The Book of Tells (Peter Collett)[unlocked]

GREETING TELLS
relationship between the US and Cuba, for example, has
been very tense since Castro came to power. Although
there have been high-level contacts, they have not been
made public for fear of upsetting the exiled Cuban
community in the US. However, when Bill Clinton
attended a meeting of world leaders at the United Nations
in 2000, he happened to bump into Fidel Castro. On the
spur of the moment the two leaders shook hands,
exchanged a few pleasantries and then went their separate
ways. When a White House spokesman was asked if
Clinton had shaken hands with Castro, he denied that anything
of the sort had happened. Later on, when the White
House realized that too many people had witnessed the
handshake to allow a cover-up, it relented and admitted
that a brief, impromptu exchange had indeed taken place
and that the two men had shaken hands. The fact that it
was considered necessary to deny that a handshake had
taken place illustrates how powerful the handshake can be
as a symbol of acceptance. In politics a handshake is
never neutral.
Nowhere was the power of the handshake more evident
than in the historic meeting that took place between
Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn
in 1993, orchestrated and overseen by Bill Clinton. Before
the meeting took place there was a lot of nervousness
because nobody knew how Rabin and Arafat would
behave when the moment came for them to shake hands.
The White House Press Secretary, George Stephanopoulos,
remembered the preparations in great detail:
On Saturday morning we practised the handshake. This
was just a dry run; four guys in jeans around my desk,
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