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Look-Like Settlement. Those footnotes to history were hardly as enticing as the intimate details that the press had already reported as cut from the Look series at Jackie's insistence—but no difference. Despite protests from Look, which pruned 1,600 words from the 60,000-word text, Germany's Der Stern, the Holland weekly Revue and the Danish daily Berlingske Tidende are going ahead with plans to publish the uncut original, which will certainly appear shortly thereafter in the U.S. Even so, attorneys met daily in Manhattan to work out a Look-like settlement with Harper & Row, publishers of the 300,000-word manuscript. Reporting "steady progress," they agreed to postpone until mid-January last week's scheduled hearing on whether Harper & Row should be temporarily prevented from publishing the book. If no agreement has been reached by then, the matter will go to trial. In any case, the publishers promised that the book will not be placed on sale before April.
Meanwhile, the evidence grew that Manchester's unfavorable picture of Lyndon Johnson is distinctly onedimensional. The portrayal, say close friends of the Kennedy family, comes not from Jackie but from Kennedy partisans and from Manchester's own judgment—or lack of it. The record indicates that Lyndon Johnson was every inch the gentlemanly sympathizer during those tense moments in Dallas and later in Washington. Jackie wrote several letters to Johnson after the assassination, reported the Chicago Daily News, that "contradict the account of Mr. John son's behavior toward the grief-stricken widow." In addition, Johnson's statement to the Warren Commission shows his sensitive concern for Jackie at a time when he still was not sure about his own safety or the country's.
Despite urgings that he fly immediately from Dallas to Washington, the President testified, "I did not want to go and leave Mrs. Kennedy in this situation. I said so, but I agreed that we would board the airplane and wait until Mrs. Kennedy and the President's body were brought aboard the plane. I suppose, actually, that the only outlet for the grief that shock had submerged was our sharp, painful, and bitter concern and solicitude for Mrs. Kennedy. We were ushered into the private quarters of the President's plane. It didn't seem right for John Kennedy not to be there.
I told someone that we preferred for Mrs. Kennedy to use these quarters. I shall never forget her bravery, nobility, and dignity."