What’s the hottest book right now in the world of used and out-of-print books? It’s the 1967 bestseller The Death of a President by William Manchester after it was featured in the current issue of Vanity Fair magazine.
The Vanity Fair article, called A Clash of Camelots, examines how John F. Kennedy’s widow asked Manchester to write the authorized account of JKF’s assassination. However, Manchester became entangled in a bitter battle with Jackie and Bobby Kennedy over the book’s content. The article looks at how The Death of a President ruined the author “physically, emotionally, and financially.”
The Death of a President is certain to be one of AbeBooks’ bestselling books for September. On AbeBooks.com at least, The Death of a President has out-sold Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol by more than four to one over the past few days since this issue of Vanity Fair was published.
Six hundred thousand copies of The Death of a President sold out within two months, and by the summer of 1967 it had sold more than a million copies. The reviews were full of guarded praise, mostly for Manchester’s exhaustive assemblage of detail.
Manchester wrote all about that bitter battle in his subsequent book “Controversy.”