One of the world’s most beloved Christmas songs sprang from one of the world’s closest calls to nuclear oblivion.
For 13 days in October 1962, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union squared off in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
At the height of Cold War anxiety, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro secretly agreed to install nuclear ICBMs on the Caribbean island as a kind of strategic trump card. The world’s most powerful weapons could land on American targets within a matter of minutes.
When President John F. Kennedy learned of this development, his options ranged from doing nothing to invading Cuba to launching a nuclear strike of his own.
He opted for diplomacy, backed by a naval blockade of the waters around Cuba – a move aimed to prevent the arrival of additional Soviet missiles and supplies.
He also went public, declaring that a high stakes poker game was underway between the planet’s two nuclear superpowers. JFK (and presumably the Soviets) knew that a nuclear exchange had the potential to erase at least a third of humanity. The watching world held its breath.
Back-channel deal-making resolved the crisis. The Soviets stood down and removed the missiles – a public humiliation – while the United States secretly agreed to remove the nuclear-tipped ICBMs that it had recently deployed in Turkey.
Historians agree it was one of the Cold War’s closest calls.
No one knew just how close things had been until October 2002, when some of the surviving military and political leaders from both sides gathered in Havana for a 40th anniversary Cuban Missile Crisis conference.
That’s when the Russians revealed that the B-59, a diesel-powered submarine with nuclear-tipped torpedoes, almost triggered World War III. The sub had been detected by the U.S. blockade fleet, which unwisely began to drop depth charges in its vicinity.
The B-59 was too far underwater to monitor news reports and radio traffic. The sound of the charges suggested that hostilities had broken out.
The boat’s skipper and political officer quickly decided to launch a nuclear torpedo at the nearest American aircraft carrier – an attack that would almost certainly have set off an international chain reaction of strikes and counterstrikes.
It was necessary for the third senior officer aboard the sub, a young man named Vasily Arkhipov, to concur with their decision. Fortunately, he refused.
Arkhipov had already demonstrated some heroic qualities. The previous year he had exposed himself to severe radiation in order to save a Soviet submarine with an overheating reactor. Now, at just the right moment, he courageously stood in the gap.
In 2002, Thomas Blanton of the U.S. National Security Archive concluded, “A guy called Vasily Arkhipov saved the world.”
My family happened to be vacationing in Florida during those anxious days. I was just nine years old, but I grasped from my parents’ fixation on TV news reports that the world was approaching some kind of tipping point.
The married songwriting duo of Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne was also caught up in the moment.
Regney had recently been asked by a record producer to compose a new Christmas song. Given the global situation, such a task seemed to be the farthest thing from his mind. But then he imagined telling the story of the birth of Jesus in a fanciful way, loosely basing the lyrics on fragments of both Matthew and Luke’s nativity accounts. The song would culminate in a plea for peace in a war-weary world.
Do You Hear What I Hear? quickly found an enthusiastic audience, and its popularity soared the following year when Bing Crosby made it a hit single.
Said the night wind to the little lamb
Do you see what I see?
Way up in the sky, little lamb
Do you see what I see?
A star, a star, dancing in the night
With a tail as big as a kite
With a tail as big as a kite
Said the little lamb to the shepherd boy
Do you hear what I hear?
Ringing through the sky, shepherd boy
Do you hear what I hear?
A song, a song high above the trees
With a voice as big as the sea
With a voice as big as the sea
Said the shepherd boy to the mighty king
Do you know what I know?
In your palace warm, mighty king
Do you know what I know?
A Child, a Child shivers in the cold
Let us bring him silver and gold
Let us bring him silver and gold
Said the king to the people everywhere
Listen to what I say!
Pray for peace, people, everywhere
Listen to what I say!
The Child, the Child sleeping in the night
He will bring us goodness and light
He will bring us goodness and light
During the past 60 years, hundreds of groups and artists have covered the song.
Interestingly, neither Regney nor Shayne ever chose to do so. They discovered they couldn’t sing “our little song” in public. They inevitably choked up as they thought about the meaning of the words and the events that had given them birth.
Regney always maintained that Robert Goulet’s version was his favorite – for the simple reason that when the singer comes to the middle of the fourth verse, he seems to abandon the notes and almost shouts, “Pray for peace, people, everywhere!”
Check it out for yourself.
We owe a debt of gratitude to Vasily Arkhipov. But despite his heroics, he didn’t actually save the world.
That job will always belong to the Child, the Child sleeping in the night.
And when He finally ushers in the fullness of the new creation, the world will at last know the deepest meaning of goodness and light.
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