interpretations into his work, however they made Johnson look.

Reading the rest of this book, you sense a deeper problem. Johnson may have been a liberal, and at least going by results more of one than Kennedy was. The problem, for Manchester as well as for many others of his type, was Johnson wasn’t their kind of liberal. His chronic lack of tact, as when he took Kennedy’s Air Force One compartment on the flight home from Dallas, was emblematic of a style Manchester didn’t like, and didn’t want to soft-soap in his book. This upset the Kennedy circle whom he was dependent upon for his writing it in the first place.

Bobby Kennedy, the Attorney General and main supporter of Manchester’s early on, was having his own problems with his new boss. He didn’t need Manchester making things worse. Like he did in other parts of his foreshortened life, he took these valid concerns as an excuse for bad behavior.

When Manchester contracted to have excerpts from his book published in Look magazine, a lucrative agreement which would allow him to make some money from a work he was barred by the Kennedys to profit from more directly, Bobby pounced. Jackie, he said, doesn’t like this.

Manchester explained that was too bad, but it was something they had agreed to before. Since the Kennedys already had final-cut approval of the book’s own text. Manchester didn’t see the harm in excerpting it.

They didn’t agree. According to Manchester, Bobby even proposed Manchester use his revision powers with Look to “shred and emasculate” the text, so Look would opt not to run any of it.

By this time, Manchester was not just sick of the whole thing, he was physically sick, too. He tried to recuperate in a hotel room while Bobby pounded at the door, shouting he knew Manchester was in there. Finally, the Kennedys played their ace, the widow. She sued to block Look’s serialization:

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 all to go away.

Jackie was being unreasonable, if not unsympathetic. Manchester, on the other hand, acted in a way that was reasonable if less sympathetic. He had fouled his own nest with his digs at Johnson (“slurs,” the Kennedy camp called them), and wanted to preserve as much of his distaste for the current president as he could.

Ironically, as Manchester notes, the book proved not that bad for all concerned. It was a best-seller, it made strong points about Kennedy’s legacy, and it even pleased Jackie when she finally got around to reading it. Even Johnson would have less cause to complain from posterity’s standpoint, as The Death Of A President presented a strong case for the lone-gunman theory, rather than as the victim of a conspiracy that many now claim included Johnson himself.

How much of Manchester’s angst was ultimately self-inflicted is admittedly hard to judge. By the time this essay came out, Bobby wasn’t around to tell his side of the story, and the surviving Kennedys were content to allow Death Of A President to lapse out of print, though not before collecting a tidy profit which Manchester itemizes at the end of his essay. Though it all you can almost hear something Manchester didn’t, his mentor Mencken tutting at his protégé’s misplaced faith.