Word: manuscript
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...high job in the Communist Party, she went to work as an English translator for a Moscow book publisher. "My interests were primarily literary," she said, "and my friends were drawn largely from the ranks of writers, artists and teachers." Like many of her friends, she had written a manuscript that she knew could not be published in the Soviet Union, and she brought it to India with her when she left. It was an 80,000-word account of her life with father...
...Switzerland seven weeks ago, Svetlana turned the manuscript over to the U.S. State Department. State passed it on to former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow George Kennan, a Russian scholar who is at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. Kennan was impressed. Svetlana's memoirs, he found, are not an expose of Stalin's sins but a "literary and philosophical document" of human reaction to the Stalin era. He telephoned Washington to offer his services to Svetlana as a private citizen. He also called his neighbor in Princeton, Edward S. Greenbaum, 77, a literary lawyer whose most celebrated...
Obviously the logistics of the events in front of the Texas Book Depository do not make for nice reading. But Manchester, if he felt duty-bound to write a 647-page manuscript on four days in November, should have paid more than summary, melodramatic attention to this issue. Historians of the future, to whose efforts Manchester hoped to contribute, will undoubtedly be far more perplexed by the actual assassination than the random deployment of Kennedy family and friends in planning the President's funeral. Yet it is these arrangements--with the variety of emotions they evoked--that seem to intrigue...
MANCHESTER even mishandles some of his own ill-conceived notions about the assassination. The manuscript is peppered, for example, with snide, venemous, often fantastic references to both the city of Dallas and the person of Lee Harvey Oswald. Dallas, Manchester argues, epitomizes all the noisome features of American life which buttress lawlessness and unreasoning violence. Because the city was Oswald's home base, Manchester constantly seems to imply that Dallas supported and encouraged Oswald's instability and volatility--that the wickedness of the city had something to do with the wickedness of the individual. But the argument is never made...
Just as Manchester's distaste for Dallas distorted his perspective, other personal judgments intrude too often into the story. The Death of a President deserved better editing than it got. By simply eliminating those numerous single sentences of gratuitous, overly emotional, often incorrect comments, the manuscript would have lost fifty or so tedious and maddening pages...