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Manchester interviewed such historic walk-ons as the presidential baggage-master, J.F.K.'s White House French teacher and a soldier who carried a wreath in the funeral procession. He examined the coffin in which Kennedy's body was brought to Washington, studied Jackie's bloodied pink dress in the Georgetown attic where it has been stored since she took it off, walked the entire five-mile motorcade route in Dallas. In the end, he molded his mountain of minutiae into a highly dramatized reconstruction of the tragedy.
The time covered in the book's 710 pages stretches from 8:45 a.m. Nov. 20, when a vibrant, if slightly testy, John Kennedy presided over a White House breakfast for congressional leaders, to midnight Nov. 25, when Jackie prayed and placed a bouquet of lilies of the valley beside the eternal flame at the dead President's grave.
The story begins slowly. The author tries too hard to achieve a sense of ominous anticipation from various people's warnings and premonitions. Manchester approaches Dallas and the underpass near the Texas Schoolbook Depository Building at an excruciatingly slow pace and with innumerable sidetrips. But then the horrendous drama takes hold of the reader all over again. It is not so much that Manchester's details bring new significance to the event; it is rather that the event itself seems to infuse even the most unimportant detail with meaning.
"I Couldn't Help It" Manchester focuses microscopically on the thoughts and actions of the occupants of the presidential limousine. A fragment of Kennedy's shattered skull "rises over the President's falling shoulders and seems to hang there and then drift toward the rear, and Jackie springs up on her stained knees . . . and sprawls on the sloping back of the car, defeated." John Connally, suddenly covered with blood, thought instantly of riding as a boy in the family Model T after helping butcher cattle, then realizing that he himself was hit, "fills his lungs and screams and screams and screams."
At Parkland Hospital, the President lay in Trauma Room 1—an area "as impersonal as IBM, which had actually manufactured the wall clock." Dr. Malcolm Perry entered the room and looked at Kennedy, who was undressed except for a back brace and shorts; the surgeon's first reaction was, "The President's bigger than I thought."
While the doctors worked, Jackie stood in a corner with Presidential Physician George Burkley and "rested her spattered cheek" on Burkley's shoulder, then "knelt in the President's blood and closed her eyes in prayer." Later, in the corridor, Secret Service Chauffeur Bill Greer came up to her and sobbed, "Oh Mrs. Kennedy, oh my God, oh my God, I didn't mean to do it, I didn't hear, I should have swerved the car, I couldn't help it." Then he embraced her and wept on her shoulder.
Bugler's Haircut