Like many another woman before her, Jacqueline Kennedy last week got her way by stubbornly insisting on her rights. In her reluctant but aggressive battle to prevent publication of numerous personally embarrassing passages in Manchester's The Death of a President, she scored a victory over Look magazine, which plans to begin serializing the book in its issue out Jan. 10, and appeared likely to win a similar capitulation from the book's publisher, Harper & Row.
By threatening a costly lawsuit over the "painful" passages, Jackie forced Look either to delete or drastically tone down every last one of them. The magazine went out of its way to emphasize that the changes involved only 1,600 words out of 60,000, and Editor in Chief William Attwood of Cowles Communications, the magazine's publisher, told New York Post Columnist Murray Kempton: "We gave up some slush; a little gingerbread's off the top, but the structure's intact." The fact remained, however, that Look's editors had fought hard to preserve the gingerbread—and that, in the end, Jackie took it away from them. After the Look negotiations, a spokesman for Harper said that the company "will be very glad" to settle Mrs. Kennedy's suit along the lines of her agreement with Look.
Such lofty phrases as "historical accuracy" and "the right to know" were tossed about freely during the dispute, but they were not really at issue. Neither was "the book's right to live," as Harper Executive Committee Chairman Cass Canfield put it. The central point of the dispute was whether the author had violated an agreement guaranteeing the Kennedys' control over Manchester's final account of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Whether or not the Kennedys should have demanded such an agreement was also beside the point. "Manchester made a promise," said Jackie's attorney, former Federal Judge Simon Rifkind, "and now has not lived up to his part of the bargain."
Deadly Dozen. The settlement followed a week of politely barbed name calling—some of it conducted at long distance. In Washington, Senator Edward Kennedy chided Manchester for refusing to cut out the offending passages "despite the pain he knows it will give Mrs. Kennedy." In Manhattan, Canfield said that the row "has been the most trying and distressing one in a 40-year publishing career," added that if either Jackie or Senator Robert F. Kennedy had read the book, "the present situation might have been avoided." In Sun Valley, Idaho, a vacationing Bobby Kennedy paused on the ski slopes long enough to blast the publishers. "We didn't want to go through with a suit," he said, "and we spent a lot of time trying to avoid that. But they drove us to that point."
While the words flew cross-country, representatives of the Kennedys and Look were at work in Manhattan searching for a way out. At a weekend meeting in Manhattan, Jackie read key sections of the serialization. With former Presidential Speechwriter Richard Goodwin at her side, she pointed out twelve passages that she considered to be invasions of her privacy, demanded their deletion. The passages included: