Manchester, William
New York: Harper & Row, 1967. First First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xvi, [2], 710, [6] pages. Chronology on front endpapers. Map on rear endpapers. Occasional Footnotes. Glossary. Charts. Diagrams. Appendices. Sources. Index. Name of previous owner on half-title. DJ has some wear, soiling, edge tears, chips, and front flap creased. Minor edge soiling. William Raymond Manchester (April 1, 1922 - June 1, 2004) was an American author, biographer, and historian. He was the author of 18 books which have been translated into over 20 languages. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal and the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award. His best-selling book, The Death of a President (1967), is a detailed account of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1964, Manchester was commissioned by the Kennedy family to write the book. Manchester, who retraced the movements of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination, concluded, based on his study of Oswald's psychology and their similar training as Marine sharpshooters, that Oswald had acted alone. Manchester had the support of Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy, but later had a falling-out with Robert over Manchester's treatment of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Before the book could be published, Jacqueline Kennedy filed a lawsuit to prevent its publication, even though she had previously authorized it. The suit was settled in 1967, reportedly with Manchester's agreeing to drop certain passages dealing with Kennedy's family life. In his collection of essays Controversy (1977), Manchester detailed Kennedy's attempts to suppress the book. The Death of a President: November 20-November 25, 1963 is historian William Manchester's 1967 account of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The book gained public attention before it was published when Kennedy's widow Jacqueline, who had initially asked Manchester to write the book, demanded that the author make changes in the manuscript. The book chronicles the long November weekend in 1963 from a small reception the Kennedys hosted in the White House the evening of the trip to Dallas, through the flight and trip to Texas, the motorcade, the assassination, the hospital, the plane trip back to Washington, and the funeral. The friction between the Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson factions, the worldwide reaction, and Lee Harvey Oswald's unplanned televised execution by Jack Ruby are all discussed in painstaking detail. In early 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy commissioned Manchester to produce an account of the assassination. She and the Kennedy family wanted a definitive telling of the events to preempt other books, including Jim Bishop's forthcoming The Day Kennedy Was Shot. Kennedy was familiar with Manchester's work through Portrait of a President: John F. Kennedy in Profile, his account of the president's first year and a half in the White House. Manchester had met and grown to admire her husband when both were recovering from war wounds in Boston. The book agreement stipulated that Jacqueline Kennedy and the president's brother, Robert F. Kennedy, then Attorney General, would approve the manuscript. As part of the agreement, Manchester was to receive an advance of $36,000 but only against the income from the first printing. All other earnings would go the John F. Kennedy Library. Kennedy promised Manchester exclusive interviews with members of the family, and sat for 10 hours of interviews with him. Manchester interviewed 1,000 people for the book, including Robert F. Kennedy; only Marina Oswald refused. Working 100 hours a week for two years to meet an accelerated 1967 publishing deadline, the stress of focusing on the assassination sent Manchester to a hospital due to nervous exhaustion for more than two months, where he completed a manuscript of 1,201 pages and 380,000 words. Manchester turned in the manuscript to his editor at Harper & Row, Evan Thomas, and to the Kennedy family for review in March 1966. He received an offer of $665,000 from Look magazine for serial rights; his agent had obtained an agreement that payments for a serial would go to the author. In early 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy commissioned Manchester to produce an account of the assassination. Harper & Row published The Death of a President in the spring of 1967 to good reviews. It sold more than one million copies by summer and was later given the Dag Hammarskjold International Literary Prize. By 1970 the book had earned $1 million in royalties for the Kennedy Library.
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