About
Joseph A. Esposito is a historian, writer and educator. He served in three presidential administrations, most recently as a deputy undersecretary for international affairs at the U.S. Department of Education. He also held various positions over eleven years at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and was a working group chair for the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba. He has taught history at three colleges, and is currently an adjunct associate professor at Northern Virginia Community College. His book, Dinner in Camelot: The Night America's Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House (ForeEdge), was published in 2018 and audio book in 2019.
Featured Work
Dinner in Camelot: The Night America's Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House
Dinner in Camelot brings alive in vivid detail the largest and most important dinner of the Kennedy era. On April 29, 1962 forty-nine Nobel Prize winners were honored along with other leading American scientists, writers and thinkers. The guest list included Linus Pauling, who picketed the White House earlier in the day; J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose presence represented redemption from his political exile in the 1950s; John Glenn, the hero of the hour who recently orbited the earth; and such great writers as Robert Frost, James Baldwin, William Styron, Pearl Buck, Katherine Anne Porter and John Dos Passos. Baldwin formed a relationship with Robert Kennedy, who also was there, and that had an important subsequent impact on civil rights. President Kennedy called it “the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Not only a fascinating story, this evening had historical repercussions. The dinner also has a message for us today in a severely polarized political climate. Foreword by Rose Styron.
