Dinner in Camelot

The Night America's Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House

Joseph A. Esposito

• Publisher: ForeEdge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781512602555
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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 Actor Frederic March gave a public recitation after the meal, including some unpublished work of Hemingway's that later became part of Islands in the Stream.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."

CHAPTER ONE

America in Transition

THE SUN ROSE AT 5:59 AM on this first day of Daylight Savings Time. Most of the tenants in the eleven-story, half-century-old apartment building located at 35 Claremont Avenue in New York’s City’s Morningside Heights neighborhood were still asleep. But on the first floor Lionel and Diana Trilling were rushing about their stylish, book-lined, first-floor residence, dressing and packing.¹ They knew this would be a long, but notable day, starting with a nearly four-hour train trip to the nation’s capital, then changing clothes at a friend’s house, having dinner at the White House, and finally making a late-night return.

One of New York’s most prominent literary couples, “Li” and “Di” would be joining a group of writers, scientists, and scholars in paying tribute to Nobel Prize winners from the Western Hemisphere. The Trillings, both fifty-six, would be comfortable interacting with these intellectuals, many of them friends and colleagues. They also were expecting to enjoy this time with the president, who shared their liberal, but strongly anticommunist views.

Lionel was the better-known half of the couple. Long associated with the once left-leaning Partisan Review, he was a professor of English at Columbia. His most prominent book, The Liberal Imagination, provided a balanced postwar perspective on liberalism. Published twelve years earlier, it was a best-seller that remained popular and influential. “And,” according to one modern critic, “it changed the role of literature in American intellectual life.”²

His marriage to Diana Rubin in 1928 turned out to be a bumpy one, but she admired his intellect. Different in temperament from her husband, she was a tough, acerbic writer, one of the few prominent women writers of the period. The British novelist Martin Amis, who wrote an essay on her in the 1980s, said of the experience: “Whenever I announced my intention of going along to interview her, people looked at me with trepidation, a new respect, a certain holy dread,” he said. “I felt I was about to enter the lion’s den—or the den of the literary lioness, which is often just as dangerous.”³

Train travelers at the time departed from the majestic old Pennsylvania Station, a Beaux Arts structure created by the legendary architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White. The Trillings would have known about this firm because it also had created the master plan for Columbia University in the early 1890s. They would come across another magnificent example of their work that evening; McKim, Mead and White was responsible for the restoration of portions of the White House in 1902—including rooms that the Trillings would be visiting.⁴

As light streamed into the cavernous waiting room, the Trillings walked on the pink marble floors as they passed two large statues of Pennsylvania Railroad magnates Alexander Cassatt and Samuel Rea, sculpted by Adolph A. Weinman. Weinman had also designed the popular Winged Liberty or Mercury dime and Walking Liberty half-dollar coins, still in wide circulation in 1962; Lionel probably had a few jingling in his pocket.

On this particular morning, a streamlined GG1 locomotive of the Pennsylvania Railroad awaited the couple to pull their run on the Midday Congressional. The temperature had already soared to its daytime high of eighty degrees on this unusually warm spring day as the train departed at 11 am. The passengers in the fluted stainless-steel cars painted in Tuscan red with gold trim would make their way past Newark, Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore before arriving midafternoon at Washington’s Union Station; they would follow the same route that Amtrak would in the decades to come.

After getting settled in her coach seat, Diana Trilling was not feeling well, and that made her anxious. Another of her migraine attacks had hit, and she had taken a cocktail of medications to address it. After swallowing one of the tablets, the pink one, she panicked, realizing her supply was low. Worrying about tonight’s big event, would she run out if new attacks came later?

“I got nervous: suppose I passed out in the middle of the dinner party?” she recalled. “My headache was becoming quite severe, and I was alarmed because, if it followed its usual pattern, by eight o’clock I’d be very sick and by nine I’d be throwing up.”⁵

We don’t know how she passed those anxious hours on the train; but if she and Lionel were typical of well-educated train travelers on a Sunday train from Manhattan, they likely were clutching a copy of the New York Times, the “Gray Lady” that was enjoying its undisputed dominance of American journalism. In fact, it was must-reading for the largely Jewish liberal circle of thinkers and writers known as the New York Intellectuals, with which they were associated. Perhaps both read the newspaper during the trip, exchanging sections or—if Diana’s headache was too overwhelming—Lionel may have commented on portions to her.

The newspaper was not much different in appearance than it would be a half-century later, but it was heavier and larger. What they would have seen in the newspaper’s 474 pages would prepare them for what would be part of the conversations at dinner that night. The Times provided a snapshot of the nation and world during this period that was on the cusp of major transitions.

The train ride presented enough time to become acquainted with the events of the city, nation, and world as reported that day in the newspaper of record. Foremost was the lead story in the upper-far-left first column of the eight-column paper: an article reported that President Kennedy and Prime Minister Macmillan had decided to delay a summit meeting with the Soviet Union “because,” as E. W. Kenworthy wrote, “there was virtually no prospect of useful results.” A photo of the president, whom they would be seeing in a few hours, was prominently displayed, as he was conferring with the prime minister and other officials.⁶

Addressing the concern that Pauling and his fellow protesters were picketing at the same time—in Washington—the article noted that Macmillan expected that there would be no movement on a nuclear test ban treaty until both the United States and the Soviet Union completed a new round of testing.⁷ But anyone reading that newspaper that morning would have read about much more, reflecting the prominence of the discussions and concerns about nuclear testing. In fact, a photograph of Pauling holding aloft a “WE HAVE NO RIGHT TO TEST” sign was part of almost an entire page of related stories on page twenty-nine. The caption and article accompanying the photograph noted that the chemist-turned-activist would be at the dinner that night.⁸ The Trillings might have thought about that photo. Certainly it would prime them for what might come in a few hours.

The other articles on that page in the first section dealt with some of the preparations being undertaken at Christmas Island, a fifty-two-square-mile Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. Among those assisting was a contingent from Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb.⁹ It was there in the New Mexico settlement that two of the dinner guests that night, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer and Dr. Isidor I. Rabi, had held such prominent roles. Rabi had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1944. Both men were present at the Trinity test explosion in the desert in July 1945.

Both scientists, along with hundreds if not thousands of others associated with the Manhattan Project, had done their job well. In an adjacent article on the same page, a wire-service story reported on how accurate the subsequent aerial bombs had been. “With few exceptions, they have been on or satisfactorily close to the aiming point,” the article stated and then noted that just “two known misses have been reported publicly.”¹⁰

Oppenheimer and many of the scientists had immediately realized the horrific potential that was created by their work. At the moment of detonation of the bomb at the Trinity test site, the man who was the driving force behind it recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu work: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”¹¹

As the years wore on, more people around the world grew increasingly anxious about the potential horror. Protests such as those occurring in April 1962 were being replicated around the world. In the New York Times that day, the Trillings and more than one million readers could learn about three thousand protesters in Tokyo who even urged redefining relations with the United States as a result of the administration’s nuclear position.¹² They also could read about protests near the American Embassy in London and a report that three of the four national Indian newspapers criticized new US nuclear tests.¹³

There was an article addressing New York Senator Kenneth B. Keating’s argument that the United States should withhold foreign aid from those countries which criticize US nuclear policy and focus foreign aid money on “those nations which share our view of the world crisis.” Keating was a Republican, but a liberal one.¹⁴

The issue of nuclear testing was prominent and growing. That afternoon Adlai Stevenson, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, appeared on his regularly scheduled television program; and his guest, the head of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, commented on nuclear testing and recent discussions in Geneva, Switzerland.¹⁵ These discussions involved seventeen nations, including the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union.

You could not get away from the topic that day if you were exposed to newspapers, television, or radio. In addition to breaking news stories, there was extensive analysis of the current and anticipated tests, testing in general, and the superpower “propaganda war” in the “Review of the Week” section. The section was led by a front-page article, complete with a map that explained the nuclear detonation that had taken place the day before on Christmas Island. There also had been a blast on Friday, as well as the most recent underground explosion in Nevada. Additional tests were soon to begin on Johnston Island, an atoll in the North Pacific.¹⁶

This action was the administration’s response to the Soviet Union’s resumption of tests the past fall after a three-year hiatus. When Nikita Khrushchev turned down an offer to develop a new ban, Kennedy acted. The president succinctly stated the position of the United States: “If they [the Russians] persist in rejecting all means of true inspection, then we shall be left with no choice but to keep our own defensive arsenals adequate for the security of all free men.”¹⁷

The impact of resumption was enormous. An armada of one hundred ships was massed in the Pacific to support the US effort. Protests against the tests, predictably, came from the Soviet Union as well as in the form of demonstrations at home and abroad.¹⁸ Many would see all this as a further escalation of a continuing dangerous arms race.

In yet another article, Max Frankel, then a young reporter in the Washington bureau, discussed how an aggressive propaganda war was being waged by the two superpowers.¹⁹ But public concerns were increasing as the amount of radiation from this proliferation of tests continued to grow, as John W. Finney reported in yet a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: Camelot
• Preface
• Key Attendees at the Dinner at the White House, April 29, 1962
• Prologue: Heading to Dinner
• Chapter One: America in Transition
• Chapter Two: Camelot at Midpoint
• Chapter Three: Poetry, Prose, and Politics
• Chapter Four: America’s Queen and America’s Hero
• Chapter Five: Redemption and Promise
• Chapter Six: Is That Linus Pauling?
• Chapter Seven: “The Fire Next Time”
• Chapter Eight: A Galaxy of Geniuses
• Chapter Nine: An After-Party
• Chapter Ten: Lives Connected
• Epilogue: Nothing Like It Since
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Illustrations