Curated playlist
American anti-communists
- John F. KennedyJohn Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas on the 22nd of November 1963, while riding in a presidential motorcade. He was 46 years old, and had served as the 35th president of the United States for less than three years. The man…
- Donald TrumpDonald Trump was born on the 14th of June 1946 at Jamaica Hospital in Queens, New York, the fourth child of a family that was already wealthy. He would grow up in a 23-room mansion, become a millionaire in inflation-adjusted terms before…
- Ronald ReaganRonald Wilson Reagan was born on the 6th of February 1911 in a rented apartment above a bakery in Tampico, Illinois, the younger son of a dreaming salesman and a devoted churchwoman. By the time he died on the 5th of June 2004, he had been…
- Richard NixonRichard Nixon was the only president in American history to resign from the office he held. On the 9th of August, 1974, he stepped away from the presidency under the weight of the Watergate scandal, a crisis rooted in a break-in at the…
- Jack KerouacJack Kerouac learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens, because the language of his Lowell, Massachusetts home was French. His parents, Leo and Gabrielle, were French Canadians, and around the house the…
- Jimmy CarterJimmy Carter was born on the 1st of October 1924, in the Wise Sanitarium in Plains, Georgia, where his mother worked as a registered nurse. That detail made him the first US president born in a hospital. It is a small but fitting fact for…
- Dwight D. EisenhowerDwight David Eisenhower drafted a message he hoped no one would ever read. On the eve of the D-Day landings on the 6th of June 1944, he wrote a short statement taking full personal responsibility if the assault on Normandy failed. 'If any…
- Elia KazanElia Kazan was born Elias Kazantzoglou in Constantinople on the 7th of September, 1909, to Cappadocian Greek parents whose surname derived from the Turkish word for "pot maker". His family arrived in the United States on the 8th of July,…
- Jack L. WarnerJack Leonard Warner ran Warner Bros. Studios for more than half a century, longer than any other pioneering Hollywood mogul. His career began with a pawned horse and a borrowed chair, and it ended with an estate valued at $15 million and a…
- John WayneMarion Robert Morrison weighed thirteen pounds when he was born at 224 South Second Street in Winterset, Iowa, on the 26th of May 1907. A fireman in Glendale, California, later renamed him for the dog he never went anywhere without, a huge…
- Lyndon B. JohnsonLyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States aboard Air Force One, just hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on the 22nd of November 1963. The photograph of that moment, taken…
- Woodrow WilsonWoodrow Wilson was three years old when he heard a man outside the Augusta parsonage announce in disgust that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war was coming. That earliest memory shaped everything: a boy growing up in the…
- Irving ThalbergIrving Thalberg was twenty years old when Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures, told him to take charge of the entire Los Angeles studio. In shock, Thalberg replied, "I'm what?" The young man already carried a death sentence. As…
- Harry S. TrumanHarry S. Truman became the 33rd president of the United States not by winning an election, but by walking into a room where Eleanor Roosevelt told him her husband was dead. He had been vice president for only 82 days. He had never been…
- John Foster DullesJohn Foster Dulles died on the 24th of May, 1959, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, having resigned as Secretary of State just weeks earlier as bone metastasis consumed what remained of his health. He was 71. Funeral services were held…
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann once told a colleague that the second incompleteness theorem had struck a harder blow to mathematics than even its discoverer believed. He was born in Budapest in 1903 and died at age 53 in 1957, and in those years he…
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman died on the 16th of November 2006, and his last column ran in The Wall Street Journal the very next day. He was still a working economist at 94. That detail alone tells you something about the man. Born in Brooklyn on the…
- Douglas MacArthurDouglas MacArthur was born on the 26th of January 1880 at Little Rock Barracks in Arkansas, the son of a Union Army captain who had earned the Medal of Honor at Missionary Ridge. He would go on to hold commands that no American soldier had…
- Ludwig von MisesLudwig von Mises was born on the 29th of September 1881 in Lemberg, then the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time he died on the 10th of October 1973, he had outlasted two world…
- Allen Lawrence PopeAllen Lawrence Pope was born in Miami, Florida on the 20th of October 1928. He grew up as the son of a moderately prosperous fruit grower in Perrine, Florida. After graduating from the University of Florida, he entered the U.S. Air Force.…
- Frank ZappaFrank Vincent Zappa was born on the 21st of December, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland, into a household where Italian was spoken by his grandparents and gas masks hung by the door. His father, a chemist and mathematician who worked in the…
- Caspar WeinbergerCaspar Weinberger spent six years and ten months as Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan, longer than anyone except Robert McNamara and, more recently, Donald Rumsfeld. That tenure placed him at the center of one of the most…
- Joseph SchumpeterJoseph Alois Schumpeter was born on the 8th of February, 1883, in Triesch, a small town in Habsburg Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic. He died in his home in Taconic, Connecticut, on the night of the 8th of January, 1950. In…
- George F. KennanGeorge Frost Kennan sent a telegram from Moscow on the 22nd of February, 1946, that would reshape American foreign policy for the rest of the twentieth century. It ran to 5,363 words. The Treasury Department had asked the State Department…
- James F. ByrnesJames Francis Byrnes was born on the 2nd of May, 1882, at 538 King Street in Charleston, South Carolina, into a household shaped by loss before it had truly begun. His father died shortly after he was born. His mother, Elizabeth McSweeney…
- Daniel Patrick MoynihanDaniel Patrick Moynihan shined shoes at Pennsylvania Station as a boy during the Great Depression, in the same building he would later spend decades fighting to restore as a United States Senator. That arc, from the floors of Hell's…
- Nicholas Murray ButlerNicholas Murray Butler ran Columbia University for 43 years, the longest presidency in that institution's history. He won the Nobel Peace Prize. He shook hands with presidents and persuaded Andrew Carnegie to fund one of the world's great…