In November 1963, the weekly news magazine Time invited 20 corporate executives and one college president from the United States to go on a news tour to Washington, DC, and through Europe for nearly two weeks, meeting with six European leaders along the way. The objective was to give the executives firsthand experience in gathering information, as journalists would, by being in direct contact with political leaders. After the trip, Norman Buckle Obbard, one of the executives, was presented with a special album, which was recently acquired by the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. It chronicles the Time news tour through photographs and documents. The first meeting was with President John F. Kennedy at the White House (days before his assassination). There are excellent photos of Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, and others in meetings and discussions. The pages that follow show the visitors in London, Berlin, Paris, and other capitals. A section of the album depicts their visit to Moscow, showing various members of the news tour group shaking hands with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
This exceptional album is an important document of the era, possibly showing the attempts at improving Soviet-American relations, especially commercial relations, in the years following the Cuban Missile Crisis. This collection also complements existing papers dealing with Soviet-American commercial relations, technology transfer, and citizen diplomacy, such as the Arthur Hyatt papers and the Samuel Kelly papers.
