A few weeks ago , the press reported aggressively on the fact that Kim Kardashian had visited the White House. Just as it had the visits of Kid Rock and Ted Nugent before her. With homage toDr. Seuss, Oh, how far we have fallen.

On April 29, 1962, John F. Kennedy welcomed a group of Nobel Prize winners to the White House. Other guests included William Styron, James Baldwin, Mary Welsh Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s widow, who sat next to the President and grilled him on Cuba policy. Also there were John Glenn, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Researcher Linus Pauling, and Pablo Casals. Actor Fredric March gave a public recitation after the meal,

Held at the height of the Cold War, the dinner celebrated American achievement, and symbolized a time when ideas and facts were esteemed, divergent viewpoints could be respectfully discussed and the great minds of an age might all dine together in the glamour of “the people’s house.”

It was about this event that Kennedy said, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House — with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

To revel for twenty minutes on what used to be, you’ll want to listen to Joesph Esposito, the author of Dinner in Camelot: The Night America's Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House. 

My conversation with Joseph Esposito:

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