Before Manchester’s book was published, Johnson and his advisers were poised to perform damage control. They knew that the author was no Johnson fan. As Manchester himself later confessed, J.F.K.'s successor reminded him of “somebody in a Grade D movie on the late show.”

When Johnson heard about Manchester’s take on his deer hunt with Kennedy, he was outraged. “Forcing that poor man to go hunting?” L.B.J. told his aides, while taping himself on his secret White House recording system. “Hell, he not only killed one deer; he insisted on killing a second!” he said. “It took three hours and I finally gave up. I said, ‘Mr. President, we just can’t do it.' ”

Johnson dismissed Manchester’s insistence that Kennedy had been horrified about having to shoot a deer. “Poor little deer — he saw it in his eye and he just could not shoot it? Well, hell, he wasn’t within 250 yards from it,” he said. “He shot it and he jumped up and hoorahed and put it right on the fender of the car so he could kill another one.”

As for asking J.F.K. to display the deer’s head, Johnson observed that Kennedy had already installed in the Fish Room a large, taxidermized sailfish, which he had caught during his wedding trip to Acapulco.

With sarcasm, Johnson scoffed: “Even if we had made the tragic mistake of forcing this poor man to put up a deer head along with his fish — I do not know who forced him to put up the fish in the Fish Room that he caught on his honeymoon, but I damned sure didn’t force him to put up anything. It is just a manufactured lie.”

Noting that Manchester’s book also reported that his power had been severely limited as Kennedy’s subaltern, L.B.J. bitterly added, “I think it is the greatest desecration of his memory that an ‘impotent’ vice president could force this strong man to do a goddamned thing.”

One reason Johnson was so indignant about Manchester’s rendition of the deer hunt was that he knew that Kennedy’s assassination had jaundiced many Americans against hunting and guns, and he did not want to suffer unpopularity by association.