The Death of A President'

...He thought of himself as carrying out a mission for the Confederacy, and at the moment of his deed he tried to dignify it with his quotation of the Virginia state motto, "Sic semper tyrannis...

...The wise reader will turn many of these pages pretty fast...

...The living Lyndon B. Johnson remains at best a Texan, and Kennedy, after all, was killed in Texas...

...Some of the alleged mistakes doubtless seem like mistakes only in the hindsight of participants and witnesses who have consciously or unconsciously revised their memories...

...Not that Manchester has anything really nasty to say about Lyndon Johnson—who, like Andrew Johnson, might have been described (but is not) as the only person who "could possibly realize any interest or benefit" from his predecessor's assassination...

...For a book of this size, however, the errors are remarkably few...

...And he makes it clear that Johnson fairly quickly mastered both himself and the situation...

...McKinley's assassin, Leon Czolgosz, one of eight children of a Polish immigrant laborer, had quarreled continually with his stepmother and, after leaving home, had become a lonely, brooding reader of anarchist literature...

...As Manchester observes, it is a good thing there was no plot to take over the government on November 22, 1963, for if there had been one, it might well have succeeded in the confusion and the paralysis of authority that prevailed for the first few hours after Kennedy's death...

...Harper & Row...

...He had written a letter saying of Garfield: "His death was a political necessity...

...To get its spirit, the reader has to read between the lines and reflect on the account as a whole...

...To Manchester, the dead Kennedy is "a watchman of honor who never sleeps...

...Manchester does not attempt to compare the death of Kennedy with the deaths of the other murdered Presidents...

...We invited one of the foremost authorities on Lincoln to assess the volume from the vantage point of the professional historian's perspective of the assassinations of Lincoln and two other Presidents...

...Critical objectivity is especially hard to attain when the subject is a martyred President and the author one of his most unrestrained admirers...

...Both Oswald and Ruby must have been mere agents of a vast, far-reaching conspiracy...

...Manchester injects his own feelings and opinions, either overtly or covertly, as indeed any historian must...

...The author does picture L.B.J, as acting rather dazed or stupefied while waiting, in Dallas's Parkland Hospital, for news from the near-by room where Kennedy lay on his deathbed...

...I believe I had more investigative experience than any of them...

...Lee Harvey Oswald, it seemed, could not have conceived and carried out, by himself, the killing of Kennedy, nor Jack Ruby the killing of Oswald...

...Had the Kennedys chosen a pedestrian talent," he says, "the resulting chronicle would have been bland and flat, yet there would have been no row...

...The assassin's bullet deified Lincoln, and it made Garfield and McKinley seem, briefly, much greater men in death than they had ever been in life...

...The trouble arose because, with his presumably superior talent, he was "determined to give this generation a living history" of the President's death...

...The strength of Manchester's book is also its weakness...

...Indeed, more than a dozen books on the subject have appeared already, in less than four years...

...It might seem presumptuous, he says, for him to "roam an arena actually larger than that recently occupied by a Presidential Commission...

...Among his other books are The Lincoln Nobody Knows and Lincoln and the First Shot...

...Yet he resembled Oswald in having a hunger for notoriety, a hunger that apparently was not satisfied by his legitimate fame...

...The Warren Commission considered The Death of a President: November 20—November 25, 1963, by William Manchester...

...Back of the murder, according to Buchanan, was a Texas millionaire who intended to get rid of both Kennedy and Khrushchev and thus, somehow, to get control of the world oil market...

...He sometimes used the alias of Fred Nieman, which means Fred Nobody...

...He also shows, however, that practically everyone else in the Kennedy entourage was momentarily stunned or dazed...

...such rumors in its investigation and dismissed them in its report, September 24, 1964, which concluded that "the shots which killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald" and found "no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy...

...A poll of Europeans would probably have shown a much higher proportion of doubters...

...Garfield's assassin, Charles J. Gui-teau, was a drifter and a thwarted office-seeker who, if not a downright maniac, certainly had an abnormal desire for publicity...

...Yet all four resisted precautions which would have put a barrier between them and the people...

...Behind it, no doubt, were racists or Communists or some other nefarious group...

...This was, perhaps, no more fantastic than other rumors that were then going around...

...All this is relevant, well told, dramatic...

...Well-informed critics have pointed out errors of fact and interpretation on Manchester's part, and a photograph apparently has proved him wrong about those present—and absent—at Lyndon B. Johnson's swearing-in ceremony on Air Force One...

...Guiteau almost had his Ruby...

...One of these, in turn, pointed to Johnson himself as the only person who "could possibly realize any interest or benefit" from the removal of Lincoln...

...The first of the books to deal with the Kennedy case, Thomas Buchanan's Who Killed Kennedy?, presented a rather startling thesis...

...The drama, the living history, is drowned in a flood of irrelevancies and trivia...

...Another of the accused rebels designated Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, as the archplotter, and innuendoes about him (wholly unfounded though they are) have formed the theme of a couple of recent books and a television show...

...Booth had with him not only his handful of inept associates but also countless Lincoln-haters, North and South, such as the publisher of the La Crosse, Wisconsin, Democrat, who had editorialized about Lincoln: "We trust some bold hand will pierce his heart with dagger point for the public good...

...After the shooting of Garfield, rumors of a widespread conspiracy also circulated, though only for a short time...

...The book gives copious examples of the kind of hate which was being expressed in Dallas and which could have given Oswald the feeling that he ought to deserve a medal for killing Kennedy...

...It is hard to see how they—or Johnson and his friends, for that matter—could possibly make a case against Manchester by pointing to specific passages in his work...

...And yet, when all is said that Manchester has to say, it appears that Oswald did not act quite alone, for hate too was the assassin...

...The book is pro-Kennedy and anti-Johnson, to be sure, but it is subtly so...

...He pictures the new President as kindly and considerate, if a bit gauche, in his treatment of the late President's widow...

...Oswald, Manchester feels, "slew in the criminal hope that reflected glory from the Kennedy nimbus might brighten his own anonymity...

...Nevertheless, when Manchester's manuscript was shown to the Kennedys, they objected to it partly on the ground that it was unfair to Johnson...

...Here is a minutely detailed treatment of such matters as the Texas trip, Oswald's marital life, the assassination itself, the complex confusion that followed, Jacqueline Kennedy's bearing, the breaking of the news to the Kennedy children, and on and on...

...It remains to be seen whether the New Orleans district attorney will prove Manchester and the Warren Commission wrong about Oswald's having acted strictly on his own...

...Skeptical authors combed through the Commission's records and thought they discovered all kinds of inaccuracies and inconsistencies, especially in regard to the number and direction of the shots that had been fired...

...Czolgosz was abetted by the anarchist writers and also, no doubt, by other spokesmen for the workers and farmers who had struggled bitterly through the depression of the not-so-gay Nineties, though, by 1901, McKinley had come to be about as popular a President as this country has ever had...

...Certainly his quarrel with the Kennedy family gave the volume a remarkable pre-publication build-up...

...Indeed, a work by Charles Roberts (who also sustains the Warren Commission's main conclusions) is already appearing...

...Though hardly the masterwork that some have called it, The Death of a President is certainly monumental in its massive detail...

...After Lincoln's death the notion rapidly spread that someone higher up than Booth must have masterminded the assassination plot...

...He had read that it was right to kill the enemies of the working people, and these enemies included all rulers, even the mild McKinley...

...Manchester's volume,, for all the fanfare that has preceded and accompanied it, can hardly be described as the book to end all books on the subject...

...In the case of McKinley, almost no one at first believed that Czolgosz had acted alone, and all over the country the police rounded up anarchists and other suspected radicals, among them Emma Goldman...

...YFTilliam Manchester and some of " the reviewers seem to consider publication of his book on the Kennedy assassination as an event hardly less historic than the assassination itself...

...Anyhow, his investigative experience has led him to precisely the same conclusion that Oswald was a loner and neither Ruby nor anyone else a fellow conspirator...

...He only comments: "Each of the three previous assassinations had been a psychotic deed—Booth's 'plot' was no plot by European standards...

...Actually, John Wilkes Booth was a great deal more than that...

...it had been a cabal of impressionable weaklings led by an Oswald with charm...

...In the last of his Look articles, presenting portions of the volume, Manchester quotes people who told him it might well prove to be the book of the century...

...Guiteau had behind him—though at a distance —those Stalwart Republicans who were denouncing Garfield for gross political crimes...

...In the fall of 1966 an opinion poll indicated that nearly two-thirds of the American people doubted whether Oswald had acted on his own...

...Again, he emphasizes Johnson's innocence in the mix-up over the passenger list on the Presidential plane...

...It is living history...

...That is approximately the same number that have been published on the Lincoln assassination in more than a hundred years...

...Additional parallels could be drawn between 1963 and 1865, 1881, and 1901...

...In this atomic age the risk is greater than ever...

...By killing McKinley, he doubtless hoped to transform himself into Fred Somebody and, at the same time, to fulfill the demands of both duty and envy...

...As for the other Presidential murders, those of Garfield and McKinley, neither has yet been deemed worthy of an entire book...

...But "junior staff men" did the Commission's real work...

...Kennedy and those around him, as Manchester tells the story, had premonitions of a sort...

...On taking over the Presidency, Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation accusing Jefferson Davis and several other "rebels and traitors...

...The only book to be compared with it, Jim Bishop's The Day Lincoln Was Shot, a bestseller which the same publishers brought out a dozen years ago, is a very thin volume alongside it, and Bishop's research job was relatively easy...

...Apparently the dissenting books had more effect than the Warren Report on the public mind...

...So did Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley...

...This generation has, of course, already had a spate of histories of the Kennedy assassination, whether "living" ones or not...

...The risk, it would appear, is one that both a President and the country have to run...

...He, too, assumed he was performing a public service...

...while he was in prison awaiting trial, one of his soldier guards shot at him from a distance through an open window...

...But here also is a meticulous and tedious record of what every possible Kennedy intimate and not-so-intimate was meanwhile doing and thinking...

...Reading these name-filled pages is like listening to a compulsive talker with total recall...

...Manchester covers a much broader field than the mere identity of the assassin, and he depends on his own investigations and interviews (involving many persons besides Jacqueline Kennedy) rather than rehashing the evidence that the Warren Commission gathered...

...Current, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, was awarded the Bancroft Prize for Lincoln the President: Last Full Measure, written in collaboration with the late J. G. Randall...

...The book, despite its vast accumulation of facts, must be viewed as essentially an embodiment of the Kennedy legend rather than as simply a presentation of the facts...

...before he turned assassin, he had made a brilliant reputation on the stage...

...Some of Lincoln's contemporaries blamed the Roman Catholic hierarchy...

...Even the lone assassin has accomplices of a kind...

...After his capture, Oswald told a police captain: "Everyone will know who I am now...

...710 pp...

...He sees Oswald as a kind of human cipher who had been utterly rejected— by his mother, by Soviet society, by Castro's Cuba, and finally by his wife...

...Besides, as Czolgosz afterwards put it, "I didn't believe one man should have so much service, and another man should have none...

...Marina was a "minx" with Lee, he says, though Warren found her "appealing," and the Commission "treated her with exceptional consideration...