Hand Shake

Hand Shake

By Charles E. Kraus

         JFK and I shook hands once, or touched hands would be more accurate.  Maybe we did, would be more honest.  If this monumental moment took place at all, the year would have been 1959 or 60.  My recollection is vague, not vivid like those I have of November 22^nd .  Sometimes vague is better than vivid.

         When my kids were growing up, I tried to explain JFK – not just the handshake, not just the shots, to explain Camelot, from pre-election to the sudden end.  I never felt I’d done more than pass along facts and well established mythology.  I couldn’t get to the essence.  “You had to be there,” is a phrase or concept used by frustrated explainers upset because reality is complex and language is approximate. 

         During the 1960 election my father was an enthusiastic Kennedy supporter.  After the Bay of Pigs, he was not.  He began quoting from Victor Laski’s book, The Man and the Myth, a long, provocative, highly embellished account of everything Kennedy had done wrong.   Written before the sexy stuff surfaced, Victor must have been shocked by those revelations.   He was a precursor to Kitty Kelley, but not as much fun to read. 

Like so many people who questioned the Administration, my father was still able to appreciate Kennedy’s personal strengths.  He found the President to be a man capable of thinking on his feet, the embodiment of wit, style, and grace.  Kennedy was not afraid to test these skills and attributes, as he did during his weekly press conferences.  There was no cable television, no CNN or FOX, no all-news radio.  New York had seven newspapers and some of these published more than one edition on a busy news cycle.  There were more newspapers than television stations.  If you lived in a major media market, you were fortunate enough to have four or five channels.  We were New York, we had six.  

The President’s press conferences commanded large audiences, and being a part of that viewership had a communal feel.  John Kennedy wanted to talk to the nation, and the nation wanted to watch and listen.  People either liked what they heard or they did not.   Opinion wasn’t shaped by pundits filtering the story and telling you what to think about it.  Opinion was formed by watching John Kennedy live, fielding questions and making himself available for public scrutiny.  

On the 1960 evening of my possible contact with Mr. Kennedy, he was scheduled for a campaign stop at the Teaneck, New Jersey Armory.  He was running really late.  Inside the old brick edifice came more and more supporters.  As the hour grew, maneuvering space shrank. It felt like Time Square on New Year’s Eve, and if it wasn’t exactly a new year, politically, we were celebrating a New Frontier.  The sound that too many people make in a confined space, if they are excited and if their voices compete for rebounding with the walls and ceil, can charge a united mindset with massive energy.   And so, if you are the catalyst, and you wait just long enough, if you enter a rally as the wave of enthusiasm reaches its peak and, accompanied by your entourage, make your way onto the stage, then taking the last dozen steps, a lone man, buoyed by a rousing reception, if you are JFK, there is a roar so impossibly exquisite, only the sound of another lone man, pulling the trigger of his 6.5 mm Carcano can eventually extinguish the reverberation.

When he left the Armory, he headlined of a procession of open topped cars, creeping ever so slowly through crowds that had spilled out of the building and mingled with crowds already lining the street.  I made my way ahead of the caravan, maneuvering high and low, left and right, until I reached the curb.  Overwhelmed by the joy and excitement, I raced onto the pavement, my arm, like those of many other exuberant supporters, reaching for the man who stood in the open car.  Someone shook it.  

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