BLOTTING OUT HISTORY

THROUGHOUT that long weekend in late November, 1963, it was impossible to conceive of John Kennedy as a dead person. We spent hours trying to disbelieve and, finally, hours isolated in a personal, idiosyncratic kind of grief. Never, because we were so convulsed, did we imagine what William Manchester has opened to us.

He has recounted a once-familiar chronology and cleared up some of the misconceptions mass media unthinkingly thrust into our too open minds. Yet he has done more--too damn much more. He has tried, to relate and mawkishly analyze the most minute reactions of the President's family, friends, and official Washington. He has intruded on our recollections with hoked-up naturalism, and clogged our impressionistic memories with what he presents as cold fact.

Manchester indulges himself in a welter of detail so massive, confusing, and personal that one is forced to gape instead of emphathize--or remember. The poignant moments--like John Kennedy Jr.'s salute to his dead father outside of St. Matthew's Cathedral--are preserved. Utterly absurd events are related as well, but Manchester won't allow them to stand for themselves. He adds his own brand of brutal interpretation. He spends, for example, eight pages relating the difficulty Kennedy's staff had when they attempted to leave Parkland Hospital with the President's body and return quickly to Washington. The Dallas County Medical Examiner insisted that a standard, perfectly constitutional state law requiring an on-the-spot autopsy should not be broken. The scene was painful and absurd. But to Manchester, "it was a direct confrontation between a diehard defender of state sovereignty and the representatives of the national government, with the body of the thirty-fifth Chief Executive lying between them."

Though all of Manchester's information is second-hand (he was home in Connecticut the weekend of the assassination), he thinks he knows what just about everyone was thinking or doing. He should have realized that belabored descriptions of petty intimacies do not make for the most credible account of past events. More important, he should have realized that his wealth of information--the results of endless months of interviews--was no license to interpret repeatedly during his often poorly-written narrative. The result is not, as Manchester hoped it would be, "contemporary history." Any kind of history is a weave of event and evaluation, but the evaluation must have a veneer of rationality. Manchester is simply unable to make sense most of the time. When, for example, Kennedy visited the LBJ Ranch shortly after after the 1960 election, he reluctantly forced himself to shoot a deer because, Manchester says, was a national leader he was obliged to resolve any doubts about his mettle." It is doubtful that Manchester discerned Kennedy's thoughts, and this bit of interpretation, like many others, is unconvincing and unreal.

While this lapse--and others--results either from myopia, misinformation, or verbal hysteria, the handling of the actual events of the assassination and the assassin is more disturbing. The author's explanation is smug. The Warren Commission's most controversial theory--that one bullet hit both Kennedy and Gov. Connally--is not challenged. Despite Connally's recollection that the first shot did not hit him, Manchester writes "it had passed through...Connally's back, chest, right wrist, and left thigh, although the Governor, suffering a delayed reaction, was not yet aware of it." Certainly Connally may be wrong and Manchester correct--but how can Manchester be so terse and so authoritative?

More provoking is the author's refusal to consider the possibility that an assassin may have been firing at Kennedy from the grassy knoll in the front of the Presidential limousine. Manchester never even confronts the possibility that the bullet which killed the President may have come from the front of the car. He does, however, speak all too graphically of parts of Kennedy's scalp flying backward.

Obviously the logistics of the events in front of the Texas Book Depository do not make for nice reading. But Manchester, if he felt duty-bound to write a 647-page manuscript on four days in November, should have paid more than summary, melodramatic attention to this issue. Historians of the future, to whose efforts Manchester hoped to contribute, will undoubtedly be far more perplexed by the actual assassination than the random deployment of Kennedy family and friends in planning the President's funeral. Yet it is these arrangements--with the variety of emotions they evoked--that seem to intrigue the author.

MANCHESTER even mishandles some of his own ill-conceived notions about the assassination. The manuscript is peppered, for example, with snide, venemous, often fantastic references to both the city of Dallas and the person of Lee Harvey Oswald. Dallas, Manchester argues, epitomizes all the noisome features of American life which buttress lawlessness and unreasoning violence. Because the city was Oswald's home base, Manchester constantly seems to imply that Dallas supported and encouraged Oswald's instability and volatility--that the wickedness of the city had something to do with the wickedness of the individual. But the argument is never made explicit. Quite the opposite: we are led to believe that if Oswald had lived in any other state he would have been equally liable to take a shot at Kennedy. The result is a confusing and ambiguous story, and, in this case, the criticism of Dallas is often superfluous and overly abrasive.

Just as Manchester's distaste for Dallas distorted his perspective, other personal judgments intrude too often into the story. The Death of a President deserved better editing than it got. By simply eliminating those numerous single sentences of gratuitous, overly emotional, often incorrect comments, the manuscript would have lost fifty or so tedious and maddening pages.

The central flaw of Death of the President is that it forces the reader to become preoccupied with the numerous slip-ups in the author's style and manner of writing "history." Manchester meant his volume to complement the visual record of the four bleak days in November, 1963. Yet his shoddy craftsmanship and endless supply of irrelevant detail have dulled the effect with which he wanted to touch us deeply. In the end, the book negates the event.