There is a photograph from 1938 that almost nobody talks about. It was taken during a period of European history when the old world was unraveling and nobody yet knew what would replace it. A young man stands beside a young woman on one of the most important days of her life. He is poised, … Read more
On November 25, 1963, the day of President John F. Kennedy's funeral, the nation watched in collective grief. The procession wound through the streets of Washington, where hundreds of thousands of mourners had filed past the flag-draped coffin in the Capitol Rotunda. Television images from that day were seared into American memory. Jacqueline Kennedy, composed … Read more
In April 1945, outside Dachau in Bavaria, Germany, Gen. George S. Patton walked through a liberated forced labor camp. He had done this before, too many times. He walked with his aide and two guards, his expression fixed and his pace controlled, the way a man walks when he has learned to keep walking no … Read more
For more than sixty years, one of the most disturbing chapters of the Holocaust remained sealed behind a wall of silence, shame, and bureaucratic secrecy — a system of forced prostitution inside Nazi concentration camps that was designed, approved, and administered at the highest levels of the SS. Newly resurfaced historical documentation and decades of … Read more
Gen. George S. Patton ordered captured SS officers to the back of the food line inside a German prisoner-of-war compound after they formally complained that standard camp rations were beneath their rank, according to camp records and witness accounts, in an incident that ended with the three men eating last under armed guard. The confrontation … Read more
On July 13, 1960, at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, Lyndon Baines Johnson sat in his suite chain-smoking, surrounded by his closest aides. The Democratic convention had just nominated John F. Kennedy for president. Johnson, the most powerful Senate majority leader in American history, was about to receive a visit that would throw his … Read more
In February 1945, on a frozen front line in eastern France, Private Danny Russo of Brooklyn had not eaten a hot meal in four days. His K rations had run out two days earlier, and the resupply convoy that was supposed to reach him never arrived. He sat in his foxhole with his rifle, his … Read more
On November 8, 1960, the national networks called the presidential race too close to call by 11:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 43-year-old senator from Massachusetts, was running within fractional margins against Vice President Richard Nixon in the states whose electoral votes would decide the presidency. The popular vote would ultimately separate … Read more
Richard Nixon was in New York City monitoring the California primary results when word reached him shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, that Senator Robert F. Kennedy had been shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles — and the man who had just lost the toughest opponent he would have faced in November … Read more
On May 9, 1945, the war in Europe was over. Adolf Hitler was dead, and the Third Reich had collapsed. In a requisitioned German military barracks outside Munich, a formal surrender ceremony was about to take place. It would become one of the most explosive confrontations of the entire occupation. Fifty-three high-ranking Wehrmacht officers stood … Read more