W.Va. Book Festival Announces Featured Authors For 2024
West Virginia’s annual book festival celebrating national and regional authors will come to the Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center this October.
Continue Reading Take Me to More NewsHosted by Robert MacNeil, We Knew JFK is a radio documentary in oral history form, built around the recorded recollections of people who knew Jack Kennedy personally.
Over time, the collection far outstripped the family’s initial expectations. Today it numbers over 1200 interviews, and constitutes perhaps the most extensive oral history collection ever amassed on a single individual.
Recorded in most cases within a few years or even months of the president’s death, the interviews evoke the Kennedy era with uncanny immediacy. Further, they are unexpectedly, sometimes startlingly, candid – to discourage self-censoring, interviewees were offered the option of sealing their conversations from public view for stipulated periods of time, in some instances for their lifetimes or longer. As many participants accepted the offer, much of the material remained classified for decades. Today, with a few exceptions, the embargos have expired — many of them only recently — making this trove of long buried material available to the public for the first time.
For photos of the storytellers and more information, visit the We Knew JFK website.