High Stake Negotiation

Fifty-five years ago, the world was on a brink of nuclear war. The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning American ballistic missile deployment in Italy and Turkey with consequent Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba is often considered the closest the cold war came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war. The tense negotiation between the two powers through both public and private channels during this high stake crisis has been well documented and extensively studied. Cool heads prevailed with a peaceful resolution in the end which eventually led to the signing of a limited nuclear test ban treaty in 1963.

I recently came across this letter written by Mrs Kennedy to Mr Khrushchev after President Kennedy was assassinated a year later. Other than the somewhat uncomfortable choice of words: big men vs. little men, I find it fascinating that she had the strength, considering the circumstance, to write this one last letter from the White House.

No matter how high the stakes are involved in either business or diplomatic negotiation, it is fundamentally about human interaction.

Letter From Jacqueline Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev

Washington, December 1, 1963.

Dear Mr. Chairman President, 

I would like to thank you for sending Mr. Mikoyan as your representative to my husband's funeral.

He looked so upset when he came through the line, and I was very moved. I tried to give him a message for you that day—but as it was such a terrible day for me, I do not know if my words came out as I meant them to. So now, in one of the last nights I will spend in the White House, in one of the last letters I will write on this paper at the White House, I would like to write you my message.

I send it only because I know how much my husband cared about peace, and how the relation between you and him was central to this care in his mind. He used to quote your words in some of his speeches - “In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.”

You and he were adversaries, but you were allied in a determination that the world should not be blown up. You respected each other and could deal with each other. I know that President Johnson will make every effort to establish the same relationship with you.

The danger which troubled my husband was that war might be started not so much by the big men as by the little ones. While big men know the needs for self-control and restraint—little men are sometimes moved more by fear and pride. If only in the future the big men can continue to make the little ones sit down and talk, before they start to fight. I know that President Johnson will continue the policy in which my husband so deeply believed—a policy of control and restraint—and he will need your help.

I send this letter because I know so deeply of the importance of the relationship which existed between you and my husband, and also because of your kindness, and that of Mrs. Khrushcheva in Vienna. I read that she had tears in her eyes when she left the American Embassy in Moscow, after signing the book of mourning. Please thank her for that.

Sincerely,

Jacqueline Kennedy