Start the Presses

After nearly a month of negotiations, the highly publicized battle over William Manchester's The Death of a President was settled last weekend ex cept for the tidying up of the final legal formalities. The agreement gave Harper & Row clearance to publish the controversial book on schedule in April --with nothing in it that Jacqueline Kennedy wanted out.

The settlement became possible only after the publisher agreed to chop out as many as 10,000 words from the 300,000-word manuscript, and Manchester consented to turn over tapes of Jackie's candid remarks to him during a ten-hour interview. The tapes will be sequestered for 100 years before anyone will be allowed to hear them.

What has become more apparent as more passages from the book leak out is that its portrayal of Lyndon B. Johnson is lopsidedly prejudiced. The early versions, in fact, made John F. Kennedy so heroic and Johnson so villainous that some readers wondered if they were reading fiction or fact. It was so prejudiced that even before the Kennedy suit, Manchester had been persuaded by his publisher and Kennedy advisers to eliminate much of the offending material, including the opening chapter which, reportedly, had L.BJ. virtually forcing the late President to go hunting, kill a deer and have it mounted for his office.

Still, some anti-Johnson material remained. Only in recent weeks was Manchester, at the urging of his publisher, induced to modify a malicious passage that hinted at Johnson's being a violent man. In checking many sections of the manuscript, Jackie Kennedy read great chunks of it--often with considerable surprise. After reading Manchester's claim that there was an ugly feud between the Kennedy party and Johnson on the flight back to Washington from Dallas, she said: "I had no awareness that this was going on. All I could think of was my husband in that coffin."

Now that the book is ready to roll, insiders estimate that hard-cover sales will earn some $2,000,000 for the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, and Author Manchester, who has often said that he did not expect to make much from the work, will get rewards from magazine, Book-of-the-Month Club, foreign and paperback rights that will add up to a tidy fortune of more than $2,500,000.

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