Expanded biography of Pres. Kimball published

SALT LAKE CITY — For those who were hoping for a juicy and controversial history of President Spencer W. Kimball's administration as head of the LDS Church, the newly printed "Working Draft" of a 2005 biography may be a disappointment.

The printing of the "Working Draft" manuscript of Edward L. Kimball's "Lengthen Your Stride: The Presidency of Spencer W. Kimball" adds detail and presents a more complete look at President Kimball, but gives little in the way of controversy.

__IMAGE1__Edward Kimball, a son of President Kimball, spoke on Jan. 20 at Benchmark Books about how Mormon church-owned Deseret Book printed his biography — and included a CD ROM of his twice-as-long unedited manuscript "Working Draft." The current expanded book is a print version of the CD's "Working Draft."

In 1972, Bookcraft Publishing recruited Edward Kimball to compile his father's sermons. The book was titled "Faith Precedes the Miracle." Kimball suggested the possibility of a biography of President Kimball, who was then a member of the LDS Church's Quorum of the Twelve.

"Biography doesn't sell," was Bookcraft's response.

"Later, he was proven wrong," Edward Kimball said.

Kimball worked with his nephew, Andrew E. Kimball Jr., to write a biography anyway. "I set out to write family history for my parents," Edward Kimball said. "We put together our efforts to create a family-oriented biography."

And then President Harold B. Lee died.

The market for a biography about an apostle may be small, but when Spencer W. Kimball became the president of the church in 1973, the interest in a biography increased. It took about four years for Edward and Andrew Kimball to finish the book "Spencer W. Kimball."

"It was well received," Edward Kimball said. "I was amazed at how many people said that they felt good after reading the book because it was candid and it gave them a sense that maybe they could make something out of themselves as well."

President Kimball was 78 years old when he became the leader of the church. "He's going to live a couple years more and then be gone," Edward Kimball remembered thinking about his father. "So what we'll do, we'll put out a revised edition with a last chapter — a very few pages to sort of finish the story. But he kept living. On and on."

President Kimball died in November 1985. About a decade later, Edward Kimball retired from teaching at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at BYU. He wanted to take all the material he had been collecting since 1977 and write the last chapter on his father.

The "chapter," however, kept on getting longer and longer as he worked on it. The writing neared completion in 2001. At first Kimball leaned toward having BYU Press publish the book. He also considered Deseret Book, but was worried about cutting the manuscript for size and perhaps some content. "One of the things that I worried about all this writing I had done and all this stuff I had collected that was pure gold could hardly be included in a book of normal size for a normal press."

But, it was painfully obvious to Kimball that the manuscript had to be cut to a publishable size. He did it himself and submitted the shorter, halved version to Deseret Book, which was hesitant at first to publish it. But after a review, Deseret Book decided to go ahead with the publication of "Lengthen Your Stride: The Presidency of Spencer W Kimball."

Kimball agreed as well, with the stipulation that if Deseret Book wanted a manuscript "change of consequence," they could amicably part ways and allow another publisher such as BYU Press to print it.

Kimball, however, brooded about all the "golden words" he had cut out earlier. While driving one day, he thought of a solution. "It just came into my mind that you could put the whole thing on a CD ... and put the CD in the back of a printed book."

Kimball's "golden words" — including more footnotes and interviews — would be accessible for more serious students while the printed volume would be a more marketable size.

"Somebody will ask, 'What compromises did you make in writing the book? What juicy tidbits are there hidden in the CD that were rejected (for the print version)?'" Kimball said.

Besides the bulk of material that he had removed on his own, Kimball said the Deseret Book editor made an initial request for only 66 changes. "Many of those things were typographical errors, which any editor would have asked for."

Kimball was eager to make most of the changes. He was also "quite happy" to edit passages that identified people who were not essential to the story. In other instances, he added a few sentences that clarified the context. A few specifics were generalized.
"Sometimes it was as simple as changing 'irate' to 'annoyed,'" Kimball said.

On some items Kimball prevailed. Most of the other disagreements were solved by the inclusion of an unprecedented "Publisher's Preface" to the book — a sort of disclaimer that explained how the publisher and the author had differing points of view on certain events but that they compromised on some issues after "energetic" debate.

"It was a nice preface," Kimball said. "That relieved me of the concern ... that anything I said was to be taken as church authorized, when I ... meant for it to be my understanding or my viewpoint."

This left only about three items of disagreement. Kimball agreed that one item was too ambiguous, and the other two were quotations that they decided to merely cite in footnotes.

"People hearing about all the changes that were made in the manuscript are looking for something juicy," Kimball said, "you are going to have to look hard."

And many people did look at the longer "Working Draft" on the CD and, if they didn't find a lot of "juicy" controversy, they did find expanded stories, quotes, footnotes and other information.

Curt A. Bench, owner of Benchmark Books, received permission from Deseret Book and Kimball to publish the entire text of the CD ROM's "Working Draft" as a printed book. "Probably a lot of you ... are like me: You don't like to read off a computer screen," Bench said. "I knew there would be a number of other people like me who would want an actual book where you can smell the ink and the binding and hold it in your hands."

Bench's Benchmark Books published only 400 copies of the hefty 665-page book, which sells for $99.95 per copy. The book is designed well and is about twice as long as the LDS mass-market version Deseret Book printed.The text is printed in two colors to make it easy to see the differences between the versions. Blue ink indicates the text that was printed in Kimball's shorter version. Black ink is for the parts that were in Kimball's longer "Working Draft" version.

"It is an effort to pay tribute to my father," Kimball said, "to see that there was an adequate record of his life's work."

E-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com