Even as the dispute over William Manchester's The Death of a President appeared headed for resolution, ripples caused by the controversy spread wider and wider.
Manchester lay ill last week in a Connecticut hospital, the victim of "reactive depression" and pneumonia induced by strain and fatigue. Jackie Kennedy vacationed in the British West Indies, and Bobby Kennedy still skied in Sun Valley — yet that did not stop defenders and detractors from choosing up sides.
While Manchester was receiving get-well telegrams from the Kennedys (said Jackie's: "Please know how disturbed I am to know that you are sick, and how much I hope you will be better soon"), he was attacked in Manhattan by — of all people — Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whose intimate revelations of the Kennedy years had already caused their own furor. So many people were getting into the dispute, in fact, that Lyndon Johnson, who is unfairly treated in the book, seemed the very model of decorum; he kept quiet himself and ordered his staff to stay totally out of the controversy.
Fresh as Beowulf. Revelations about the contents of the Manchester manu script, the Harper & Row book and the Look magazine serialization have grown so numerous and detailed that official publication promises to be about as fresh as the story of Beowulf. Items leaked last week from the Look serialization, which will be put on sale Jan.
10, included the fact that 1) Jackie Kennedy sent a letter expressing hope for freedom from nuclear terror to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev after the assassination, 2) John Kennedy was planning, after being elected to a second term, to sack Dean Rusk, appoint Defense Chief Robert S. McNamara the new Secretary of State, and move Robert Kennedy, at his own request, from his post as Attorney General to Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, 3) J.F.K. was taking French lessons so that he could negotiate directly with President Charles de Gaulle, 4) Kennedy's Bible, which was used to administer the presidential oath to Johnson, was taken moments after the ceremony by a man whom Federal Judge Sarah Hughes thought to be a security agent and has been missing since, and 5) Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
asked Kennedy's Democratic National Chairman John Bailey if the party could deny the 1968 presidential nomination to Lyndon Johnson and was told that the Democrats would lose the election if they tried.