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> An account of how President Kennedy personally selected the pink wool suit that Jackie wore that day in Dallas because, according to the New York Daily News, he wanted to make sure she would show up "the cheap Texas broads."
> An unnecessarily personal and detailed recounting of Jackie's conversation with her husband on their last night together.
> In the description of the actual assassination, the "clinical, gruesome detail" of the President's injuries, as one reader described it, and of Jackie's attempts to cover the wounds.
> A passage describing how Jackie used petroleum jelly in order to slip her wedding ring on Jack's finger after he had been pronounced dead at Dallas' Parkland Hospital.
> A report of her reaction on learning the identity of her husband's assassin. "That's absurd," she cried when she was told that it was not a right-wing fanatic but Lee Harvey Oswald. "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little Communist." To her mother, Mrs. Hugh Auchincloss, she later said: "It robs his death of any meaning."
> An account of a dispute over where Kennedy should be buried. Most of the family favored his native Massachusetts, but after Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara entered an eloquent plea for Arlington, Jackie chose that site.
The day after Jackie spelled out her objections, Goodwin and Editor Attwood met in Bobby Kennedy's 14th-floor apartment at United Nations Plaza to see what could be done. "What Jackie wanted," said one publishing executive, "was simply to chop the twelve points out. She wanted to use a meat ax. Instead, Goodwin agreed that a scalpel could be used."
Wielding scalpels—and occasionally surgical saws—Goodwin and Attwood carved away until sundown. They cut out most of a passage describing how Caroline Kennedy, then nearly six, learned of her father's death from her nanny. They condensed her reaction into two words: "She cried." There was considerable paraphrasing where Jackie's own words had been used. Direct quotes from two letters that Jackie had written to Jack—one while she was holidaying in Greece a month before his murder, the other written after his death and placed in his casket—were reworded and trimmed drastically. Cuts were made in all four installments of the Look serial, the bulk of them in the last two, which deal with the immediate aftermath of the assassination, the flight to Washington and the funeral.
Attwood and Goodwin continued to perform minor incisions and excisions for the next three days. At midweek, they met in Rifkind's Madison Avenue offices to thrash out a final understanding. For 71 hours, eleven participants painstakingly examined every word of a four-page draft agreement. What held things up, as one of them acidly put it, was the fact that Bobby Kennedy was off skiing in Idaho, where he narrowly escaped injury in a bad fall, and had to be consulted by telephone on every point at his "Sun Valley command post."