The Bravery of Beverly Johnson View this email in your browser
A daily digest of things to discuss over drinks
January 20, 2020
To honor Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy, revisit the stories that shaped a nation, and the men and women who fought for civil rights, spoke truth to power, and changed the course of history—starting with Dr. King himself.
Following the Kennedy assassination, as Lyndon Johnson rallied his forces behind a historic civil rights bill, Martin Luther King Jr.'s battle for equality gathered strength across the South. In an excerpt from Pillar of Fire, the follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize–winning Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch recreates the drama of the struggle and the spirits of its warriors: FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the blueblood firebrand Mary Peabody, and a courageous seamstress, Georgia Reed, who carried its greatest hopes.
By the time Marie Colvin got herself smuggled into Syria last winter, to report on the slaughter for the London Sunday Times, she was a legend, for her style (the eye patch, the La Perla bra under the flak jacket) as well as her courageous dispatches championing the innocent victims of war. It would be her last story. Marie Brenner reveals the price Colvin paid for the work she couldn't give up.
As race riots swept the nation in the summer of 1967, its most beloved movie actor was Sidney Poitier, whose three films that year—To Sir, With Love; In the Heat of the Night; and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner—would also make him Hollywood's box office king. Charting Poitier's coolly uncompromising navigation of his symbolic status, Laura Jacobs recalls the pointed message he sent to white America.
Despite three decades of intense speculation, the identity of "Deep Throat"—the source who leaked key details of Nixon's Watergate cover-up to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—has never been revealed. Now, at age 91, W. Mark Felt, number two at the FBI in the early '70s, is finally admitting to that historic, anonymous role. In an exclusive, John D. O'Connor puts a name and face to one of American democracy's heroes, learning about the struggle between honor and duty that nearly led Felt to take his secret to the grave.
As America thrilled to the inauguration of its 44th president and a new first lady, the West Wing was filling with a kaleidoscopic army of policy aces, whiz kids, and veteran advisers, all focused on the long-haul, no-drama work to which Barack has called them. These are the civilian front lines of "We the People," photographed by Annie Leibovitz for the following pages. Maureen Orth assesses a moment, a White House, and a movement.
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