Joseph A Esposito

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...