Joseph A. Esposito

Harvard Book Store welcomes historian, writer, and educator JOSEPH A. ESPOSITO for a discussion of his new book Dinner in Camelot: The Night America's Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House.

About Dinner in Camelot

In April 1962, President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy hosted forty-nine Nobel Prize winners—along with many other prominent scientists, artists, and writers—at a famed White House dinner. Among the guests were J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was officially welcomed back to Washington after a stint in the political wilderness; Linus Pauling, who had picketed the White House that very afternoon; William and Rose Styron, who began a fifty-year friendship with the Kennedy family that night; James Baldwin, who would later discuss civil rights with Attorney General Robert Kennedy; Mary Welsh Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s widow, who sat next to the president and grilled him on Cuba policy; John Glenn, who had recently orbited the earth aboard Friendship 7; historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who argued with Ava Pauling at dinner; and many others. Actor Frederic March gave a public recitation after the meal, including some unpublished work of Hemingway’s that later became part of Islands in the Stream.

Held at the height of the Cold War, the dinner symbolizes a time when intellectuals were esteemed, divergent viewpoints could be respectfully discussed at the highest level, and the great minds of an age might all dine together in the rarefied glamour of “the people’s house.”

Praise

“Dinner in Camelot is a wonderful recounting of the greatest party of the 1960s. A real page-turner. Highly recommended!” —Douglas Brinkley, CNN presidential historian

“Joseph Esposito takes us back to a golden moment in time and makes it a fascinating metaphor for an age sadly lost. With deft strokes, he vividly portrays the glamour and grandeur, the vaulting ambition and brilliance (and, yes the pettiness and snobbery) of an evening when America reached its apogee of power and greatness.” —Evan Thomas, author of Being Nixon

“Re-creating a magical White House evening in 1962 when President and Mrs. Kennedy outshone dozens of Nobel laureates, Dinner in Camelot uses that event as a hinge of American culture in the twentieth century, tracing the paths that led to the dinner and those that sprawled away from it.” —David O. Stewart, author of The Summer of 1787