As a college sophomore in 1960, I had little interest in politics except that the woman I was dating was a member of the Young Democrats on campus. Democrats at Oregon State College in those days were a rare commodity, so when the presidential campaign got under way, our little group didn’t expect to be much involved.

Imagine our surprise, then, when we were asked by the State Central Committee to help play host to Sen. John F. Kennedy when he made a campaign speech in Corvallis. I knew nothing about campaigns or electioneering, so I was given grunt work: nailing up posters, running errands, and stuffing envelopes.

On the day of Kennedy’s arrival, I was relegated to helping set up the ballroom of the Benton Hotel in Corvallis, where the senator was to make his speech. We worked hard to spruce up the hotel’s grand ballroom with the best red, white, and blue political trappings. I had just stepped back from hanging the last piece of bunting when someone asked me to drive two other young Democrats out to the airport to greet Kennedy’s front man, who for this event was his brother Ted.

When Ted Kennedy got off the plane, he looked at the three of us and said, “How many of you are here?” I thought he meant Young Democrats, so I said there were two more of us back at the hotel. For a moment I thought he would get back on the plane and go home, but after we explained that we hoped to turn out a big crowd, he came with us.

At the hotel Ted Kennedy surveyed our lavishly decorated but cavernous ballroom and asked how many people we thought would turn out. The Central Committee folks said they hoped for fifty or sixty and explained that Corvallis was “pretty Republican.”

Kennedy said that nothing looked worse than a poor turnout and made a decision: we would move the reception into the hallway outside the ballroom. It was a large hallway, but to my mind it was not big enough to hold fifty people plus the news media. I blurted out that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone. Ted Kennedy looked at me. “I know,” he said.

This was all beyond me, but I pitched in to move the tables of punch and cookies out into the hallway and tried to string some of the bunting and crepe paper in appropriate places. Then Kennedy gave me an order: Close the ballroom doors, and under no circumstances open them to anyone.

Soon about thirty people had arrived, and then came the traveling press. Kennedy had arranged platforms at one end of the hallway, and he told the reporters that was their best vantage point for pictures.

I watched in awe. The newspeople swarmed onto their platform. Cameras and lighting equipment were much larger in those days, so the press took up a great deal of what I could see was becoming very cramped space. Also, the good citizens of Corvallis now numbered almost seventy-five (exceeding our wildest expectations) and began to overflow onto the sidewalk outside.

When Sen. John F. Kennedy and his entourage arrived, there was barely enough room for them to squeeze into the hallway. The crowd began to applaud, the camera lights came on, and the next President began to work his way through the crowd toward a small dais. As JFK approached my “guard post,” Ted Kennedy introduced me and the other Young Democrats nearby as those who helped organize the event.

I shook the senator’s hand, and he flashed me that incredible smile. “Boy,” he said, “you sure know how to turn out a crowd.” He went on to give his speech and munch on a few cookies, and then he left for his next event. After he was gone, someone remarked that there were almost a hundred people in the hallway.

The next day we all gathered around a television set to see how it was reported. The Corvallis stop didn’t get much coverage on national television, but when the film came on I finally realized why Ted Kennedy had made us leave the auditorium. The commentator said something about an enthusiastic crowd at Corvallis while the film showed what looked like hundreds jamming a large area. Jack Kennedy was right. We had turned out quite a crowd, if not in person, at least on film.

—Mike Burton is a member of the Oregon House of Representatives.

By October 30, 1958, Nikita Khrushchev’s assumption of power over the Soviet Union had already produced a slight, if uneven, warming of the Cold War. On that mild autumn day, however, a real thaw took place in New York City, where more than one hundred musicians and technicians gathered at Manhattan Center for an RCA Victor recording session whose guest star was the Soviet Union’s hottest new export, maestro Kiril Kondrashin.

Kondrashin had swept into Western consciousness that April by conducting Van Cliburn’s stunning victory in the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. As a trusted Soviet citizen and twice winner of the Stalin Prize, Kondrashin had been granted leave, albeit grudgingly, to be the first Soviet conductor to tour and record in the United States.

As a further sign of post-Stalinist warming, Kondrashin had chosen to record light classics by Soviet composers who only a decade before had been accused of “anti-popular formalist perversions” with “antidemocratic tendencies.”

I was a twenty-three-year-old research engineer from RCAs vaunted Indianapolis laboratory, attending my first live session as a technical observer. Considering the sensitivity of the event, I had been instructed by my superiors to keep a low profile, which I dutifully did.

Manhattan Center’s glittering ballroom was meant for dances and conventions, never for recording, so it resembled an improvised carnival on those occasions. Seated beneath a forest of microphones, the orchestra sprawled chaotically over the vast, wooden floor. Myriad audio cables converged on a makeshift control room—the ballroom’s bar—clogged with recording gear, its floor an obstacle course of cables, gaffer’s tape, and beer-stained bentwood chairs with sprung backs and gritty seats.

The bar itself was a monstrosity of unclassifiable, soiled wood, and behind it hung a hideous cracked mirror reflecting the scene as in a Cocteau movie. The space was so frightfully inelegant, it was hard for me to believe that Artur Rubinstein, Bruno Walter, Fritz Reiner, and Leopold Stokowski had also recorded there; it was far more appropriate to the cabbies and sanitation men who routinely packed its resonant space to harangue over contract terms and vote long strikes.

A tight yet vague entourage engulfed Kondrashin, as though defending him against the encroaching inelegance. From my safe spot behind the bar, I couldn’t be certain whether the anonymous bodies floating about him were from the CIA, MVD, KGB, FBI, or were just security-cleared music lovers. The only visitor I identified with certainty was the delivery man who brought the pastrami sandwiches and Cel-Ray tonic for lunch.

As usual at a complex symphonic session, the early minutes were devoted to orchestral rehearsals that also allowed technicians to adjust the sound levels and balance. Then Kondrashin ran the musicians—whom he had never worked with before—through several in-earnest takes of sections from Aram Khatchaturian’s “Masquerade” Suite. After several particularly fine performances of the mazurka, Kondrashin was ushered into the control room to hear a tape playback.

As he entered the miserably decayed and malodorous barroom, he exchanged animated comments with the producer through an interpreter. He was then led to a central position facing the sixteen-inch monitor speakers and seated on one of the few safe, clean chairs. The entourage receded to allow him total acoustic independence.

The maestro, with a shaggy sweater draped over his hunched shoulders, listened carefully to the playback. He followed the music without a score, often smiling at the vibrant Russian sonority he had drawn from this superb pickup orchestra of mostly moonlighting New York Philharmonic players. Occasionally, he dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief. He seemed pleased to be there.

So was I. As a lifelong music student, I was drawn to the moment and the man—to the point, however, that I could not stop staring at his avuncular face. In order to break his hypnotic grip, I forced my gaze about the crowded room, finally scanning the length of the cluttered bar—past a leaking coffee cup, a bent soda can, a crushed cigarette pack, an open attaché case, a full ashtray, and a newspaper …

A newspaper!

It was a day-old New York Post and its shocking front-page headline pierced icily into the music’s warmth: RED AUTHOR REJECTS 41 G NOBEL PRIZE.

The grotesque, night-black letters made my face flush, my head swim. It was not just the tragic “Pasternak scandal” that disgusted me. No, I was supremely outraged by the blatant shallowness of the words—so typical of the Post’s style—and the way they unjustly intruded on this high musical moment.

I slipped to the end of the bar, tucked the paper under my arm, and returned to my haven, certain I had averted a political and personal insult.

But then I imagined the inevitable questions: Was I the only one who had seen it? Had some right-wing goon placed it there to incite? If the maestro had seen it, would it affect his music making? Is Kondrashin planning to defect?

The playback ended and the beaming maestro indicated his approval of the take. A coffee break was called. The orchestra members stretched and scattered about the main hall; the barroom entourage split into sociable groups, leaving Kondrashin and his interpreter standing momentarily alone.

Suddenly my heart began pounding and my hands became cold in reaction to an urge so strong it terrified me. Yet I couldn’t resist it. As though pushed, I walked toward Kondrashin and his interpreter, holding the headline like a billboard before me. We exchanged a quick triangle of equally nervous glances. Then:

“Maestro. What do you think of this?” I asked.

But before an answer could form on his lips, I was wrenched backward in a powerful grip: a terrified RCA executive apparently felt that history could not withstand my impudence. He scolded me, then released me chastened.

When I set my gaze once more on the two men, their faces were grim—in reaction to the question or to the scolding I could not tell. The maestro said a few Russian words to the interpreter. They again glanced at me, with sadness in their eyes. Kondrashin, a tall man, seemed oddly compressed. The interpreter looked at me, then to the newspaper I now held limply at my side, then at Kondrashin, and then again at me.

“Terrible business,” he translated flatly.

He turned away.

Kondrashin rose, stepped carefully over the rat’s nest of cables, and exited to conduct more Khatchaturian.

In 1978—after being named People’s Artist of the U.S.S.R., after winning the principal conductorship of the Moscow Philharmonic, after premiering Shostakovich’s controversial Thirteenth Symphony, after how much personal agony we cannot know—Kiril Kondrashin defected to the West.

On March 7, 1981, by then a permanent conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Kiril Kondrashin died suddenly of a heart attack after a concert in Amsterdam.

—Jack Somer is a freelance writer and a former editor of Yachting magazine.

It is hard for a journalist to admit that he didn’t know a story when he spent an evening with it. I had that experience, sad to say because the story was no less than the imminent honeymoon of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

On a July evening in 1939 my wife and I gave one of our frequent Saturday get-togethers—big on talk and drink, given our finances, less lavish on food. The guests were mostly newsmen and their spouses, and the talk mostly about where Hitler would strike next, weekends being high on his calendar for that activity. “The Füfchrer takes a country in the weekend,” it was being said, “while the English take a weekend in the country.”

Not long before the gathering, one of the guests, an old friend, called to ask whether he might bring along an acquaintance just in from Baltimore with a chap in tow who likewise hoped to be included. The latter was a German, but, I was assured, a decent sort. “As long as he’s not a Nazi,” I said, “bring them both along. There’ll be enough beer to go round.”

The German, it turned out, was a baron—even more surprising, a Baron Müfcnchhausen. Barons were scarce in an uptown Manhattan apartment house on Claremont Avenue—and especially in that Bohemian, mildy raffish company. He stood out, his title and courtly manner befitting the descendant of one who had some two centuries before made the Müfcnchhausen name synonymous with tall tales told about impossible adventures.

As the evening wore on, the baron gradually took up a jocular defense of his government’s way with the lesser tribes of Europe. A favorite target were the Czechs, who were, thanks to the overpowering attentions of the Third Reich, a nation then much in the world news. When a Czech is still in the cradle, he explained, a violin and a beer mug are placed on either side of him. By noting which object first gets the babe’s attention, one can readily predict his future career—fiddler or town drunk.

The sally went over none too well, but the group was fairly high by then and all too little was made of the baron’s Teutonic jest. As a staff member of The Nation, which had been long and constantly demanding that the world stand up to the brutal Reich, I had grown more and more wary of the baron and was inclined to break up the evening as soon as an opportunity presented itself. At the same time I was alerted enough to probe his Durooses a bit further.

After another interval of hand-kissing charm on the part of the dubious guest of honor and a slightly dampened jollity around the room, the evening’s proceedings came to an unexpected climax. One of the group, just beyond the stage of mellowness, undertook for no good reason to reintroduce us one by one to the baron: this one was a Socialist, that one a New Deal liberal; here a mild Republican, there a man who might as well be a Communist; and so forth.

In acknowledgment the baron rose, bowed, and delivered himself substantially as follows: Never mind what you call yourselves. 1 am sure all of you are leftists of one sort or another and you think of my country as the great enemy. But let me just say this: soon, very soon, we will all be friends.

For some weeks, to be sure, there had been murmurings about the possibility of a trade agreement between Germany and Russia, but few on the American Left thought even that was conceivable after the years of free-flowing venom between them. Anything more than the merest financial deal was of course the fancy of deranged minds—very likely unhinged by “Trotskyite” propaganda.

When the party broke up, Miinchhausen asked whether he might come around the following morning and have a private chat now that we were friendly acquaintances, but I declined to issue an invitation, convinced that he was here, officially or unofficially, to spread the soft soap in the journalistic ranks. If he had anything to communicate, I said, he could come to my office the following week.

It was an unpleasant surprise to find him, nevertheless, at the door the next morning, bouncy and smarmy as ever. An unexpected call, he explained, was taking him out of town, and since he would be unable to meet me at the office, he trusted it would not be an imposition if he dropped in on a Sunday morning after all. Whereupon he clicked heels, kissed my wife’s hand, and patted my infant’s head, like a long-lost and eccentric family connection working the stiffness out of an unexpected reunion.

He wanted me to know, he said, that the Germans of the Third Reich were not all louts, as my colleagues of the press generally depicted them; many were cultivated and well-mannered even if they happened to be holding down lesser jobs in the civil service. And not all of them, by the way, agreed with Hitler on the “Jewish question.” He, for example, would be just as pleased if those Jews who chose to assimilate were allowed to do so and those who didn’t were encouraged to leave (about as good a deal as the Spanish Inquisition had offered). Sure, Hitler was a fanatic in this area, he implied, but we all have our blind spots, don’t we? I had, I know, but since they didn’t include a tolerance for smoothies like the baron, I sent him on his way.

I never found out whether or not he was a paid missionary from the office of Dr. Goebbels, futilely dispatched to modify the hostility of American reporters. But as a prophet he suspiciously had his points. Only a few weeks later Ribbentrop went to Moscow and the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed. The way had been cleared for World War II.

—Robert Bendiner is a former member of the New York Times editorial board.