September 17th, 1978. Boston Garden, 18,000 people. Bob Dylan was three songs into his set when his fingers froze midcord. A cardboard sign, third row, handlettered in black marker. My last concert, held by a 9-year-old boy, completely bald, thin, pale, smiling despite what that sign meant. The band stopped. The crowd went silent. Dylan…
June 23rd, 1972. 10:04 a.m. The Oval Office. President Richard Nixon sat behind his desk. Chief of Staff HR Halddederman entered. The secret tape recorders Nixon had installed captured every word. They were discussing a problem. 5 days earlier, burglars had been caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. The…
At 12:45 p.m. on October 12th, 1964, jogger Henry Wiggins heard a woman scream, “Somebody help me! Somebody help me!” He looked down from the toe path overlooked toward the Chesapeake and Ohio canal. Below on the wooded trail, he saw a slender black man in a light jacket standing over a woman lying on…
In the early morning hours of March 23rd, 1945, a secure telephone line crackled to life. Winston Churchill sat in his war room at 10 Downing Street, listening as the voice on the other end delivered news that would fundamentally alter the final chapter of World War II. George S. Patton Jr., the American general…
The war had ended. Across Europe, the ruins of the Third Reich continued to smolder. In a drab, colorless interrogation room inside a British prisoner of war camp, Captain BH little Hart sat facing General Gunther Blumenrit. Blumenrit had served as Runstead’s chief of staff, one of the key men who had planned the defense…
August 1944 A German artillery battery is receiving routine supply deliveries 30 km behind the front line. Officers are planning next week’s fire missions. Sentries are watching roads leading east, not west. Then American tanks appear. Not a raid. Not a breakthrough. An entire armored column operating freely in what every map shows as secure…
The morning sun filtered through the lace curtains of the modest Memphis apartment where 97year-old Evelyn Margaret Thompson sat at her old upright piano. The weathered fingers moving slowly but surely across the yellowed keys. Despite her advanced age and the arthritis that made every movement a small victory, Evelyn’s mind was as sharp as…
The tension in Studio B at RCA Victor in Nashville had been building for 3 hours. And by 2:47 p.m. on March 15th, 1968, it had reached a breaking point. What had started as a routine recording session for Elvis Presley’s comeback album had devolved into something ugly. A clash between artistic vision and commercial…
The massive crowd at the Houston Astrodome on August 16th, 1975 was electric with anticipation as Elvis Presley took the stage for what would become one of the most extraordinary concerts in music history. 25,000 devoted fans had gathered to celebrate the king’s 40th birthday, which happened to fall on the same day as the…
June 1968, Los Angeles, corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, a 12-year-old blind girl sat on a bench outside a drugstore singing Fly Me to the Moon to nobody in particular. Her voice was pure, untrained, but beautiful. She sang because she loved the song, not because she expected anyone to listen. Then…
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