cover image Dinner in Camelot: The Night America’s Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House

Dinner in Camelot: The Night America’s Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House

Joseph A. Esposito. ForeEdge, $29.95 (256p) ISBN 978-1-5126-0012-4

The April 1962 dinner hosted by President John and Jackie Kennedy for 49 Nobel laureates and other intellectuals was, in the president’s oft-quoted words, “the most extraordinary collection of talent that has ever been gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Esposito, who served in various roles in three presidential administrations, sets the contextual scene: the Kennedys’ youthful vigor and glamour, the remnants of McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, and a far more unified media landscape than today’s (80 million Americans had watched Jackie’s tour of the White House a few months earlier). Then he narrates the dinner’s importance to several figures. For physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” the dinner represented a “release... from political purgatory.” For writer James Baldwin, the evening ultimately led to his arranging a meeting between Robert Kennedy and African-American leaders that sensitized Kennedy to black concerns. There’s no shortage of A-list glamour, but repetition (it is mentioned three times that White House social secretary Letitia Baldrige referred to the evening as the “brains’ dinner”) and somewhat limp prose make parts of the book a slog. Still, this is a fascinating look back at a time when intellect and culture were respected in the inner sancta of American power. Photos. Agent: Roger Williams, the Roger Williams Agency. (Apr.)