The Death of a President:
November 20-November 25, 1963

By William Manchester, Harper & Row, 1967, 647 pages
Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski, July 4, 2020

By now, billions of words have been spilled by authors trying to cash in on President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, his assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, the wheezy Camelot connection, assassination conspiracies, his randy nature – Monica Lewinsky wouldn’t have merited a two-line footnote in the books and articles about his philandering – his charm (the word “charisma” was invented when he showed up). Hell, I think his hair has a statue in Boston.

But this assassination account by William Manchester, the product of more research than can be healthy for an author, is lively without being lurid, and it certainly outshines most of the Kennedy literature, which by now could fill a battleship-size dumpster.

The temptation with a book that is at least a quasi-biography of several people – JFK and Jackie, for sure, with lesser focuses on Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy and some of the slain president’s aides – is that it turns into hagiography. (Don’t go rushing to the dictionary. It refers to a fawning, uncritical biography. I had to look it up.)

Manchester does dip periodically into making both JFK and Jackie look too good to be true, and those moments can summon a cringe or two, but only in the light of JFK’s obsessive tomcatting, tales of which didn’t emerge from the murk until long after Manchester finished writing.

The details Manchester does unearth are impressive. The subtitle of the book, not printed on the cover but on the title page, reads, “November 20 – November 25, 1963,” meaning he intricately plots not just the assassination, but the events of two days before it and three days afterward, from the preparation for the First Couple’s trip to Texas, designed to resolve a political feud among the state’s powerful Democrats, to the post-funeral, midnight visit Bobby and Jackie Kennedy made to the fallen president’s burial spot in Arlington National Cemetery.

Along the way are gripping portraits of the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, his estranged wife, Marina, and his just plain strange momma, Marguerite; Gov. John Connally (wounded, but recovering) and Sen. Ralph Yarborough, the feudsters; Vice President, then President Lyndon Johnson; and even the First Children, a remarkably mature Caroline (at age 7) and feisty, frisky John (3).

In Manchester’s telling, what comes across most clearly is how senseless and avoidable the assassination was. Dallas in 1963 was a boiling, overflowing stew of hatred, and numerous smart people in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere warned that by visiting, the president was risking at least vitriol, at worst an attack. Nevertheless, the Secret Service, the FBI and the local authorities failed at even the most rudimentary precautions.

They failed so badly that a failed U.S. Marine, a failed defector (he tried Russia, but came back defeated and disillusioned), a failed husband (his wife, Marina, a pretty, self-absorbed Russian émigré, despised him) and, in Manchester’s searing profile, a comic-strip caricature of the ultimate loser with but one A-plus on life’s report card, in marksmanship, Oswald, managed to outwit all the president’s men.

The scenes from Parkland Hospital, to which the mortally wounded president was taken, are wrenching. Emergency room doctors, knowing they could do nothing but keep him technically alive a few minutes longer, went through the sadly mechanical paces.

When it was over, Manchester wrote movingly of the scene outside Trauma Room No. 1: Stiff-faced, the young widow sat as thin and straight as a spire of smoke from a dying fire.

He infrequently gives in to florid language. Here he is describing the seamy Dallas milieu in which Jack Ruby, a strip-club owner who on Nov. 24 killed Oswald, wallowed:

… the maggoty half-world of dockets and flesh-peddlers, of furtive men with mud-colored faces and bottle blondes whose high-arched overplucked eyebrows give their flat glittering eyes a perpetually startled expression, of sordid walkup hotels with unread Gideon Bibles and tumbled bedclothes and rank animal odors, of police connivance in petty crime, of a way of life in which lawbreakers, law enforcement officers, and those who totter on the law’s edge meet socially and even intermarry.

For the most part, however, his prose is stylish without being overbearing. There isn’t much humor here, although there are plenty of accounts of bungled attempts to carry out duties or smooth over disagreements, and they might have been funny but for the result. I had marked one page as an attempt at Manchester humor, but when I went back and found it to include it in this review, I realized it actually was not funny. It stood out only because all the rest of the writing was so appropriately sober.

Although I loved “The Death of a President,” I offer this qualifier to anyone tempted to read it: Take into account my background. I was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family, and JFK, not to mention his entire family, was very publicly Catholic. I was in Catholic grammar school when he was elected, in Catholic high school – in sophomore geometry class, in fact – when he was killed. I love politics. Complex yarns, especially when they’re true, and especially when they are political, intoxicate me, and in this book, the political intrigues are more powerful than the criminal ones.

Non-Catholic, politics-despising, intrigue-avoiding readers, you’ve been warned.

(For me, the simultaneously baffling-yet-inevitable Robert Kennedy v. Lyndon Johnson drama alone was worth the investment of 647 pages.)

This was my second reading of “The Death of a President” – the first was in the early 1970s – and often when I have reread what I once considered a favorite book, I have been disappointed. This second time, however, the experience was as rewarding as the first.

And, for the record, although I never wondered what brand of clock was in Trauma Room 1 of Parkland Hospital the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, Manchester apparently did: IBM.