Dinner in Camelot
The Night America's Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
In April 1962, President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy hosted forty-nine Nobel Prize winners—along with many other prominent scientists, artists, and writers—at a famed White House dinner. Among the guests were J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was officially welcomed back to Washington after a stint in the political wilderness; Linus Pauling, who had picketed the White House that very afternoon; William and Rose Styron, who began a fifty-year friendship with the Kennedy family that night; James Baldwin, who would later discuss civil rights with Attorney General Robert Kennedy; Mary Welsh Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s widow, who sat next to the president and grilled him on Cuba policy; John Glenn, who had recently orbited the earth aboard Friendship 7; historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who argued with Ava Pauling at dinner; and many others. Actor Frederic March gave a public recitation after the meal, including some unpublished work of Hemingway’s that later became part of Islands in the Stream. Held at the height of the Cold War, the dinner symbolizes a time when intellectuals were esteemed, divergent viewpoints could be respectfully discussed at the highest level, and the great minds of an age might all dine together in the rarefied glamour of “the people’s house.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The April 1962 dinner hosted by President John and Jackie Kennedy for 49 Nobel laureates and other intellectuals was, in the president's oft-quoted words, "the most extraordinary collection of talent that has ever been gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." Esposito, who served in various roles in three presidential administrations, sets the contextual scene: the Kennedys' youthful vigor and glamour, the remnants of McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, and a far more unified media landscape than today's (80 million Americans had watched Jackie's tour of the White House a few months earlier). Then he narrates the dinner's importance to several figures. For physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," the dinner represented a "release... from political purgatory." For writer James Baldwin, the evening ultimately led to his arranging a meeting between Robert Kennedy and African-American leaders that sensitized Kennedy to black concerns. There's no shortage of A-list glamour, but repetition (it is mentioned three times that White House social secretary Letitia Baldrige referred to the evening as the "brains' dinner") and somewhat limp prose make parts of the book a slog. Still, this is a fascinating look back at a time when intellect and culture were respected in the inner sancta of American power. Photos.
