Just Jackie by Edward Klein (trending books to read TXT) 📕

It was not only the money that bothered Jackie. She and Bobby had enlisted the editorial help of several old Kennedy friends: Edward Guthman of the Los Angeles Times, John Siegenthaler of the Nashville Tennessean, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, former JFK speech-writer Theodore Sorensen, and Jackie’s private secretary, Pamela Turnure. When these proxies came back with scores of suggested revisions to the manuscript, Manchester balked. He refused to make many of the changes. Now, to make matters even worse, he had sold his unacceptable text to a popular weekly magazine.

Who was going to choose the excerpts that ran in Look! Jackie asked. And what about the photographs? The art director in Jackie always thought in terms of packages—visuals and text together.

The trouble was, Bobby had already approved both the publication of the book and the Look serialization. In a telegram that he had sent to Manchester, Bobby promised:

[T]he Kennedy family will place no obstacle in the way of publication of his work.

Jackie did not care what promises her brother-in-law had made. She wanted Look to cancel the serialization. In late August, she summoned Mike Cowles, the chairman of the board of the media company that owned Look, to Hyannis Port.

Cowles arrived the next day with his lawyer Jack Harding at his side. To their surprise, Jackie was there to greet them at the small airport. She was wearing a pretty smile and a Pucci dress.

They drove to the Kennedy compound, where she served them iced tea and sandwiches and took them on a tour of her house. Then she, Bobby, and her attorney Simon Rifkind, whose law firm was one of the most prestigious in New York, got down to serious business.

“Bobby doesn’t represent me,” Jackie explained to Mike Cowles. “He sort of protects me.”

Jack Harding, Cowles’s attorney, pointed out that Look had paid $665,000 for the serial rights.

“If it’s money, I’ll pay you a million,” Jackie said.

No, no, said Harding, it was not just the money. Look wanted to excerpt the book because it was an important historical document.

It was a huge mistake for Harding to lecture Jackie Kennedy about history.

“You’re sitting in the chair my late husband sat in,” she said. “I will demand that publication of both the book and the serialization be stopped.”

“No,” Bobby interjected, “not the book.”

Jackie turned to Mike Cowles and demanded to know: “Are you going to serialize?”

“First, let me ask a question,” Cowles replied. “I sense an undercurrent of feeling that Look didn’t act in good faith.”

“Look acted in good faith,” Bobby conceded.

“Well, then, yes, Mrs. Kennedy,” Cowles said, “we will publish.”

No one had dared to say no to Jackie in a very long time. She exploded in a fit of anger.

“You’re a son of a bitch!” she told Cowles. “And a bastard! You can’t do this!”

The men sitting around the table stared at her, aghast.

“She became quite hysterical and violent, verbally violent,” said William Attwood, Look’s editor in chief, “to the point that Mike Cowles came back [to New York] a little amazed that the great lady of the funeral and all that could talk just that way. …

“I agreed that [Manchester’s] prose was very purple,” Attwood continued, “and we all decided that the [series] could easily have been trimmed down…. But Manchester is a very baroque writer, and he loves to describe the color of the brains on the lapels, that sort of thing. And so, nevertheless, this is what he wanted.

“We were caught between two rather neurotic people—Manchester, who is subject to fits of depression, and exhilaration, and all that… and Mrs. Kennedy, who had by this time become really out of control.”

“US AGAINST THEM”

Desperate now, Jackie turned for help to Richard Goodwin, JFK’s old speechwriter and political jack-of-all-trades. With his craggy face, hirsute appearance, and slightly slurred speech, Goodwin reminded some people of a man with a perpetual hangover. But he was one of those brilliant Renaissance men who seemed to know everything and have friends everywhere—in politics, academia, the arts, publishing, medicine, and business.

Goodwin had come to Jackie’s rescue once before, when he had arranged for her to take her traumatized children to the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson after the assassination. Since then, Goodwin had become an important member of Bobby’s shadow cabinet, and while he waited for the Kennedy Restoration, he had taken a teaching post at Wesleyan University, where—conveniently enough—William Manchester also taught. In fact, the two men were close neighbors in leafy Middletown, Connecticut.

Jackie hoped that Goodwin could make Manchester see the light. And on Wednesday morning, September 7, she dispatched the Caroline to La Guardia Airport to pick them up and fly them to Hyannis Port.

“Jackie was waving to us as we came down the ramp,” Manchester wrote. “I remember that she was wearing sunglasses and a green miniskirt; she looked stunning. In the compound, we drank iced tea on the porch of President Kennedy’s house. Then Dick strolled off and Jackie and I changed to bathing suits.

“I sat on the back of a towing boat with young John on my lap while she water-skied behind—Jackie at her most acrobatic, at one point holding the tow rope with one foot and zipping along with the other foot on a single ski. After she had tired of this, I dove in, and the two of us struck out for shore. Wearing flippers, she rapidly left me far behind. Wallowing and out of breath, I momentarily wondered whether I would make it. I remember thinking: What if I drowned? Would that be good for the book or bad for the book?”

Like many men before him, Manchester was overcome by an irresistible impulse to please Jackie.

“She’s incredible,” he recalled. “She’s all woman. You’ve got to spend a little time with her, to see her in the full spectrum. When she looks at you with those big eyes …”

But Manchester was in for a big letdown.

“Back on the porch,” he went on, “with the