THE PHOTOGRAPH: OR HOW I NEARLY STARTED WWIII

John F. Kennedy, the future 35^th President of the United States, married Jackie Bouvier on September 12, 1953. On that very same day a bouncing baby boy was born in Brooklyn, New York. That intelligent, witty and impossibly impulsive brat was me.

Why do I mention this trivial tidbit of information? I’m not sure but like every kid born in the 1950’s we all felt an affinity to Jack Kennedy. I called him Jack because of our perceived and imaginary friendship. I knew him as well as I knew my friends. Impeccably dressed, dashing, war hero, Pulitzer winning author. The only person in the world more famous to an eight year old than Jack Kennedy was Jerry Lewis. Jerry was too busy hanging around with Dean to hang around with me.

I found out through my school that the government’s Office of Public Information (it may have went by another name but I can’t recall it) had all of these pamphlets available for free on the Constitution, the founding fathers, the Civil War, the revolutionary War, Songs of the Union and the Confederacy and much more. All you had to do was send a letter and tell them what you wanted and in a few weeks you received it in your very own mail box delivered by the United States Postal Service by an official emissary of the government of the United states of America.

I than wrote to the White Houses and asked Jack if he would send me a signed photograph.  And he did. A full color 5 by 7 photo signed by the President of the United States of America! This was my proudest possession of all time. I treasured this more than my worthless mint condition Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Roger Maris, Warren Spann, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Mel Ott and Ralph Kiner trading cards which I threw out to make room for my new prized possession.

I showed my parents the photo and they were so proud of me for being a personal friend of the President of the United States. I sent another letter to the White House and told Jack that if he is ever in Brooklyn he could come by and have cookies and milk together.

My father, Harvey, was a hard worker and put in 60 hour work weeks and worked six days a week. His only day off was Monday so we rarely spent time together other than talking at the dinner table. My father rarely disciplined us as this was usually my mother’s job but when we did something that required additional discipline my mother would say wait until your father comes home. My dad hit me once in my entire life and that amounted to a few light slaps on my leg. But nevertheless my brother and I feared my father’s anger.

When my father got angry he would start to whistle. I believe this was his way of counting to ten so he didn’t go completely ape shit on us. He would then stick the tip of his tongue out to the side of his mouth and his fair skin would start to turn red. At this point we knew it was time to start to quiver. He would then begin to yell and pick up his shoe on the floor and throw it down and pick it up and throw it down again and again while yelling at us. After he finished the tirade and we were still in one piece we would wipe the sweat from our brows and thank God that he didn’t beat us with that shoe. My mom was the one who hit us. Usually with a belt, a shoe or a hair brush and many times left a bruise but it was my father we feared despite the fact that he never hit us.

What is it about yelling and shoes? Nikita Khruschev, Chairman of the Communist Party and Premier of the USSR, used this tactic effectively. Sitting at his table at the United Nations smashing his shoe on the table yelling. “Nyet, Nyet, Nyet!”  This was pretty damn cool. Like my dad throwing his shoe on the floor! So I promptly prepared a letter addressed to Russia and asked Mr. Khruschev, I called him Nick for short, for an autographed photo to keep next to my Kennedy photograph.

Who else can I write to? Brazil! So I promptly wrote a letter addressed to the President of Brazil and not knowing exactly where to send it to I asked my father if he could mail it for me.

He looked at me and said, “You can’t send this!”

“Why not?”

“You’re going to start a war! Who else did you write too?”

“I wrote to Russia”.

“Oh my God!. You can’t do this. There are things you just can’t do”.

Did he really think a letter from an eight year old would start a war? I know Tommy the Turtle constantly told us to go under our desks and cover our heads when we heard a siren in case of a nuclear attack. Everyone was really scared that we lived on the brink of a nuclear cataclysm. Gary Powers was shot down while spying on Russia from his high flying spy plane and if this didn’t start a war I surely didn’t think that my letter asking for a signed photo of Khruschev would start World War III.

“What is this?”

“It’s a leyter from a boychik in Brooklyn, New York from the United States asking for a photograph of you”

Taking off his shoe and banging it on his desk, “Nyet, Nyet! Unacceptyable! Who is this American boy to create international incident! Launch the nuclear missiles!”

I don’t even think it was the letter to Russia that bothered my father. I think it was the letter to Brazil that was the nexus of his angst. If the Brazilians were upset by my letter they would stop the export of Samba music and coffee. You know they grow an awful lot of coffee in Brazil.

Even while growing up I can remember the day that Jack was assassinated as well as the days that ensued. The only other memories that are etched so vividly in my mind is the attack on the World Trade Center. It was a tumultuous decade with the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the escalation of the war in Viet Nam. But Jack Kennedy who may or may not go down in history as a particularly effective President did catch our imaginations and projected the image of what a President should embody.

Over the years the signed photo from Kennedy disappeared along with my copy of Profiles in Courage and model of the PT 109. It’s probably somewhere with my baseball cards, my American Flyer train set and my number one issues of Spiderman and Daredevil.