Communication in The Crisis

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Communication In The Crisis

In a televised address to the nation, Kennedy declared that the USSR was driving the world toward the "abyss of destruction." Soviet Premier Khrushchev responded in a letter to Kennedy with outrage. To quote:

You, Mr. President are not declaring a quarantine, but rather issuing an ultimatum, and you are threatening that if we do not obey your orders, you will then use force. Think about what you are saying! And you want to persuade me to agree to this! What does it mean to agree to these demands? It would mean for us to conduct our relations with countries not by reason, but by yielding to tyranny. You are not appealing to reason; you want to intimidate us....No Mr. President, I cannot agree to this....

Khrushchev Any false move could have meant nuclear annihilation on both sides, since a Soviet strike would have triggered a U.S. retaliatory one on Moscow. This is the closest we have ever come to a real nuclear war and it was very frightening for those who lived through that time. Through the use of speeches and written letters the crisis was worked out through both sides. However, why were these forms of communication used? What effect did these have on communication? These are all questions that historians have attempted to answer.

"Pen Pal" Correspondence
Perhaps what amazes people the most about this crisis is the modes of communication that the heads of states of USSR and the United States used to get their messages across to each other. They had no faxes, no e-mail, no top secret phone lines to each other, and no computers like we have today. Instead they relied heavily on hand carried letters, both formal and "back channel" to threaten and negotiate. In a situation this explosive, having to rely on a slow speed of a letter seemed to be toying with nuclear disaster.
President Kennedy knew he had a problem if he needed an immediate response from Khrushchev. Early on in the crisis, on October 18, President Kennedy had a meeting with EX-COMM in the Oval Office. The President asked a few of his advisors how long it would take for him to get a message back and forth to Moscow:
JFK
JFK - How quick is our communication with Moscow? Say we sent somebody to see him and he was there at the beginning of the 24 hour period to see Mr. Khrushchev, how long would it be before Khrushchev's answer could get back to us as far as communications?
Llewellyn Thompson? - It would have to go in code probably, what, probably 5 or 6 hours...[unintel]... You could telephone of--
RFK - Wouldn't really have to go in code, would it?
Thompson? - You could save time by not putting it in a highly confidential ...[unintel]... machine?
JFK - Then it would be a couple of hours?

Why did Kennedy prefer to write letters to Khrushchev as the primary way of communicating during the crisis in spite of this time lag? Evidently, letter writing with Chairman Khrushchev had been established earlier in President Kennedy's presidency. This correspondence was intended to exchange ideas in a purely informal way, and was known later as "the pen pal" correspondence.
Although slower than the phone lines, the letters, given their importance, moved remarkably fast. Moving them in the space of "a couple of hours," in spite of the distance that the letters had to go and the translations that had to take place, must have been quite a feat. Many of these letters were more in depth and thoughtful than you could expect from a phone conversation. The leaders could prepare statements and edit their thoughts using the tried and true format of letters, Kennedy and Khrushchev could talk to each other as friends, not as enemies.
It is possible that this personal and informal form of correspondence helped prevent the crisis from getting any worse than it already was. In one instance, the fact that the presidents were using letters to work out a deal actually made a dramatic impact on the final outcome. On October 26, Khrushchev wrote President Kennedy a long rambling letter outlining a proposed resolution. He suggested that the USSR would take its missiles out of Cuba, if Kennedy agreed publicly that we would never invade Cuba. Then, on October 27, before Kennedy could respond, a U-2 was shot down over Cuba. Later that day one of our planes flew off course into Russia and almost got shot down as well. This showed that the crisis could be spinning violently out of control, and that was something both sides knew they had to avoid.

Letters as a Form of Communication
As this was occurring, Kennedy received a second letter from Khrushchev outlining a deal that was much tougher than the first. Among other things, he asked that the U.S. take its missiles out of Turkey as well. Because there were two documents that said different things, no one knew quite how to respond. On Robert Kennedy's suggestion, John F. Kennedy ignored the second letter and only negotiated with the first proposal. If these deals had been talked about, on a secret phone line for instance, instead of having been written out as a more permanent statement, it would have been more likely that the U.S. would have been forced to take the last "hard line" word. This way the U.S. had the opportunity to choose between two "offers," and obviously took the earlier, better one.
Still, the letters were a risky way to communicate. The world is lucky that no catastrophe occurred. On October 27, while the presidents were transmitting these letters over five or six hour periods, these U-2 planes could have provoked someone in the USSR or Cuba into pulling the nuclear trigger. Clearly at this point we could have benefited from having a more immediate, hot-line link to the USSR.
This crisis taught us, if nothing else, that Washington and Moscow needed at some critical times, faster ways of communicating. In fact, the secret phone hot line was created as a result of this crisis. If the hot line or some other form of communication, better than written letters, would have been used during the crisis, there would have been much less danger related to miscommunication. For instance, if Kennedy hadn't gotten the letter from Khrushchev in time we could have started a nuclear war just because our communication took too long.

The Creation of the "Hot Line"
This hot line was installed less than a year later on August 30, 1963. The hotline was modeled on the already existing top-secret airforce strategic command communication links set up in 70 bases in 10 countries on four continents around the world. The Boston Globe reports that the first use of the hotline was made in 1967 during the Arab/Israeli war, when Soviet leader Alexei Kosygin asked President Lyndon Johnson about "a foray" of U.S. planes and that Johnson explained that they were "planes from the U.S. Sixth Fleet helping an American ship that had been attacked in the Mediterranean." Because of these communications, the hot line "helped shorten the war to six days."
Fortunately the letter correspondence between Khrushchev and Kennedy did manage, slow and inefficient as it was, to help us resolve the crisis to our satisfaction. Both Khrushchev and Kennedy indeed brought us back from, as Kennedy said in his speech "the abyss of destruction." But these leaders were great statesmen who loved and respected the power of the written word. It is our loss that we cannot use the power of the written word as they did before, because in our day and age events develop much too fast to use communication with the slow speed of letters.