Family members, friends and colleagues said goodbye this June to William Manchester, a writer, a historian, father, husband and retired Wesleyan professor. Manchester died at his home in Middletown on June 1 at the age of 82.
Manchester first came to the University in 1955, working for the Wesleyan University Press as a managing editor. Soon he became an adjunct professor in the history department and a writer-in-residence.
Before coming to Wesleyan, Manchester worked as a reporter for many years with The Daily Oklahoman and The Baltimore Sun newspapers.
President Douglas Bennet recalled Manchester saying to him, “I just want to try books.”
Bennet said he has known Manchester closely since 1995.
Manchester’s first book, published in 1951, was a biography on the life of his friend and mentor at The Baltimore Sun. The book is titled “Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H.L. Mencken.”
H.L. Mencken was one of the most influential journalists and social thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century. He publicly renounced oppression and injustice in America with his libertarian political writings.
Manchester went on to become a prolific writer, producing an expansive list of essays, novels and historical biographies. His most notable works are his three volumes of biographies on the life of former President John F. Kennedy, his lengthy annals on Winston Churchill, and his memoir “Goodbye, Darkness,” published by Little Brown & Co.
Manchester’s memoir chronicles his service in World War II. In a 1980 interview with Don Swain for CBS Radio, Manchester said he enlisted in the U.S. Marines after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and assigned to a base in Guadalcanal, an island off the coast of the Philippines.
The memoir begins with Manchester in a helicopter flying over the Pacific waters some 35 years after World War II, returning to the very island where he had served in the Marines.
“I had suppressed for many years memories [about the war] I could not tolerate,” Manchester told Swain. “And one reason for going back to the Pacific and revisiting the island was to see if there was something that I left behind and to retrieve it.”
At the time of his death, Manchester was working on the third installment of his series of biographies on Winston Churchill.
In a eulogy that Bennet read at Manchester’s funeral service on June 13 at the Memorial Chapel, Bennet recalled an interview with Manchester run by The New York Times. In that interview, Manchester admitted that he was not well enough to finish the third Churchill biography.
“I wrote to him saying that I was profoundly moved by his bravery in his public acknowledgement,” Bennet said.
According to Bennet, “to admit he couldn’t practice his craft anymore” was of the most powerful and poignant confessions a writer such as Manchester can make.
“I would see him occasionally and he was completely lucid,” Bennet said. “If he could not write, he could still converse. We often talked about current issues. Politics was a main interest of his.”
Manchester’s colleagues also reported having great respect for him.
“Bill wrote brilliantly about General MacArthur and his own experiences in the Second World War,” said Nathanael Greene, Professor of History. “His works were intended to reach a broad audience […] and he had many thousands of devoted readers who read everything he wrote.”
The afternoon of Manchester’s death, host of National Public Radio’s (NPR) “All Things Considered” Melissa Block interviewed Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at the University of New Orleans, on his memories of Manchester.
“[Manchester] was a part of that elite group of historians …you could just be swept up by their prose,” Brinkley sad. “He was a prose stylist. [Manchester knew that the] greatest gift in history is to be a storyteller.”
Though he stopped teaching in the 1990s, Manchester remained involved in the Wesleyan community. He built a house on Pine Street in 1967 that was designed by Wesleyan faulty member and architect John Martin, where he lived until his death.
He also received many honors and awards, including the National Humanities Medal in 2002 and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Wesleyan.
Manchester is survived by two daughters, Laurie and Julie, and one son, John.
The NPR interview with Brinkley ended with a recording of a poem that Manchester himself had read on the air on the same station twenty years earlier.
The poem, Manchester said in the recording, is one written by an Irish poet that he encountered in his research on J.F.K.
The last stanza, Manchester admitted, haunted him since he first read it: “We thought you would never die/ Why did you leave us in our utmost need to handle life’s cruel blow?/ Sheep with no shepherd, snow shuts out the sky/ Why did you leave us? Why did you die?”
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