What the Fuss Was About

Last week's Look was printed amid utmost secrecy. Shipped out in sealed trains and trucks, the magazines quickly sold out on newsstands across the U.S. Subscription copies were stolen from the mail. Xeroxed facsimiles passed from hand to hand.

Naturally. It was, after all, the first installment of The Death of a President. Yet readers, after getting through these first four chapters, may well have asked themselves what all the fuss was about.

There was little that was new or start ling. The 1,600 words that Jackie deleted were hardly missed. Manchester wrote slickly; yet he did not indulge in emotionalism nor did he dwell on personal detail.

Illusion of Spontaneity. For a man who is supposed to adore the late President, Manchester did not hesitate to portray him in his last hours as harassed and irascible. J.F.K. is described as chewing out Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh for wrongly forecasting cool weather in Texas. He orders Jackie to wear "simple" clothes to "show these Texans [original version: "those rich Texas broads"] what good taste really is." While making a speech in Houston, Kennedy's hands shook so violently that they seemed palsied. "To his audiences," writes Manchester, "his easy air seemed unstudied. The illusion of spontaneity was almost perfect; only his hands would have betrayed him, and he was careful to keep them out of sight."

In lean prose, Manchester skillfully traces Oswald's mounting frustrations and emphasizes his wife Marina's role in bringing him to the breaking point. "Lee," he writes, "had thought he had found a beautiful, dedicated Communist who would forever be his submissive darling. He had expected her to scorn the world that scorned him and reject the materialism of a capitalist society." Instead, she jeered at all his failures and paid him the ultimate insult of leaving him. Somewhat melodramatically, Manchester pictures Oswald "going mad" while watching a flickering TV set the night before the murder. The author never wavers in his conviction that Oswald acted alone and was clearly demented.

Down on Dallas. Despite the even tone of the narrative, Manchester manages to say enough to stir up several storms. He contends that Kennedy went to Texas to patch up a quarrel between the followers of conservative Governor John Connally Jr., and those of liberal Senator Ralph Yarborough. If there is a villain (other than Oswald) in the Manchester piece, it is Connally, who--says Manchester--wanted to use the presidential visit to serve his own political ends. Calling a press conference, Connally insisted that Kennedy came to Texas to mend his own political fortunes, not to resolve a local quarrel. Moreover, Connally said that he, too, had advised the President not to come.

Labeling the book an "astonishing propaganda instrument based on unfounded rumor, distortion and inconsistency," Connally promised to publish his own version of the events.

Manchester is as rough on Dallas as he is on Connally. "There was something in Dallas unrelated to conventional politics--a disease of the spirit, a shrill hysterical note suggestive of a deeply troubled society." Calling this "guilt by geography," Columnist William S. White dismissed the book as one more vain attempt by "extreme Kennedy cultists" to blame Dallas for the tragedy. In another outraged rebuttal, Texas Senator John Tower declared that all the churning hate emanated from the left, not the right. Claiming that he had been threatened so much that he had to move from his home for a few days, Tower attributed the uproar to "knee-jerk ultraliberals of Mr. Manchester's stripe."

Sensitive to Censorship. The main excision from the first Look installment is a tender, somewhat girlish, letter Jackie sent her husband from Greece the preceding summer. Yet even that was available to readers. Stern, a sensational German picture weekly, ignored the entreaties of both Look and Bobby Kennedy and ran the letter. Editor Henri Nannen loftily explained that after experiencing "a censored press for twelve years," Germans were in no mood for more censorship. Nevertheless, Nannen did not hesitate to delete other portions of the manuscript dealing with U.S. politics; he left so little, in fact, that Stern's version does not make much sense.

Though it may be unfair to judge the work before it appears in unabbreviated book form next April, it is already clear that the book that was supposed to set everything straight on the assassination has simply added to the controversy.

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