Veteran of Cuban missile crisis shares history, life lessons

KATHY NORCROSS WATTS/Special Correspondent/

Bruce Chapman/Journal

Jerry Hinson was a U.S. Army soldier away from his Winston-Salem home when he shook President John F. Kennedy’s hand.

“That’s something I’ll always remember,” Hinson said. “He was one of the best presidents we’d ever had.”

Hinson was one of about 70 veterans honored recently by Old Richmond Elementary School, where his great-granddaughter, Jamya Crawford, 8, attends. She lives with the Hinsons during the school year.

Fifty years after that handshake, Hinson recalled some of the challenges of that era.

Hinson served in the U.S. Army during the Cuban missile crisis. It was a time when Hinson, who is black, couldn’t drink from a “whites-only” water fountain, and the United States and the Soviet Union were edging toward nuclear war.

“In the fall of 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union came as close as they ever would to global nuclear war,” according to the Department of Navy – Naval History and Heritage Command. Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev had deployed nuclear-armed missiles to Cuba that could target the United States.

Kennedy told Khrushchev to take the missiles out of Cuba, Hinson said, and the president “was going to show him he meant business.”  More >>