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Death of a President

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This book was published in 1967. Reading it today gives the reader an opportunity to contrast the perspective of the mid-'60s with current information. The subject matter is treated with great reverence. At times, objectivity suffers. The book is very close to fawning in its treatment of Jackie Kennedy, for example. It is also very apparent that one who admired John Kennedy wrote the book. Again, there is that perspective thing. The ravages of time have taken its toll on the martyred president. More of the unsavory details of JFK's personal life are now a matter of public information. Jackie Kennedy stepped down from her pedestal and became "Jackie O" in the late '60s. The Kennedy aura in general has suffered.

Equal to the book's admiration of John Kennedy is its utter contempt for Lee Harvey Oswald. Great effort is made to disparage Oswald as the most contemptible of losers. Oswald is portrayed as arguably history's greatest mediocrity. A nonentity who forced his way into the history books by a despicable and cowardly act. The book openly regrets that Oswald's memory will be forever enmeshed with JFK's.

William Manchester takes the reader through the bleak events of that long November weekend in 1963. The trip to Dallas, the motorcade, the assassination, the hospital, the plane trip back to Washington, the funeral, the inside details of the friction between the Kennedy and Johnson factions, the worldwide reaction, and Oswald's unplanned televised execution by Jack Ruby are all discussed in meticulous detail. This book is a grim portrait of a turning point in American history. Regardless of one's politics, this single event marked the death of innocence and naivete that was typical of much of post WWII America, even as late as 1963. After President Kennedy's murder, the country was caught in an escalation of violence and death for much of the rest of the 1960s, typified in that dreadful year, 1968.

This is an exhaustive book on a grim topic. The adoring treatment of JFK and the Kennedy family is quaint. In some ways, the book is an antique, illustrating the temper of a bygone era. Reading this book is not an uplifitng experience, but it is a very effective memoir of this major event in American history. The book can be especially recommended for those too young to remember. Just a warning to other readers: reading this book can add to one's reflective midlife melancholy as one considers where we have been, and also the road left before us. The cadence of the muffled drums that escorted the funeral procession to Arlington remains in the mind for days after finishing this book.

On my seventh birthday, November 22, 1963, I returned home from school and was told that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated earlier in the day in Dallas, Texas. Even for a seven-year-old schoolboy the gravity of event was striking.

For the next forty years, because of my own curiosity and because the event was continually thrust upon me by the media, I studied the sad event from every possible angle. I considered the views of those propounding the prospect of the lone shooter, the single bullet. I listened to the views of those sure that a conspiracy of monumental proportions had taken the President. In short, I have heard every possible explanation and still the evidence--in my view--leads backs to the beginning.

In "The Death of a President," William Manchester, one of the greatest authors of our time and one renowned for his concise, almost obsessive, research was called upon by Jacqueline Kennedy to attempt to set the record straight. The work was published in 1967, four years after the assassination. His research was characteristically pointed, considering every detail, every venue, every person involved. The result: the only book needed to understand the "crime of the century."

In 1988 the book was reprinted and Manchester wrote a new forward to his masterpiece. He mentions how individuals came to him wondering whether he would update and modify his original work due to "new developments" in chronicling the story. He observed at the time that, in his view, "the cruel fact" was that there were no new developments.

Having studied, as I said, the event in considerable detail, I echo Manchester's profound sentiment. There simply is nothing that holds up under severe scrutiny.

Conspiracy theorists claim that it is just impossible that someone like Oswald, a crazy loner, could kill someone like Kennedy as the result of the shallowest of motives. They want to believe that something weightier, darker and more sinister than simple hatred and ego had to be at the root of things. Why?

I would ask them to step back just a few years to when Reagan was President. Consider a lone gunman, John Hinckley, who squeezes off at least three shots before being subdued, wounding Reagan, Brady and a secret service agent in the process. His motive? He wanted to get the attention of a girl, of the actress, Jodie Foster. The shallowest of motives, nothing more. So why is it that we can accept Hinckley's dementia without crying conspiracy but have such difficulty when it comes to Oswald? Quite simply Reagan survived. I believe that, had Reagan died, the nation would have erupted into the same conspiracy craze that has gripped our minds since 1963.

"The Death of a President," so well researched, so well written, is and should be the first and last word. It's been nearly forty years since Manchester completed his study and, despite all of the other books, all of the other theories, this is really the only work that any serious student of that sad day in Dallas need consider.

Douglas McAllister

I was continually left in wonder at the depth of Manchester's attention to detail. For a book that basically only chronicles 6 days in the history of the U.S., the 700+ pages almost seems insufficient given the level of information the author gives the reader. Early in the book Manchester states that he personally visited many of the key sites described in the book, and that dedication is rewarded in almost every situation that can benefit from a precise description. I really wouldn't recommend this book to anyone bent upon proving some "conspiracy theory" because the author does a sound job of debunking many of the sources of the myths that the current conspiracy fans hold dear. If I could have asked for anything more from this book, it would be that a second reflection could have been written after the end of the Johnson presidency and the assassination of RFK. So much more has been learned and revealed in the years after this book was finished (in 1967), that I think even more material on those 6 days could be written. And I suppose that is the best testimonial I can give.

I have read many books on this subject, but when I discovered the existence of this book last year, it was one of the best surprises ever. The funny thing is, it has been around longer than any of the others. Unlike the vast majority of books about the assassination of Kennedy, this book does not go into the whodunit at all, it instead decribes the built-up, the aftermath and the funeral in spectacular detail. No ther book will give you as many facts about this.

And this is why it is special. It conveys all of the grief, all of the trauma and all of the shock, and does so unsentimentally. It does not bore the reader with magic-bullet this or grassy-knoll that. There may have been a conspiracy, there may not have been, but it is wonderful to have a book by someone who simply does not CARE. He has written instead about the savage murder of a much-loved man, and how it affected those who knew him. Simple as that.

I cannot tell you where I was when Kennedy was shot because I wasn't yet alive. By the time I became interested in the world around me, Kennedy's aura had dimmed somewhat, with tales of his infidelities in specific and society's increasing disillusionment with government and politics in general. So I was quite unprepared for the depths emotions that I would experience while reading this book. I felt the power of the Kennedy charisma, awe of Jackie's strength in the aftermath of her very public grief, horror at the power of an assassin to make himself permanently associated with the Kennedy legend. Manchester is a powerful writer, and he weaves together this narrative into a beautiful yet devastating read. His admiration of the Kennedy family is obvious, yet appropriate. I have heard that the Kennedy family was upset about the book after its publication. That is a shame. It is the perfect testament to the death of a great man and leader, who affected the world far more than most Americans (especially those of us in the "slacker" generation) knew. All of the Kennedy's are treated with great respect in relation to their importance to their brother and their grief at his early loss.

There are some disconcerting elements in the book that the writer could not have foreseen. The book was published in 1967, so no one knew yet that RFK would not survive the decade. No one knew that Jacqueline Kennedy would marry Aristotle Onasis (although he does make an appearance in the narrative) and later die young of cancer. No one knew that the little boy who finally gave a perfect salute to his father's coffin would die a very premature death three decades later. This knowledge only made it more poignant for me as I read the book.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is highly readable and very literate. And it certainly helped fill in holes in my knowledge.

I have studied the assassination for 13 years now, and I often lecture to groups at schools and organizations about the subject. What I tell my listeners (especially the young ones) is that, before discussing theories on this subject, we must first determine as best we can the facts. Mr. Manchester's book is a riveting factual account of the events of these six days. And, it is astonishingly fast reading for a 700-plus page book. A real page-turner!

One review here, in the headline, calls the book "quaint," suggesting that it's a relic of a bygone day, a rather charming little thing, insubstantial and light-weight. Nothing could be further from the truth. The book is powerful and riveting, grabbing your attention with the first sentence and carrying you all the way through to the end. It's one of the best non-fiction books of the 1960s - indeed one of the best works of non-fiction ever written - ranking with the "The Right Stuff" by Tom Wolfe as the best-written works of history ever created by an American. It's as alive and compelling today as on the day it was published in 1967. In a word, it's a classic. William Manchester very nearly killed himself writing this thing (see the Vanity Fair piece on the writing and publishing of the work; do a Google search for Vanity Fair and William Manchester and the book title) and all I can say, as I finish my once-every-five-years reading of it, is: "Thank you, sir, for making a major contribution to my understanding of history, of politics, of JFK and Jackie, of LBJ and of Washington D.C., of human tragedy and grandeur, and finally, of literature."

I discovered this book in my high school library when I was 15 years old. I had always been a Kennedy buff, but this book opened my eyes to the history that had happened before I was born, and brought it to realistic proportions. Step by step, minute by this minute this book gives you every detail that has been missing from every article, television show, and commentary that has ever been told about the Kennedy asassination, or the Kennedy Administration. I recommend this highly.

Manchester's book is so well-written and well-researched that the reader is carried back in time to that fateful weekend. The details which come forth are not to be found in many of today's books about JFK, which seem to be concerned with either scandal or with solving the question of conspiracy. This book is especially interesting because it was written within a few years of the assassination. RFK was still alive when the book was published. I believe the closeness of the book to the events in question have helped Manchester stay close to the events and away from speculation. Highly recommended.

Having read a copy in the late '60s following its publication, I was thrilled to stumble on a first edition copy in a small bookstore in Palm Springs almost 20 years later. Since then I have reread the book at least a dozen times. Each time I find myself absorbing something new about perhaps the most momentous weekend of my life. What a sense of history is conveyed! What a richness of detail about the nouances of that tragic period. The passage of time and emergence of facts unknown when Manchester wrote his tome add to a sense of amazement that he could extract as much detail and current observation as he could at the time. A must read for any student of the history of the 20th century, of assasinations, or of the byzantine backwaters of power in Washington in time of ultimate crisis.