Foreign Relations: Hot-Line Diplomacy

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FOREIGN RELATIONS

Through the dawn and early morning hours, Lyndon Johnson pored over cables on the Arab-Israeli war in his White House bedroom. After two weeks in which the President had bent every effort to avert hostilities, the overwhelming peril was that the U.S. and Russia would now be sucked into a direct confrontation that neither superpower wanted. Around 8 a.m., Monday, the President's bedside phone brought some electrifying and potentially ominous news. Walt W. Rostow, the President's national security adviser, was calling to report that the "hot line" was being activated from Moscow.

Since the hot-line link between Washington and Moscow was first put into operation on Aug. 30, 1963, it had conveyed nothing more dramatic than New Year's greetings and hourly testing messages. Never before had it been used for communication between the U.S. and Soviet governments in time of crisis. Now, at the cable circuit's terminus in the Pentagon, lines of Cyrillic type sent from Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin began clattering in at 66 words a minute on a teletype machine supplied by Moscow (which has a U.S. machine with Roman characters at its own end). From the Pentagon, the machine maintains continuous communication with the President, wherever he may be. A Russian translator on stand-by duty for such an event was rushed to the White House. Concerned, the President hurried to a mahogany conference table in the basement Situation Room of the White House. He was joined there by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Rostow. A map of Viet Nam normally hangs behind the table; in its place hung a huge map of the Middle East.

Kosygin's message was decoded and relayed instantly in Russian from the Pentagon to the Situation Room, where it was rendered into English within minutes. A glance at the rough translation told Johnson what he wanted to know: there would be no face-down between the Big Two. Russia, said Kosygin, did not plan to enter the conflict, but would do so if the U.S. stepped in. Johnson and his aides drafted a reply on the spot, directly assuring Kosygin that the U.S. did not intend to intervene.

"Snootral" Position. Despite a subsequent barrage of Russian bluster against the Israeli "aggressors," that early-morning understanding between the two powers held up through the week. It was further cemented by the exchange of at least a dozen other messages on the hot line, and it underscored a noteworthy point. Though the Israelis and Arabs were able to launch a small but ferocious war on their own turf, the key to a big war remained in the hands of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Given prudence and restraint on both sides, the key will not be turned.