In my last post here, I spoke of my favorite author, Stephen King. That was in the realm of fiction, though. I also mentioned and told a little about my most favorite non-fiction author, William Raymond Manchester, a brilliant historian and biographer. And between Manchester and King, there are no other authors that have as many books in my personal library than them.
Surprisingly, being the avid reader and wannabe historian I am, I’d never heard of William Manchester. It was only by serendipity that I discovered Manchester. I went to my favorite used-book store in search of Stephen King book and ran across a two-volume book set by William Manchester entitled The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972. What caught my attention was the dates, ’32 thru ’72, spanning the beginning of my mother’s life in the Great Depression through my teenage years and the beginning of the fall of Tricky Dick President Nixon. So I couldn’t help but grab ’em up and to my delight, looking back on it, that was the beginning of a great relationship between me and Manchester.
The Glory and the Dream chronicles the lives of those whom Tom Brokaw later dubbed the “greatest generation”, who then fathered the baby boomers after WWII, then followed those two generations through the placid ’50’s, into the swinging ’60’s, finishing with the turbulent ’70’s. This book captures all facets of those decades in a way I’ve never seen done better and I’ve probably read it at least a dozen times without boredom.
William Manchester served in the Pacific with the Marines in WWII, following in the footsteps of his father who had been a Marine in WWI. He was nearly mortally wounded on Okinawa, and while recuperating in a naval hospital he met another wounded vet, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, beginning a friendship that lasted until President Kennedy’s assassination, which later led to one of Manchester’s most sold works.
After the war, Manchester returned to college and earned his master’s degree, writing his thesis on H.L. Mencken whom he met while working as a reporter at The Baltimore Sun.
Mencken, who came to be known as the “sage of Baltimore, was a journalist, satirist, critic, political pundit and as a scholar he penned The American Language, a multi-volume work on how the English language is spoken in the United States. But it was his satirical reporting on the Scopes Trial, which he dubbed the “Monkey Trial”, which earned him notoriety. He actually dubbed himself a “conservative anarchist”.
Manchester and Mencken became good friends and Mencken mentored Manchester, encouraging him to write. That led to Manchester’s first book which was, ironically, Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H.L Mencken, following up on what he wrote for his master’s thesis. He then wrote four novels, interspersed with his second historical work, A Rockefeller family Portrait, From John D. to Nelson. But after his fourth novel, he concentrated on history.
Such works include Portrait of a President: John F. Kennedy in Profile; The Death of a President: November 20 – 25; The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty that Armed Germany at War; as mentioned earlier, The Glory and the Dream : A Narrative History of America, 1932–1972; Controversy and Other Essays in Journalism; American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964; Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War; One Brief Shining Moment: Remembering Kennedy; A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance—Portrait of an Age; and his last project before his death was his three-volume biography of Churchill, The Last Lion, of which he’d only completed two volumes, turning the last one over to his writer friend Paul Reid to complete after having suffered a couple of strokes. Of these, my most favorites, including The Glory and the Dream, is Goodbye Darkness and The Death of a President.
Goodbye Darkness is autobiographical, based around his late ’70’s journey across the Pacific visiting the islands the Marines fought their bloody battles on in WWII, prompted by the nightmares he began having twenty-some years after his experiences on Okinawa. In those dreams, he’s visited by his youthful alter ego whom he dubbed “the sarge”, who was questioning just what had happened in those years since his bloody baptism of fire and near death. What he was describing about those nightmares is what later came to be diagnosed as PTSD and it’s interesting that he didn’t suffer from it until long after the fact of his exposure to the events that led to the dreams. But at the journey’s end on the island he fought, Okinawa, the final story is told that helps in understanding what eventually led to his nightmares.
But of them all, I consider The Death of a President to be his magnum opus. If anything, Manchester was a consummate researcher to go along with his prolific writing, sometimes working in fifty hour stretches before stopping, of which he exclaimed that he loved doing. All of his books are full of great detail and The Death of a President is a painstakingly detailed account of JFK’s final two days of life, followed by the three days of national disbelief and mourning, ending on midnight of the Monday on the day of his burial when Jackie and his brother Robert placed a bouquet by the eternal flame. It’s a powerful work, and if you lived through those historic and traumatic four days and have not ever read this book, you’d do well to check it out for it will give you a true picture of just what went down during that tragic time.
As an interesting aside, due to his research and study of Oswald’s personality and psychology, along with the fact that he and Oswald both had training as Marine riflemen, he concluded that Oswald had acted on his own with no accomplice. And in a 1992 letter to the New York Times, Manchester, in an attempt to put to rest any idea of a conspiracy, wrote: “Those who desperately want to believe that President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy have my sympathy. I share their yearning…But if you put the murdered President of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something. A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever that there was one.”
It’s sad that he was unable to finish his last work about Churchill due to having had a couple of strokes. And before his friend was able to complete the final volume, Manchester passed away. I vividly remember hearing the news of his death. It struck me extra hard because I was halfway through rereading Goodbye Darkness for probably the tenth time. I felt as if I’d lost a lifelong friend. I’ve yet to read that final volume on Churchill; it just wouldn’t be the same. But I owe it to his memory and need to keep that flame of literary friendship alive. And that’s the thing about books and the words that make them up: though the author may be dead and long gone, they will live forevermore as long as there are libraries and guys like me who have a love of the written word. So…so long, Bill. But we will meet again as soon as I make it to the library and pick up volume three of The Last Lion, and I can hardly wait to renew our acquaintance.
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