KENNEDY BOOK ‘REPULSIVE’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31346, 17 April 1967, Page 13

KENNEDY BOOK ‘REPULSIVE’

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

LONDON, April 16.

Britain’s Sunday newspaper critics today described William Manchester’s account of the death of President Kennedy as repulsive, tedious and pornographic—but admitted it was worth reading.

The television personality and author, Malcolm Muggeridge, wrote in the “Observer” that Mr Manchester’s “Death of a President”—due to be published in Britain tomorrow—was a “classic example of the pornography of power.” As with sex pornography, “everything is there except the,crucial point—in this particular case a death. We are led up to it in the minutest and most sanguinary details and away from it likewise in the minutest detail, but the death itself never seems to happen,” Mr Muggeridge wrote.

But, he said, his porno-

graphic reference meant no disrespect to Mr Manchester, whose study was meticulous and conscientious. “His business was to write the commentary for the last tragic sequences of a television spectacular, which he has expertly done,” he said. However, Mr Muggeridge said be found the < book “intrinsically tedious” and felt the satirical American play “Macßird” “gets nearer the Dallas tragedy than Mr Manchester, with all his painstakingness." “Macabre Memorial”

The “Sunday Express” called the book “a macabre memorial” in which all the most private and stomachturning details of operating theatre, embalmment and funeral grief were put on display in Mr Manchester’s preserving bottles. “It is repulsive—but it is fascinating too. One of the marks of human life is that we are intrigued by human death,” the newspaper added. The “Sunday Times” claimed that Mr Manchester was biased in favour of the Kennedys. “It would not be true to say that he denigrates Johnson or Johnson’s entourage, but his enthusiasm wanes when it comes to depicting them,” it said. “It is not history, but noone will be able to write the history of this time without it,” the "Sunday Times” added.