Word: account
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...those anguished words to close friends last week, Jacqueline Kennedy set in motion the biggest brouhaha over a book that the nation has ever known. The book was no ordinary one: it was William Manchester's The Death of a President, which has been awaited as the authoritative account of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. The late President's family carefully hand-picked both the author and the publisher-neither of whom had sought the assignment-and offered them exclusive access to information and key figures, hoping thereby to avoid "distortion and sensationalism" and produce...
...least, Manchester told how the Kennedy contingent arrived at Dallas' Love Field with the President's body and was "dismayed" to find that Johnson's party had moved in to Air Force One. Johnson himself was already ensconced in the President's quarters. Moreover, the account portrayed L.B.J.'s aides as shocked and saddened but scarcely able to disguise their satisfaction at finally taking command...
What angered O'Donnell and other members of the Kennedy group, according to Manchester's account, were a number of incidents aboard the plane. One portrays L.B.J. as maneuvering to make sure that Jackie Kennedy was in photographs of his swearing in. Another describes how the Kennedy people disassociated themselves from Johnson's party, which was in the forward part of the plane. A high Kennedy aide remarked to a newsman: "Make sure you report that we rode in the back with our President and not up front with him"-meaning Johnson...
...nurse until a doctor appeared and told the nurse to let her in. Through the day, Jackie refused to change from her blood-spattered clothes so that, as Manchester quotes her, "they can see what they've done." Another section that disturbed Jackie was Manchester's account of her feeling of emptiness and despair when she went to bed at the White House on the night of the assassination. In helpless, futile anguish, she tore at the pillow that night...
Jackie wanted at least three other things deleted from the manuscript. One is an emotionally charged account of how the children, Caroline, then 5, and John, 2, learned of their father's death. Another was a letter that she had placed in her dead husband's casket before it was sealed. A third was a series of letters she had written, often in conjunction with her daughter Caroline, to Jack; she was particularly upset at the inclusion of a letter that she had sent him from Greece the month before his death...