Kennedy responded with a lengthy and receptive letter of his own in which he agreed with Khrushchev's analogy about their problem: "I like very much your analogy of Noah's Ark, with both the 'clean' and the 'unclean' determined that it stay afloat. Whatever our differences, our collaboration to keep the peace is as urgent -- if not more urgent -- than our collaboration to win the last world war."
Thus began a delicate but crucial exchange between sworn enemies in a mythical battle for the world.
By October of 1961, Khrushchev had intuited enough about Kennedy to suspect that the crisis at the Berlin Wall was brought about by elements of the U.S. government without Kennedy's knowledge or approval. When Kennedy became aware of the intense standoff between American and Soviet tanks at the Wall, he immediately utilized the back channel established with Khrushchev to work out a withdrawal plan. This turn of events would prove prophetic in averting future crises.
The road toward peace the two leaders had embarked on, however, was littered with compromises and regressions. Both leaders had to deal with hardliners in their respective governments and Kennedy had to make compromises and throw an occasional bone to the Cold War hawks around him.
In March of 1962, Kennedy made a statement during an interview with the Saturday Evening Post that "Khrushchev must not be certain that, where its vital interests are threatened, the United States will never strike first. In some circumstances, we might have to take the initiative." Khrushchev interpreted this as a first-strike threat, which resulted in a Soviet military alert. When Kennedy's press secretary tried to reassure Khrushchev during a visit to Moscow a couple of months later, the leader was not convinced and began to reexamine his military position. Placing missiles in Cuba would have the two-fold purpose of deterring the invasion of an ally and providing parity with the U.S. installation of nuclear missiles in Turkey which was on the USSR's borders.
By October, a full-blown crisis had emerged that threatened a nuclear holocaust.
The best insight into President Kennedy's reaction and concerns during the darkest moment of the Cuban Missile crisis, when Soviet ships were approaching Cuba and nuclear war seemed imminent, come from Robert Kennedy: "His hand went up to his face and covered his mouth. He opened and closed his fist. His face seemed drawn, his eyes pained, almost gray. We stared at each other across the table. For a few fleeting seconds, it was almost as though no one else was there and he was no longer the president." Robert goes on to explain that what most haunted the President was the fate of all the children who'd had no say in what was happening and would have no chance to grow up and make something of the world.
The miracle that ended the tension was Khrushchev's order for Soviet ships to stop dead in the water before breaching the U.S. blockade, thereby providing more time for negotiation. The crisis ended when, after a visit from Robert Kennedy to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that included Kennedy's message that the President's military advisors were pressing for escalation and that things could spiral out of the President's control, Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles. In exchange, Kennedy made a secret promise to remove U.S. nuclear missiles from Turkey on the Soviet Union's border. Kennedy upheld his promise of removal of the missiles within six months and never gloated about Khrushchev's "retreat."
There is some debate about the extent of the spiraling threat that Robert Kennedy conveyed, but Nikita Khrushchev believed, as stated in his memoirs, that Kennedy feared the real possibility of a military overthrow.
When asked by journalist Norman Cousins in December of 1962 how it felt to have his finger so close to the nuclear trigger during the Missile Crisis, Khrushchev said:
The Chinese say I was scared. Of course I was scared. It would have been insane not to have been scared. I was frightened about what could happen to my country -- or your country and all the other countries that would be devastated by a nuclear war. If being frightened meant that I helped avert such insanity then I'm glad I was frightened. One of the problems in the world today is that not enough people are sufficiently frightened by the danger of nuclear war.
Despite the halting progress being made by Kennedy and Khrushchev, by 1963 they had reached an impasse on terms of a nuclear test ban treaty over the number of inspections that would be allowed. The Soviets feared inspections were an opportunity for espionage and had reluctantly agreed to three. The Kennedy administration soon realized that Congress would not approve any treaty that required less than eight. Kennedy, however, sensed that most of the American public had drawn the same conclusion that he and Khrushchev had from the Cuban Missile Crisis, that of a need to turn toward peaceful co-existence, disarmament, and cooperation in whatever areas were possible.
As will be discussed later, Kennedy was becoming increasingly aware of numerous factions in his own government that would undermine his peace policies. Partly in an effort to do an end run around these obstructionists, he enlisted advisor Theodore Sorenson to write an ambitious speech that would outline a vision of peaceful co-existence and disarmament. That speech was his American University Address quoted above in which he insisted that peace was possible if broken down into manageable and concrete steps, acknowledged the shared humanity of the Soviet people despite political differences, and encouraged Americans to self-reflect on their own attitudes that could impede progress toward peace.
Kennedy had gotten word to the Soviets ahead of time that he would be giving a significant speech. The Soviet Unions' response to the speech was described as follows:
The full text of the speech was published in the Soviet press. Still more striking was the fact that it was heard as well as read throughout the USSR. After fifteen years of almost uninterrupted jamming of Western broadcasts, by means of a network of over three thousand transmitters and at an annual cost of several hundred million dollars, the Soviets jammed only one paragraph of the speech when relayed by the Voice of America in Russian, then did not jam any of it upon rebroadcast -- and then suddenly stopped jamming all Western broadcasts. Equally suddenly they agreed in Vienna to the principle of inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to make certain that Agency's reactors were used for peaceful purposes. And equally suddenly the outlook for some kind of test-ban agreement turned from hopeless to hopeful.
Furthermore, "Khrushchev was deeply moved. He told test-ban negotiator Averell Harriman that Kennedy had given 'the greatest speech by any American President since Roosevelt.'" He proposed to Kennedy the consideration of a treaty that would ban nuclear testing in the air, space and water, obviating the need for inspections, as well as a non-aggression pact between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
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