Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Robert Kennedy
Maeve McKean, Robert F. Kennedy’s granddaughter, and her young son were lost in a tragic boating accident.
On a windy afternoon this April, Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, a vibrant blue-eyed 40-year-old, and her son Gideon hopped into a canoe to chase a ball that had blown into the water. But the wind and waves swept them into the Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis. Then they disappeared. Read more >>
In a pivotal trip in 1967, Sen. Kennedy saw first-hand the effects of poverty in the Delta.
Rob Read more >>
CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite underwent a dramatic change of heart during the Vietnam War—and in doing so, changed the face of broadcast journalism
On February 6, 1965, Vietcong guerrillas attacked the U.S. base at Pleiku, killing eight American soldiers and wounding 126. The Johnson administration quickly retaliated, commencing another vicious cycle of lightning reprisals and military escalations. Suddenly U.S. Read more >>
The Cuban Missile Crisis as seen from the Kremlin
THE WORLD CAME CLOSE TO A NUCLEAR CLASH THREE times during the half-century of the Cold War. The first was in Korea when China’s intervention snatched imminent victory from General MacArthur. Read more >>
Organized crime? Mafia? A lot of people, including J. Edgar Hoover, said it was mere folklore—until one day in 1957 an alert New York state trooper set up a roadblock in a small town. What followed was low comedy with high consequences.
As Hillary Clinton campaigns for a New York Senate seat, she’d do well to study the career of another effective outsider
New Yorkers knew they were in for a long, hot summer this year when Hillary Rodham Clinton made an early political foray into their state and was greeted by demonstrators whom the state GOP had urged to dress up as blackflies. One of Mrs. Read more >>
If he’d been the closest companion of the president of IBM, you might happen across his name in a privately printed memoir. But LeMoyne Billings was John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s best friend from Choate to the White House—and that makes him part of history.
CROATE, 1935 Read more >>
Here is the federal government’s own picture history of our times—and it tells us more than you might think
FEW ARE AWARE of a major publishing project that has been sponsored by the federal government and some of our leading citizens over the past eight decades. Read more >>
As this issue goes to press, Governor George Wallace of Alabama lies gravely wounded by bullets fired from the handgun of a would-be assassin while he was campaigning for the Presidential nomination in Maryland. Read more >>
Harry Houdini, the American magician and escape artist who became famous in the first quarter of this century, spent a great deal of his time exposing frauds. Read more >>