The first printing of William Manchester’s The Death of a President ran to a half million copies and reached stores in April 1967. I believe I bought mine with several weeks’ worth of my allowance, though perhaps it was a sixteenth birthday present. Whatever the case, so definitive was the book believed to be that I felt prompted to start composing my own epilogue on one of the volume’s blank endpapers: “November 7, 1967—Former Vice-President John Nance Garner, born November 22, 1868, died in Uvalde, Texas. He received Kennedy’s second to last phone call on his 95th birthday.”

Annotating a clothbound book constituted a big step up in literary luxury for me. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, published the previous year, and the last book to be a national event on the scale of Manchester’s, had sent me to my town’s little rental library (itself already something of an anachronism). My early perusal of Capote’s creation, for perhaps a nickel a day, provoked the jealousy of my English teacher. Even so, my possession of the first “nonfiction novel” was only temporary. The Manchester book was mine, and its 710 pages have been on my shelves for more than forty years.

Latter-day evidence that Capote’s book contained rather more fiction than its author let on has rendered it more controversial with the years: along with two movies of it, two more about it have been made. Manchester’s book is no longer much read, and the prepublication fracas over it is largely forgotten. And yet, at the time, the book gave rise to an emotional and widely publicized battle of editors, lawyers, and public images, one that put Manchester into the hospital for nervous exhaustion (Bayer Aspirin offered him an endorsement deal) and left many Americans ready to relinquish Jacqueline Kennedy, their...

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