[Sample B: Approval/Signature Sheet] - George Mason University

answerable” for his research or narrative. 114 Manchester explained that the Kennedy
family sought what the book jacket called a “responsible writer” to gather together
recollections of the days immediately preceding and after the assassination. Manchester
had praised Kennedy in a character sketch of the president in his 1962 book Portrait of a
President, and apparently the Kennedy family felt he could be trusted with the task of
describing the assassination in a way acceptable to them. He received unprecedented
access to the participants in the drama, including Mrs. Kennedy.
Actually, despite the family’s misgivings, Manchester’s rendering of Kennedy
was hagiographic: the President was a god-king who died a martyr. Oswald, by contrast,
was depicted as barely human. The author’s contribution to the search for Oswald’s
motive was to blame the anti-Kennedy right-wing extremists in Dallas for influencing the
deranged, left-wing assassin.
In describing the late president, Manchester repeatedly evoked the imagery and
symbols of nobility and religion. For example, he used the Secret Service’s code words
for Kennedy and his administration as chapter titles, including JFK’s name “Lancer” and
the White House as “Castle.” Of course, in later years, the phallic imagery of “Lancer”
would also evoke Kennedy’s many reported romantic liaisons, which are not even hinted
at in The Death of a President. In describing Kennedy’s last White House social
occasion, Manchester quoted the lyrics of the Arthurian musical Camelot – “For one brief
shining moment that was known as Camelot,” which Jacqueline Kennedy would use to
114
William Manchester, The Death of a President, (New York: Harper and Row, 1967),
ix.
66