Richard Strauss thought of his son when chaos and panic erupted at the White House Correspondents Dinner amid gunshots.
In the terrifying seconds after an alleged gunman sprinted through a security checkpoint, the DC communications strategist found himself sprawled on the floor of the Washington Hilton ballroom — surrounded by panicked guests as his mind raced to the one thing that mattered most.
“It was scary. It was surreal. I thought about my son. I didn’t know what was happening,” said Strauss, a former Clinton operative who was unaware that a photographer was capturing his blank, stunned stare for a image that would land on the front pages of newspapers across the country.
Another guest, DC “shadow” senator Paul Strauss (D), can be seen laying on his back, while holding his head up at a seemingly awkward angle.
“I heard somebody say ‘shots fired’ … I hit the deck,” said Strauss, who is not related to Richard.
Nearby, drawing the group’s concern, was Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of assassinated Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
“We were all trying to focus on Kennedy because of her family’s tragic experience,” Paul Strauss said.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) ended up climbing on top of Kennedy to shield her, though only her hair was visible in the photo. Her brother, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., would be soon be escorted out of the room with wife Cheryl Hines running behind in a “crazy moment.”
Kennedy later described a “mosaic” of bodies lying across each other after the shooting.
“I immediately recognized it was gunshots,” said freelance photographer Nathan Howard, a member of the press “pool” who snapped the picture.
“Within half a second of the shots being fired I was up and out of my seat and sprinting towards the ballroom” to find “petrified” guests hiding under tables, he added.
The photo went out automatically on the Getty Images wire.
It all went down about 30 minutes after suspect Cole Allen snapped a selfie showing him armed with guns, knives and extra ammo before he would burst through security in an alleged attempt to assassinate President Trump.
Paul Strauss said his 90-year-old father spotted the picture in the print edition of The Post in Florida. Others who reached out thought he might have been receiving CPR. But the Boston Globe’s DC Bureau Chief, Jackie Kucinich, also pictured, was doing nothing of the sort.
Strauss said he was mainly trying to keep his head up to monitor the situation while avoiding the hotel’s well-worn carpet.
He joked about the hygiene of sheltering-in-place, but pointed out the texts his daughters sent him in the moment still haunt him.
“Cover yourself in blood … Play dead,” his daughter — who attended a DC prep school terrorized by a sniper in 2022 — told him in one message.
When the situation finally calmed, Richard Strauss, who runs a communications firm, got peckish – just like the man who decided to nosh on his salad during the scare.
“I was hungry. I went to have a little bit more of my salad. And there was tons of red wine in the salad. I was thinking to myself: I’m glad this was red wine and not red blood,” said Michael Glantz of Creative Artists Agency.