As far as Manchester was concerned, The Death of a President had already been approved by Robert Kennedy, who was now bending over backward to please his sister-in-law. It particularly rankled Manchester that he now had to deal with the passages Pam Turnure wanted deleted. He reminded his editor that she “was not qualified to edit historical work” and that they had agreed, once Bobby gave his approval, that “no suggestion from Pam Turnure was to be even considered.”

In August, Thomas received a shocking telegram from Robert Kennedy, backpedaling on the entire project: “I feel the book on President Kennedy’s death should be neither published nor serialized.… It just seems to me that rather than struggling with this any longer we should take our chances with Jim Bishop.” Jim Bishop!

Jackie’s Last Stand

On August 12, in the face of an airline strike, Manchester and Thomas chartered a plane to Washington to attend a meeting at Kennedy’s Senate office. Kennedy “paced tigerlike,” taking up Jackie’s cause by inveighing against the serialization in Look. Manchester—trying to keep his voice down—reminded Robert that he’d already signed a contract with Gardner “Mike” Cowles Jr., founder and publisher of Look magazine. “You have a contract with me, too,” Kennedy snapped. Manchester reminded Kennedy that he wasn’t planning to get rich on the deal, nor was Harper & Row, and that he’d been through a great deal over the past two years. In fact, he was currently under a doctor’s care.

“Do you think you’ve suffered more than Jackie and me?” Kennedy cried out in anguish. He asked that the serialization be shredded so that it could never come out, and Manchester refused. Furious, Kennedy left the room. “There’s something wrong,” Manchester said to his editor. “This is not the brother of the man I knew.”

When Kennedy returned, he’d apparently had a change of heart. He took Thomas aside, assuring him that he could go ahead with the publication of the book, and not to worry about the serialization. After all, this was really Jackie’s fight, and he had taken up her interests as far as he could.

Jackie was not pleased. She summoned Mike Cowles and his attorney, John F. Harding, to Hyannis Port, where she and her lawyer Simon Rifkind met with the Look publisher. Rifkind, a former federal judge, was a senior partner at the powerful law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which had had close ties to the Kennedy administration. Jackie sent the family plane, Caroline, to fly the two men to the Kennedy compound. Once there, she alternately cajoled, charmed, shed tears, and stalked off in anger. She even offered Cowles a million dollars to kill the serialization. Cowles refused, but he did offer to reduce the seven installments to four, and to postpone publication from November to January of 1967, to avoid what had become, for Jacqueline, the cruelest month. Next she turned her attention to Manchester.

In September, Manchester and Dick Goodwin flew to Hyannis Port, where Jackie met them at the airstrip in a green miniskirt. She was determined to win Manchester over, first by dazzling him with her hospitality and athleticism—she water-skied and swam with him in the ocean, leaving the ex-Marine gasping for breath. Back at the compound, she pressed her case against the Look serialization, alternating between anger and tears. “It’s us against them,” she said in her whispery, intimate voice. “Anyone who is against me will look like a rat,” she added, “unless I run off with Eddie Fisher.” She tried a charm offensive, recalling her home telephone number as a child (“Rhinelander4-6167”) and confiding how incredulous she was that her picture appeared so often on the covers of movie magazines. When that didn’t work, she insisted her taped interviews had been made exclusively for the Kennedy Library and that Manchester had had no right to use them. She reminded him that she had “poured out her soul as if he were a psychiatrist.” She was deeply critical of all books about her husband, even Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Through tears, she told Manchester that she was going to fight Look, and fight him if she had to, and she was going to win.