In the spring of 1945, as the war in Europe staggered toward its end, thousands of American soldiers who had survived Hitler's prison camps believed they were finally going home. Many never did. After the German surrender, after the parades and the telegrams to American mothers promising their sons were coming home, those sons quietly … Read more
FORT WORTH, Texas — In the final hours before he flew to Dallas to die, President John F. Kennedy stood in a modest hotel suite on the eighth floor of the Hotel Texas and calmly described to his wife and one of his closest aides how a man could assassinate a president. It was the … Read more
The summer of 1955 was scorching in Chicago, but nothing burned hotter than a mother's grief. Mamie Till Mobley sat in her small apartment on the South Side, staring at a telephone that seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. Her hands trembled as she lifted the receiver. She had gotten a number from a woman … Read more
In October 1959, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson was in his seventh year of a 15-year sentence at Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. He was 54 years old, serving time for federal narcotics conspiracy, one of roughly 260 inmates held at the maximum-security prison on an island in San Francisco Bay. Johnson had arrived at Alcatraz in June 1953. … Read more
On April 17, 2021, inside St. George's Chapel at Windsor, 30 mourners sat spaced apart under pandemic rules. A widowed queen sat entirely alone. Every other face belonged to a Windsor, a Mountbatten, or a cousin carried down from some scattered German house. And yet, listed 30th, neither born to the family nor married into … Read more
In a Boston archive, there is an index card with John F. Kennedy's name written in his mother's hand. It lists scarlet fever, whooping cough, measles, dental work, and shoe size. It is an inventory, and it contains no affection. America called Rose Kennedy the most devoted mother in the country. Her second son grew … Read more
Shortly after midnight on November 15, 1942, an American battleship stood in the darkness between Guadalcanal and Savo Island, her main guns trained on a target she could not see. Her radar could see it, though, tracking a large enemy ship at 8,400 yards. On the bridge of the targeted vessel, no one knew the … Read more
For decades, the Kennedy name has carried a weight that few American families can match. It evokes power, glamour, tragedy, and a deep Irish Catholic tradition. To marry into that world is to enter a whirlwind of privilege and expectation. But what happens when the fairy tale ends and an outsider finds herself fighting not … Read more
In the spring of 1945, in a stone cellar somewhere east of the Rhine, a nineteen-year-old American medic knelt on a dirt floor and cleaned a superficial wound on the arm of a Waffen-SS officer. The medic was unarmed. He wore a red cross on his helmet and another on an armband. The officer, captured … Read more
Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon was born on August 4, 1900, the ninth of ten children of the Earl of Strathmore. Her childhood moved between a house in Hertfordshire and Glamis Castle in the Scottish glens, an ancient seat trailing centuries of legend behind it. She grew up in a tumble of brothers and sisters, in … Read more