Reliable Sources: 100 Years at the National Press Club - Centennial Edition

From a chance encounter by two reporters on a Washington street corner in February 1908, the National Press Club has grown to be the world’s largest, most prestigious club run by journalists. It started as a watering hole and card room for newspapermen, but from the beginning its members have hosted and questioned – most of the national and world leaders who shaped the 20th and now the 21st century.

Reliable Sources: 100 Years at the National Press Club tells the story of the history-making events as well as the wackiness that only a club of journalists can create. Here is Nikita Khrushchev explaining why he would “bury us,” Lauren Bacall draping her legs over an upright piano as Harry Truman plays, Sen. Joe McCarthy winning a Club mule race and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reciting verses from the Koran. And how did the Club’s bar figure into the Cuban missile crisis? It’s all here.

Written by the people who know the Club best, this is also the story of how the original white, male newspaper bastion accepted at first grudgingly and then with enthusiasm African Americans, women, broadcast journalists and Internet bloggers and turned into a professional organization with international outreach.