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."

An Unfinished Love Story

 

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin 480 pp.

This book was fascinating to me since, while I remembered the major events of the 1960s, I was a child during that time (the assassination of JFK happened when I was in kindergarten). I have read other books by Doris Kearns Goodwin but was not familiar with her husband, Richard Goodwin, a man who was so instrumental in the world of Democratic politics in the 1960s. When her husband reached his 80s the two of them began go through his stored files of his work and memorabilia of his days in Washington as a  clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Then as counsel for the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce where he investigated the television quiz show scandals of the 1950s. (Goodwin was portrayed by actor Rob Morrow in the 1994 film "Quiz Show.") After that he became one of the speechwriters and advisors for Senator John Kennedy during his campaign for the Presidency. Kennedy appointed him Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs where he tried to discourage Kennedy from ordering the Bay of Pigs operation. Goodwin aided the First Lady in many tasks most notably in the relocating of Egyptian temples that would have been flooded by the Aswan Dam project. He was also instrumental in the planning of the dinner for Nobel Prize winners (Dinner in Camelot) and finally arranging for the eternal flame Jackie Kennedy requested for her husband's grave. Following Kennedy's death Goodwin became Secretary General of the Peace Corp until he accepted a job with President Lyndon Johnson where he was credited with writing some of LBJ's most important and effective speeches before resigning because of differences over the Vietnam War. After some work in academia, Goodwin, ever against the war in Vietnam, joined Eugene McCarthy's campaign for President leaving when his friend Bobby Kennedy decided to run after LBJ announced he would not seek re-election. Upon Kennedy's assassination in Los Angeles, Goodwin went back to the McCarthy campaign. Following those years he taught and wrote, producing articles, books, and a play. He married Doris Kearns, who had worked with LBJ on his memoir, in 1975 and they were married until his death in 2018. I learned so much from this book. I never knew that LBJ pushed the Fair Housing Bill through Congress on the heels of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination or how much friction existed between LBJ and Bobby Kennedy. And I didn't know anything about the man, Richard (Dick) Goodwin. I listened to the audiobook, read by the author.