There’s too much to do in Washington, D.C. in two weeks, never mind a day and a half. However, that’s all of the time I have on my first visit to the nation’s capital, so my self-made itinerary calls for exploring just one museum, quickly visiting all of the major monuments and having a late dinner at a non-chain D.C. restaurant. This’ll be a good preliminary tour of the area so that I’m familiar with the sights next time I’m in town—and that next time will most certainly be at a less humid time of the year.

The Newseum is an obvious choice, as it ties into the Journalism degree I received from Penn State (and deals with my minor in history in a big way). In addition to being about one of the most fascinating topics, it’s also the newest museum having opened in 2008 and the Freedom Forum prides itself on maintaining “The world’s most interactive museum.” As interactive as this seven-story building is on the inside, the outside stays old school with over 80 newspaper front pages from around the world. It’s already amazing and I haven’t even entered the front door yet.

Eight graffiti-filled sections of the Berlin Wall are displayed on the bottom floor of the Newseum along with an East German guard tower that rises two stories. Next to it is another Cold War relic: a toppled statue of Vladimir Lenin. This lower level also contains a bunch of historical artifacts in an adjacent “G-Men & Journalists” exhibit. There’s John Dillinger’s death mask and a cache of mobster machine guns, the back section of the D.C. sniper car where bullets were fired from a modified trunk, the electric chair in which Bruno Hauptmann (the Lindbergh baby kidnapper) was executed and the Unabomber’s wooden shack along with a dismantled mail bomb.

How the media played a role in the Waco siege is brutally honest, as it details how a cameraperson unintentionally tipped off a local who happened to be a David Koresh follower, or a Davidian, about the impending FBI siege. Next to this exhibit is one for the Oklahoma City Bombing, which I’ll be visiting in person on this lengthy roadtrip.

“Our World at War: Photojournalism Beyond the Front Lines” is the third and final display on the bottom floor. While there are no artifacts associated with this exhibit, the oftentimes-gory images are the most striking in the entire museum. You feel for the people involved in these war-torn situations, but also find a new appreciation for the photojournalists, armed with only a camera, doing their jobs by covering the world’s overlooked hotspots. It makes you wonder how they can fearlessly hold a camera straight in the presence of either so much anger or so much anguish.

More awe-inspiring images hang from the Pulitzer Prize Photographs room on the second floor (confusingly labeled Level 1). Here, recognizable moments captured in time include Eddie Adams’ 1969 photograph of Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner and Robert H. Jackson’s 1964 photograph of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald two days after Oswald assassinated JFK. Many award-winning photos are less famous, but depict equally harrowing situations, so all of the images in this room are worth examining for a solid half hour.
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