The pounding on the door of Suite 1407 at
the Berkshire Hotel in Midtown Manhattan reverberated throughout its two rooms
early in the morning on November 16, 1966. The banging was loud enough to drive
one of its occupants to dive under bedcovers to escape the din. The clamor also
shook author William Manchester, who had been painstakingly reviewing a
manuscript about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy with Evan Thomas, his editor at Harper & Row publishers.
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Manchester had been hand-picked by Robert F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy to write the definitive account of President Kennedy's death in Dallas, Texas, nearly three years before. The author had registered at the hotel under
an assumed name. He did so hoping for some peace and quiet before sailing later that day
on the RMS Queen Mary for a much-needed rest after working himself into
a frazzle completing a book about the assassination.
His hoped-for seclusion had already been ruined at what was to be a private
breakfast with Thomas in the hotel’s empty dining room.
The freelance author was still exhausted after staying up all night in his suite’s living room using the tools of his trade—“pen pencils, erasers, galleys, memos”—assessing changes to the manuscript sought by the Kennedy family. Looking up from his menu, Manchester saw two men enter the room, walk over, and sit down at his table. They were Richard Goodwin and Burke Marshall. They had come to New York on Jacqueline Kennedy’s behalf to insist on further alterations to the manuscript—details she believed to be too personal to allow to be published.
Manchester could not believe Goodwin and Marshall had come, seeing their presences as “an intolerable intrusion.” Under pressure from the men to agree to the alterations sought by Jackie Kennedy, Manchester held firm. “I’ve been working all night. I’m very tired, I can’t cope with this now, and I think you’re trespassing beyond the borders of decency,” Manchester told them before indignantly stalking out of the room.
On the elevator on the way up to his suite, Manchester was surprised to hear from Thomas that he had not divulged his author’s whereabouts to anyone. With his suspicions aroused by Thomas’s comment, Manchester told his editor: “You, me, and my wife were the only people who knew you and I were going to have breakfast together—where we were going to have it, when we were going to have it,” An obviously upset Thomas pleaded to his author: “I didn’t betray you!”
Escaping back to the suite, Manchester and Thomas were interrupted by the commotion at door. They heard a voice cry out: “Bill, are you in there?” The voice belonged to the junior U.S. senator from New York, Robert F. Kennedy. Whispering so Kennedy could not hear him, Thomas insisted to Manchester that he had to open the door and see the senator. “The hell I do,” Manchester countered. “I didn’t invite him, and I have nothing to say to him. Do you really think the former Attorney General of the United States is going to break down a door?” To Manchester, it seemed as if he had been trapped inside “a scene from some Grade-B movie,” recalled one of those entangled in the hullabaloo.
Eventually, Kennedy gave up and left, as did Thomas. A flustered Manchester phoned his longtime agent, Don Congdon, who called a lawyer. “Get Manchester on that ship as soon as possible,” the attorney advised. Congdon complied, accompanying his client, whose nerves had been fortified by a tumbler of straight whiskey, to the Queen Mary.
The agent and his client said their farewells at the bottom of the ship’s gangplank, with both believing Manchester was now safe. They were wrong. As he made his way to the liner’s deck, Manchester found himself confronted by CBS television broadcaster Bob Trout, who convinced him to answer few questions about the book. “Sleepless and full of alcohol, it is a wonder I didn’t disgrace myself,” Manchester remembered about the interview.
As Manchester looked out his stateroom’s porthole for a farewell view of the Statue of Liberty, he finally relaxed, believing, “at last, I would have a few weeks of peace.” Unfortunately, the peace he sought proved to be impossible to find on the way to the publication, finally in 1967, of The Death of a President.
