t3003

On the evening of January 17, 1961, three days before handing the presidency to John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower sat alone in the Oval Office. The White House was nearly empty. The transition briefings were finished and the boxes were packed. Eisenhower picked up a yellow legal pad and wrote seven words at the top … Read more

Inside a glass case at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston sits a piece of coconut shell. It was carved by hand, a distress message scratched into the husk in August 1943 after a Japanese destroyer split PT-109 in two in the Solomon Islands. That shell stayed on the Oval Office desk for … Read more

On May 23, 1953, under white linen tents at St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis, Massachusetts, 500 of America's most powerful political elites gathered to witness what the national press called the Catholic wedding of the decade. Eunice Kennedy, 31, drew the spotlight in a custom silk taffeta gown as she stood beside R. Sargent … Read more

On October 10, 1963, inside FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., Director J. Edgar Hoover reviewed a top-secret memorandum summarizing months of surveillance on one of the most influential men in America. The file included wiretaps, hotel recordings, and informants placed inside a civil rights organization. The subject was not a foreign spy. It was Martin … Read more

On October 20, 1968, under a gray autumn drizzle on the private Greek island of Skorpios, Jacqueline Kennedy walked down the aisle of the small Panagitsa church. The world's press watched from the Ionian Sea, stunned into silence. Five years after becoming America's icon of grief, the 39-year-old widow of John F. Kennedy was marrying … Read more

On June 23, 1972, Richard Nixon sat in the Oval Office as a secret tape recorder spun beneath his desk. H.R. Haldeman leaned forward, and Nixon gave the order that would eventually destroy his presidency. The Watergate arrests had just been reported. Five men had been caught inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Among them … Read more

On a damp autumn morning in 1974, an 84-year-old woman sat in a sunlit parlor in Hyannisport, Massachusetts. Her dress was tailored, her hair pinned into an immaculate wave, her back as rigid as iron. She was Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, matriarch of the most celebrated political dynasty in modern history. Rose had survived the violent … Read more

In October 1968, on the small Greek island of Skorpios, a wedding took place that was deliberately kept private. There was no press pool, no official photographers, and no estate witnesses. The woman walking toward the altar was the most recognizable widow in the world. The man waiting for her was not a senator, a … Read more

When Lyndon Baines Johnson died of a heart attack at his Texas ranch on January 22, 1973, the American public watched a carefully staged display of national mourning. Flags flew at half-mast, foreign dignitaries filled Washington National Cathedral, and military escorts carried the casket back to the family cemetery in Stonewall, Texas. The eulogies painted … Read more