Dinner in Camelot

Dinner in Camelot: The Night America's Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House by Joseph Esposito  252 pp.

On April 29, 1962, President and Mrs. Kennedy hosted the U.S. and Canadian Nobel Prize winners and other distinguished scientists and literary figures at a state dinner at the White House. Included in the group were Linus Pauling & his wife Ava Helen, who picketed the White House earlier that day, J. Robert Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scientists, John Glenn, Robert Frost, James Baldwin, Pearl S. Buck, John Dos Passos, William Styron. This account of the evening details the dinner, the entertainment - actor Fredric March performing literary excerpts from Ernest Hemingway and other Nobel Literature Prize winners, and the gathering afterward in the Kennedys' private rooms. The gathering exemplified the idealism and the ideals of an era when "intellectuals were esteemed and divergent viewpoints could be respectfully discussed at the highest level." An afterword contains "a message for us in today's severely polarized political climate." The dinner is perhaps best remembered for Kennedy's called the event "the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge that has ever gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."