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Manchester has no doubts that the Warren Commission's single-assassin finding is correct. He reports, however, that Jackie Kennedy's first reaction to her husband's death was to wish that it was caused by a widespread plot, for then "there would be an air of inevitability about the tragedy; then she could persuade herself that if the plotters had missed on Elm Street they would have eventually succeeded elsewhere."
No Snopesian Boor During the height of his battle with the Kennedys, it was said that Manchester had depicted Lyndon Johnson as a kind of Snopesian boor in the hours immediately after the assassination. L.B.J.'s portrait as it now appears in the book is not all that uncomplimentary. Fewer than 4,000 words were deleted from the book's 360,000 as a result of the Kennedy intervention—but some could have made quite a difference. Besides, it is impossible to say just how much Manchester's first-draft characterization may have been softened by Harper's editors even before the Kennedys entered the dispute. At one point, Manchester had intended to start the book with an episode in which he contrasts L.B.J.'s love of hunting to J.F.K.'s "haunting" recollection of shooting a deer on L.B.J.'s ranch in 1960. The incident, which makes Johnson seem a heartless killer while Kennedy gets "an inner scar" from shooting a deer, is still in the book, but has considerably less anti-Lyndon impact than if it had launched the entire epic. It tends to cast Johnson as a man accustomed to brutality—a gruesome and singularly unjust characterization that makes L.B.J.'s love of hunting appear to be a crude symbol of acquiescence to murder.
Manchester still details some brusque actions by Johnson or his aides that could have been handled with more polish. Yet he also reports that when one L.B.J. aide pressured him to move immediately into Kennedy's oval office from his vice-presidential suite in the Old Executive Office Building because it would "give the people confidence," Johnson barked back: "People will get confidence if we do our job properly. Stop this. Our first concern is Mrs. Kennedy and the family." When an anxious assistant tried to talk Johnson into riding in a car instead of endangering himself by walking in the funeral procession, he snapped: "You damned bastards are trying to take over. If I listen to you, I'll be led to stupid, indecent decisions. I'm going to walk."
Because of his unlimited admiration for the widowed First Lady, Manchester was also supposed to have created a mawkish, Camille-like Jackie Kennedy. Yet, she is presented fairly objectively in this version of the book—overcome by her loss, but not immersed in bathos. From the coffin she took a lock of Kennedy's hair, writes Manchester, and as she left the East Room she was "swaying visibly." She righted herself and, "beyond consolation, wrenched by a torsion of pain," she managed to retain "the sense of purpose which had kept her going for two days."
The Black Hats. Manchester does have an unfortunate tendency to create white-hat heroes and black-hat villains.