In September 1969, at his ranch in Stonewall, Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson sat down with Walter Cronkite, then the most trusted figure in American news. Five years had passed since the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President Kennedy. Johnson had created that commission, appointed its members, and endorsed its … Read more
On November 22, 1963, at 12:38 p.m., the presidential limousine arrived at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. The car was a 1961 Lincoln Continental, code name SS 100X. Inside sat President John F. Kennedy, mortally wounded. Governor John Connally had also been shot. Jackie Kennedy was still cradling her husband's shattered head. The backseat was covered … Read more
On the morning of October 19, 1962, President John F. Kennedy sat in the Cabinet Room of the White House and watched five men in uniform walk through the door. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had requested the meeting, and Kennedy knew what they wanted. They wanted war. Four days earlier, a U-2 spy plane … Read more
When news of President John F. Kennedy's assassination reached Moscow on November 22, 1963, the Soviet leadership did not celebrate. They panicked. Three gunshots had rung out in Dallas at 12:30 p.m. Within minutes, the news was racing across the Atlantic. But the fear in the Kremlin was not born of guilt. It was born … Read more
At 10:30 a.m. on March 22, 1962, J. Edgar Hoover walked into the Oval Office carrying a thin manila folder. Inside was information about President John F. Kennedy's relationship with a woman named Judith Campbell Exner. Exner was also sleeping with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, the same mobster the FBI was supposed to be … Read more
Newly surfaced historical accounts are casting a stark light on one of the most overlooked chapters of the Second World War: the story of Second Lieutenant Reba Zitella Whittle, a young flight nurse from Texas who became the only American servicewoman captured by German forces on the Western Front, held for four months in the … Read more
On a wet December morning in 1942, a chambermaid at the Dorchester Hotel found a beautiful woman half-conscious in her suite with an empty bottle of sleeping tablets beside the bed. Within a day, the woman was dead. Within a week, Britain’s most powerful press baron arrived at her door, sorted her papers, and quietly … Read more
In September 1940, London was burning every night. German bombs cracked open the sky above the city, families dragged their children into underground shelters, and hospitals ran out of beds. Streets that had existed for centuries were reduced to rubble by morning. The British people were bleeding, but they were not surrendering. Inside Nazi intelligence … Read more
On January 20, 1953, Washington, D.C., shivered under a pale winter sky as more than 100,000 Americans lined Pennsylvania Avenue to witness the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. To the world, Ike was the legendary Supreme Allied Commander who had liberated Europe and defeated Hitler, a towering figure of American democracy. But behind the heavy … Read more
On April 15, 1945, a British soldier pushed open a gate in northern Germany and stepped into a place that should never have existed in the modern world. What he found there would haunt him for the rest of his life. Thirteen thousand corpses had been left to rot in the open, alongside sixty thousand … Read more