President Harry S. Truman fired Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White on August 15, 1945, ending a twelve-year career that had shaped American monetary policy from the New Deal through Bretton Woods, after Treasury auditors flagged unauthorized currency operations that had placed American printing plates in Soviet hands and 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 the United States Treasury to … Read more
Granny Blackwater’s grandson was Thomas, a boy she had raised from infancy after his parents died. He grew up in her remote Kentucky mountain cabin, learning the healing arts with the same diligence he applied to farming and hunting. Thomas was her entire world. The trouble began when Vernon Crawford, the county’s political boss, decided … Read more
On November 22, 1963, Robert Kennedy was having lunch beside the pool at Hickory Hill in McLean, Virginia, with Attorney General Robert Morgenthau and an aide. They had just returned from a Justice Department conference on organized crime. His wife, Ethel, called him to the phone. J. Edgar Hoover was on the line. Kennedy picked … Read more
General George S. Patton had witnessed the worst of human destruction across a long and violent military career. He was a cavalryman forged in the trenches of the First World War and a commander who led armored columns through North Africa, Sicily, and Western Europe. Known to the world as "Old Blood and Guts," he … Read more
The German invasion of the Netherlands began on May 10, 1940, eight months after the start of the Second World War. German bombers struck military airfields and barracks around The Hague, while paratroopers were used to capture tactical points and support the advance of ground troops. Adolf Hitler justified the attack with a lie, claiming … Read more
On December 9, 1992, the British Prime Minister stood in the House of Commons and read a statement confirming what half the country already suspected. The Prince and Princess of Wales were separating. John Major delivered the statement in the flat, careful tone reserved for containing constitutional damage, and by that evening the palace press … Read more
The year was 1968. Robert F. Kennedy was running for president and was the favorite to win the Democratic nomination. He had survived the loss of his brother, years of political conflict with Lyndon Johnson, and the chaos of the antiwar movement that was tearing the Democratic Party apart. By the spring of that year, … Read more
The British 11th Armored Division liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945, southwest of Bergen in Nazi Germany. The camp would come to epitomize the true bestiality and horrors of the Nazi regime and its death camps. When British forces entered the camp, they found 13,000 unburied dead bodies and almost 60,000 prisoners … Read more
In May 1945, the war in Europe was over. The guns were silent, Hitler was dead, and the Nazi regime had collapsed. In Berlin and along the Elbe River, American and Russian soldiers hugged, danced, and drank vodka and whiskey together. The world was celebrating. But one man was not smiling. General George S. Patton … Read more
At 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, shots rang out in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. President John F. Kennedy was struck by two bullets and rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital. At 1:00 p.m., doctors pronounced him dead. Ninety-eight minutes later, at 2:38 p.m., Lyndon Baines Johnson stood in the cramped 16-foot cabin of the … Read more