William Manchester was a well-known figure on the Wesleyan University campus for more than forty years, serving first as an editor of university publications, then as a fellow of the Center of Advanced Studies, later as adjunct professor of history and a writer-in-residence, and, finally, as adjunct professor emeritus. After enjoying modest success writing fiction and nonfiction books in the 1950s, he suddenly rose to national prominence in 1964 when Jacqueline Kennedy selected him to write the authorized account of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Two years later, she sued him to prevent the publication of , setting off a controversy that played out on the front pages of newspapers around the world. Manchester—protégé of H. L. Mencken, newspaper man, foreign correspondent, and best-selling author—profiled larger-than-life figures, including John F. Kennedy, General Douglas MacArthur, and Winston Churchill, and chronicled contemporary American history.

William Raymond Manchester Jr. was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts on April 1, 1922. His parentage bridged the Mason-Dixon Line; his mother’s family was from Virginia, his father’s family from Massachusetts. They met when his father was recuperating in Norfolk from disabling wounds sustained as a marine during the First World War. In spite of physical handicaps, the senior Manchester was an independent and capable man who became the Western Massachusetts supervisor of public welfare. The father’s expectations had a lasting influence on his eldest son. Manchester Jr. had one brother, Robert, fourteen years younger.

Manchester started school in Attleboro, Massachusetts, continuing in Springfield, Massachusetts after the family moved there. Although not physically strong, he was an active Boy Scout, attaining the rank of Eagle Scout. He attended Springfield Classical High School, where he was active in drama. A natural leader, he directed plays and also acted in them. His writing skills were already evident in his re-working of a play by de Maupassant, , to be broadcast on the radio and in his modernization of Oliver Goldsmith’s . He graduated from high school in June, 1940. Manchester entered Massachusetts State College (now known as the University of Massachusetts) in September, 1940. As a freshman, he pledged to the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity and was subjected to the usual hazing. His letter to the editor of takes issue with that custom, but he joined the following year. In January of Manchester’s freshman year, his father died. Although he was grieving, Manchester returned to college for the spring semester. He tried his hand at poetry and represented Massachusetts State College at a poetry-reading contest in May, 1941. In his sophomore year, he was on the staff of the college literary magazine, , and became assistant editor in his junior year. He also wrote for the college newspaper, . His love of words is evident in a well-worn dictionary given to him in 1941. It traveled with him his whole life; the front endpapers document his various addresses in Amherst, Baltimore, and Middletown. Manchester was an avid football fan, then and in his many years at Wesleyan. The school songs that he obviously enjoyed were reflected later in his books in his use of popular songs to evoke the spirit of the times.

In the summer of 1942, after his sophomore year, Manchester enlisted in the Marines, perhaps as a tribute to his father. His reserve status allowed him to complete his third year of college, but at the end of this time, in July, 1943, he was sent to Dartmouth College for training in the newly-created V-12 program. This program allowed recruits to continue their education while creating a pool of potential officers for the Navy and Marines. (Wesleyan also hosted a V-12 program at that time.) Manchester’s program was completed in November, 1943. From New Hampshire, he went to Parris Island, South Carolina, for boot camp; Quantico, Virginia, for officer candidate school (he was never commissioned); and then to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for an advanced combat intelligence course.

On August 1, 1944, he was shipped out to the Pacific Ocean island of Guadalcanal, where he endured eight more months of training in tropical jungle conditions. On April 1, 1945—-his twenty-third birthday-—he was sent to Okinawa. For the next two months, he witnessed war at its worst. His unit was part of the force that took Sugar Loaf Hill at the end of May. Shortly after that, he was lightly wounded and hospitalized but quickly left the hospital to rejoin his unit. His war journal was eerily predictive. He wrote about how much he looked forward to being back, and yet, if you keep running the target up, sooner or later it’s going to get hit. He was seriously wounded on June 4, 1945, evacuated to Saipan, and honorably discharged on October 24, 1945. He returned home to his mother in Oklahoma City.

Pursuing his interest in journalism, he took a job as a copy boy at and quickly became a hospital and police reporter for the newspaper. Although he enjoyed the work, after four months, he decided to return to Massachusetts State College for the spring ’46 semester to finish his degree. In this last semester, he was chosen to be class orator and received a letter of congratulations from the president of the college. He graduated on June 10, 1946. Later that year, he met and became friends with John F. Kennedy during his first campaign in Boston.

The end of college is often a time of false starts and uncertainty. Manchester applied to the school of journalism at Columbia University but was denied admission. He also became engaged to Elinor Palmer, although no wedding date was set. They were never married. Two years later, on March 27, 1948, he married Julia Brown Marshall, to whom he was married for fifty years.

Manchester was accepted in the journalism program at the University of Missouri and moved to Columbia, Missouri, to begin the one-year program. He graduated with a master of journalism degree on August 29, 1947. His thesis was titled, In the process of writing it, he had met Mencken and the two men had hit it off. Manchester wanted to write Mencken’s biography, Mencken agreed, and the end result was that Manchester moved to Baltimore just after graduation, in September, 1947. Mencken had arranged for him to be a reporter at the Baltimore newspaper, , so he would have an income while he was writing the biography. According to a letter from Mencken to Manchester’s mother, Manchester fit in well and was well-liked. Mencken was known as a caustic observer, but he wrote a charming letter.

Manchester’s skills as a reporter and a writer led to a series in 1951 on the state of Baltimore’s hospitals. Health care was a topic that had interested Manchester since his days. The in-depth series was reprinted as a pamphlet, . In 1953, Manchester was assigned as foreign correspondent for to the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia. He departed on January 23. With his unerring ability to be in the right place at the right time, he happened to be crossing the Atlantic on the same boat as Winston Churchill and was engaged by Reuters to send regular dispatches on the great man during the journey. In February, he met with the president of Egypt, General Muhammad Naguib. In March and April, he covered cities all over India. During this time, he was in correspondence with William Shawn of , who had expressed an interest in publishing some of his writing. Manchester met Adlai Stevenson in India and wrote about their meeting for . Unfortunately, he was rejected.

Manchester continued southeast, covering Burma, Thailand, and Southeast Asia in June. In July, he was taken ill. He received medical care in India but eventually was instructed to come home at the end of the month. He received many letters of sympathy on his illness and congratulations on his excellent reporting. His pieces from this trip were reprinted in the booklet . Manchester sent copies of his work to important people he thought would be interested in them. E. M. Forster, for example, thanked him for three articles on India. Such initiative often bore results and it was a habit Manchester maintained throughout his writing career.

Back in the United States, Manchester recuperated during the fall of 1953 and spring of 1954, continued as a reporter for , and started work on a novel. Later, he would write about the summer of ’54: It was now becoming difficult to work evenings after a long day, however, and when Mencken offered me a position which would permit me to start my writing day in the afternoon, I quit the paper. For a year, Manchester read to Mencken in the mornings, and worked on his novel in the afternoons.

In the summer of 1955, Manchester was hired by American Education Publications (AEP) to be assistant managing editor of high school periodicals for the Department of School Services and Publications. Wesleyan had acquired AEP, publisher of , in 1949. This organization rapidly expanded to produce thirteen school periodicals with a circulation of 16.5 million. Manchester moved to Middletown in June,1955 and was soon promoted from assistant to managing editor. He was responsible for six weekly news reviews, among them . In 1958, he applied for, and was granted, a Guggenheim Fellowship for the purpose of finishing his fourth novel. This fellowship ran from July, 1959 to July, 1960. In 1959, he was also invited to be one of the first fellows in the Wesleyan Center for Advanced Studies, now known as the Center for the Humanities.

* * *

Appropriately enough, Manchester’s first book was devoted to the life of a writer. , published in 1951, helped establish Manchester’s reputation as a new talent and was reviewed in major publications across the country. While some reviewers felt that Manchester’s view of Mencken was not entirely objective, many appreciated his research and writing abilities.

Manchester then shifted to fiction, writing four novels in eight years that relied heavily on his real-life experiences. , published in 1953, looked at big-city corruption in a city that resembles Baltimore; , published in 1956, drew on his foreign correspondent days in India; , published in 1958, was a political thriller set in the Middle East; and , published in 1961, told the story of a political and athletic scandal at a state university. Although they generally received good reviews, these novels were not huge sellers. Today, we can see that they are representative of Manchester’s writing technique: voluminous research, a mastery of detail, and careful writing and revision.

Also in the 1950s, while a full-time employee of the Baltimore and later AEP, Manchester developed a successful freelance career writing magazine articles for such publications as , , , and . He wrote steadily for on a wide variety of topics, ranging from a journey down the Connecticut River, to the Spanish American War, to profiles of famous Americans. In 1955, he even tried his hand at drama, adapting for a television play called , starring Ed Begley.

A series of articles on the Rockefellers led to his 1959 book , and his series of articles profiling President John F. Kennedy led to his 1962 book . While researching , Manchester went to the White House to interview JFK. With completed, Manchester turned to what he thought would be his next book, a history of the Krupp munitions family.

Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963, changed all that. In early 1964, JFK’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, decided that an authorized version of the events surrounding her husband’s death should be written. Remembering her husband’s appreciation for , she wanted to know if Manchester would be willing to take on the project. Later, he would ask, how could he turn down the widow of the fallen president? He had already taken a leave from Wesleyan in early February, 1964, to work on the Krupp book. That project promptly got shelved.

Instead, in March, he headed for Washington, D.C. for meetings to discuss the new book with John F. Kennedy’s brother, Robert. The two reached an agreement covering the scope of the project. No one wished to profit from the national tragedy—Manchester agreed to limit his share of royalties to no more than $40,000 for the book, with the remainder of the profits going to the formation of a Kennedy presidential library. The publisher, Harper & Row, agreed to take only necessary expenses.

Manchester would be granted exclusive access to the Kennedy family, which encouraged all parties to participate in Manchester’s research. Robert F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy would have the right to review the book for publication, which, at that time, was scheduled for 1968, five years after the President was killed. On March 29, 1964, Robert Kennedy released an official announcement, and Manchester immediately embarked on gathering research on what would become The Death of a President.

Manchester left no stone unturned and amassed thousands of pages of research materials. He conducted hundreds of interviews, including sessions with Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. I approached every person who might shed light upon this complex of events. Manchester later wrote. I went over every motorcade route, searching for men and women who had been spectators, and in Dallas I walked from Love Field to the overpass, looking for potential sniper’s nests. Every scene described in the book was visited. I crawled over the roof of the Texas School Book Depository and sat in Oswald’s sixth-floor perch. In Washington, Hyannis Port, and elsewhere I studied each pertinent office, embassy, and home—over a hundred of them.

By March, 1966, Manchester had completed a 1,200-page draft. It was, for him, a gut-wrenching experience, but he was proud of his work. He wrote letters to Robert Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy informing them that he had finally finished. Then, he packed an original and four carbon copies of the manuscript in a suitcase, took a bus to New York City, and personally delivered them to his agent and RFK’s office. Robert Kennedy designated two of his close advisors, Edwin Guthman and John Seigenthaler, as reviewers of the manuscript. Harper’s editor, Evan Thomas, read a copy. Manchester also sent a copy to Arthur Schlesinger, who had served President Kennedy. Through the spring and early summer of 1966, manuscript drafts criss-crossed the country. Many cuts were suggested to meet a variety of concerns represented by the different viewpoints of the reviewers.

Manchester began to grow concerned that final agreement would be difficult to reach, and he feared Robert Kennedy might delay approval of publication. Manchester pressed RFK to send definitive word that the publication would go forward, and it finally arrived in the form of a telegram on July 29. At the same time, a draft was agreed upon, and with things apparently buttoned up, the manuscript went out to a half dozen magazines that had expressed interest in serialization. A bidding war developed between and . offered the most money, control of the presentation to Manchester, and perhaps most importantly, RFK felt that had been a friend to the Kennedy family, unlike Life. Manchester signed a contract with in early August, 1966, giving him the then-record sum of $665,000 for a magazine serialization. Manchester remarked afterwards that the money enabled him to pursue whatever projects he wanted for the rest of his life.

Up until this point, Jacqueline Kennedy had been a willing, if distant, participant in the process, but the announcement of the serialization seemed to disturb her. She had not read the book, and, in fact, she had been advised by Manchester and others that she shouldn’t because she would find it too upsetting. Her sense, perhaps, had been that the book would get written, published, and then sit on a shelf somewhere. Apparently, she found the idea that Manchester would receive $665,000 and that the book would be serialized and available to millions of readers to be upsetting; at least, that wasn’t what she had in mind when she initiated the project.

This was a real surprise to Manchester, his editor, his agent, Robert Kennedy, and RFK’s advisors. Richard Goodwin, another former President Kennedy man, was brought in as Mrs. Kennedy’s representative, and he and Manchester attempted to appease Mrs. Kennedy. It was not until the three met in Hyannis Port in early September that Manchester realized how Mrs. Kennedy truly felt about the serialization. Nonetheless, through September and October, 1966, the parties dug in: and Harper insisted they had valid contracts, Manchester believed he had RFK’s approval to go forward, and Mrs. Kennedy believed that the serialization should be cancelled.

The tortuous work on the book and serialization continued into November. Galleys from Harper and were produced and gone over by the parties. Harper and Manchester agreed on a publication date of April,1967 and in a concession to Mrs. Kennedy, cut back its planned seven-part series to four, commencing in January, 1967. Manchester diligently argued, edited, argued, re-edited, and edited again, trying to maintain the integrity of his work while meeting the demands of reviewers he viewed as unnecessary and unreasonable.

Still, Jacqueline Kennedy and her attorneys sent letters stating that her approval had not been forthcoming, which was required for publication, and without it, nothing could be published. Mrs. Kennedy asserted that certain passages relating to her and her children were simply too personal. Among them, subsequently detailed by a reporter, were a description of her at the dressing table, looking for wrinkles and musing about Dallas blondes; references to blood, brains, and skull in the president’s car; a conversation in which she compared her love for her children with her love for her husband; and her daughter’s reaction to learning of the death of her father.

The parties were unable to reach an accommodation. On December 16, 1966, Mrs. Kennedy filed a lawsuit to prevent the publication of the book she had asked be written. This was a huge story, and Manchester was now a real, if reluctant, celebrity. Headlines updated each new event in the saga.

In the end, the suit was resolved rather simply: Mrs. Kennedy came up with a list of items she wanted removed from the book, and Manchester complied, indicating that while the material was interesting, it was inconsequential to his historical narrative and amounted to a very small portion of the text. On January 16, 1967, a settlement was reached. Further, final edits were made; published its serialization and Harper & Row published its book on schedule.

Within a year, sold more than a million copies through bookstores and the Book-of-the-Month Club, and reported circulation in excess of two million issues. Foreign translations of the book and magazine and newspaper serializations brought Manchester’s work to millions of more readers around the globe.

As one might imagine, there was much discussion about who won and lost the battle of the book. Polls indicated that Mrs. Kennedy’s image had suffered. Some pundits agreed with Manchester, who felt that he had withstood an attack on his integrity and that of his book. Others felt he had caved in to pressure. Books were quickly published that chronicled the event. But what is clear is that a vast reading public had finally discovered Manchester’s work, and from then on, it eagerly turned each of his subsequent books into best sellers.

The settlement agreement signed among Manchester, his publishers, and Mrs. Kennedy ordered that all of Manchester’s writing related to the book, the interviews with Mrs. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and certain other materials must be sealed for a period of 100 years from January 16, 1967. However, a good deal of the papers are open and remain a very rich resource not only on the events surrounding the assassination and its aftermath, but on the turbulent, emotional process of writing the book and getting it published.

Manchester would return to writing about John F. Kennedy in the course of his career. In 1975, he published a collection of magazine articles with a new, seventy-page essay called, in which he recounted the saga of the publication. In 1983, on the occasion of the twentieth commemoration of the president’s death, he wrote , a celebration of John F. Kennedy’s life.

Manchester unapologetically carried his devotion to JFK throughout his later life. In 1968, he worked for Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. That same year, it was announced that earned $750,000 for the new Kennedy Library. Mrs. Kennedy wrote him a warm letter which Manchester found profoundly moving. All was forgiven, and over the next twenty-five years, he attended Kennedy family marriages, celebrations, and memorials.

* * *

In September, 1962, Manchester wrote to Harry Scions of , I’ve completed my reconnaissance through the Krupp material and I’ll be most happy to do the series. This series was published in five monthly installments between October, 1964, and February, 1965. The book, , which ran to almost 1,000 pages, was not published until 1968 due to the writing and publication of . Work on this history of the German arms manufacturing dynasty was a welcome respite from the Kennedy controversy. allowed Manchester to draw on his skills as a newspaperman to do interviews and ferret out documents in libraries and archives.

Although he had been consumed with the Kennedy controversy and the writing of Krupp, the social upheavals of the 1960s affected Manchester deeply. His next work was , published in 1974, an attempt to synthesize the changes the United States had gone through in the forty years between 1932 and 1972. The book was well-received, although some criticized it for being too long. One reviewer called it a great hippopotamus of a book.

Having grappled with the quicksand of the ’60s, Manchester was on firm ground again with his next book, , about General Douglas MacArthur, published in 1978. World War II was, understandably, a constant theme in Manchester’s works, and this book came close to home in its discussion of the Pacific theater. also follows a pattern of fascination with iconic and powerful men: Mencken, the Rockefellers, the Krupps, Kennedy, and now MacArthur. was a success. It was generally considered to be a balanced and well-researched portrait of a complex man.

Writing extensively about the war in the Pacific led Manchester to an interest in re-visiting his own past there. In a letter to his agent, in 1978 he wrote, Like the killer returning to the scene of his crime—the analogy is not inexact—I want to revisit the Pacific battlefields of World War II. My purpose is not nostalgic. Time can never blur my jagged memories of those years. How can one feel nostalgic about terror? My motive is very different. It is an inquiry into one of the most fascinating aspects of our national character: the yearning to find meaning in the ashes of our youthful past. agreed to finance the trip and publish his story of a tour of the WWII battlefields in the Pacific in which he described how they had changed. The account appeared in the May, 1979 issue. , the memoir that grew from this experience, was published in 1980.

Manchester began work on his next project, (the Churchill series that was inspired perhaps by a chance meeting with the British statesman during a shipboard transatlantic crossing in 195) in April, 1980. The size and scope of this project was monumental and threatened, at times, to overwhelm its creator, along with the hardworking assistants, editors, and copy-editors who worked with him. Between 1980 and 1987, drafts were written, edited, and the first two Churchill books, and , were published. As always, Manchester was meticulous about his choice of words; his ability to evoke a setting never failed him. However, it was getting increasingly difficult for him to create a coherent story line. His notes on his attempts at the third and final volume of the series, , make a poignant commentary:

For the next eight years he struggled in declining health to complete . Finally, in August of 2001, he announced that he was not able to finish it. He died on June 2, 2004.

The last book that Manchester published had nothing to do with Churchill or even the twentieth century. It was a slim volume about the Middle Ages titled , published in 1992. Like many of his preceding books, it was a best seller. As he said in his author’s note, Actually, at the outset I had no intention of writing it at all. In the late summer of 1989, while toiling over another manuscript—the last volume of a biography of Winston Spencer Churchill—I fell ill. After several months in and out of hospitals, I emerged cured but feeble, too weak to cope with my vast accumulation of Churchill documents. Medical advice was to shelve that work temporarily and head south for a long convalescence. I took it.

By any measure, the life of William Manchester was a rich and creative one. He wrote eighteen books, many of them best sellers, several of them translated into multiple languages. He wrote countless magazine articles and was much sought after as a speaker and literary expert. He traveled the world and met powerful and interesting people. He received a Guggenheim fellowship and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He was awarded six honorary doctorates, including one from Wesleyan in May, 2002. Wesleyan was his home for more than forty years. He was a writer in residence, a member of the history department faculty, and an avid supporter of Olin Memorial Library. It was a successful partnership.