The Death of a President

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The Death of a President, November 20-November 25, 1963 is historian William Manchester's account of the John F. Kennedy assassination. The book became news even before it was published, when Kennedy's widow, who had initially asked Manchester to write the book, demanded that the author make changes in the manuscript.

In 1964 Jacqueline Kennedy commissioned William Manchester to produce an account of the assassination. The resulting 1967 book chronicles the long November weekend in 1963 from a small reception the Kennedys hosted in the White House the evening of trip to Dallas, though the flight and trip to Texas, the motorcade, the assassination, the hospital, the plane trip back to Washington, and the funeral. The inside details of the friction between the Kennedy and Johnson factions, the worldwide reaction, and Lee Harvey Oswald's unplanned televised execution by Jack Ruby are all discussed in painstaking detail.

Mrs. Kennedy promised Manchester exclusive interviews with members of the family. Mrs. Kennedy was familiar with Mr. Manchester's work mostly through "Portrait of a President: John F. Kennedy in Profile," Manchester's adoring account of the president's first year and a half in the White House. Mr. Manchester had met and grown to admire Kennedy when both were recovering from war wounds in Boston.The book agreement stipulated that his manuscript would be reviewed by Mrs. Kennedy and by the president's brother, Robert F. Kennedy, then attorney general. As part of his agreement, Mr. Manchester would receive an advance of $36,000 but only against the income from the first printing. All other earnings would go the Kennedy Memorial Library.

"The Death of a President" was completed in 1966, and Mr. Manchester turned his manuscript over to his publisher, Harper & Row, and to the Kennedy family for review. In the interim Manchester received an offer of more than $650,000 from Look magazine for serial rights; his agent had obtained an agreement that payments for a serial would go to the author. Mrs. Kennedy balked at the commercialization of releasing the book serially. She threatened to block publication of the book.

Newspapers were filled with articles about her decision and speculation about the contents of the book. It was widely believed that Mrs. Kennedy feared that some passages in the book unsympathetic to Lyndon Johnson might be damaging to Robert Kennedy's political plans. Eventually some deletions were made from the manuscript and the Kennedys resolved whatever problems they had with Mr. Manchester's book. Mr. Manchester said the edits were minimal. Harper & Row published "Death of a President" in the spring of 1967. It became a best seller and was later given the Dag Hammarskjold International Literary Prize.

In 1988 the book was reprinted and Manchester wrote a new foreword. He mentions how people had come to him wondering whether he would update and modify his original work due to "new developments" in chronicling the story. He wrote that, in his view, there were no new developments.