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did not respond sympathetically. He said, “I'm going to do it and you can't stop me--that's all there is to it.” I don't think that she's ever felt the same way toward me since. In some strange way, it seemed to her that I wasn't being faithful to the clan or something.

At any rate, we never did do the book. First, he put it aside when the Manchester book came along. I told him, “Manchester has taken the whole play away from your book. He's virtually done your book.” He replied angrily that he had all kinds of new leads to the Secret Service and a lot of inside facts that Manchester didn't have. Anyway, first he decided he was going to do A Day in the Life of President Johnson. We already had reluctantly done a book of his columns which was, like most books of unrelated stale columns, a deserved dud. Anyway, I think that Bishop's at best a fourthrater. He's been lucky. His column to me has always seemed rather cheap. Then, when the Johnson book came along, we had a contract with him; but the enthusiasm at Random House, to put it mildly, was lukewarm. The appeal of A Day in the Life of President Johnson was going to be limited, to say the least. The book came out, was bypassed by both critics and the public and Bishop blamed us for not giving it the publicity and advertising which we had given him for the Kennedy book, which, of course, was a pre-ordained success.

Then a very annoying thing happened. Last Winter, Phyllis and I flew down to Florida for the last night of Frank Sinatra's engagement at the Hotel Fontainebleu. That's the