Dear Advent Star Gazers:

There are many accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis which I will not recount for you here today, but as this time of year we muse together about Christmas music, some of you may not know how these two topics overlap.

For a quick background, the United States had placed nuclear tipped Jupiter missiles with NATO allies Italy and Turkey in 1961. At that same time the Kennedy administration was arming and training Cuban exiles to mount attacks on Fidel Castro’s regime, a strategy which ended tragically with the Bay of Pigs debacle where the American trained forces were humiliated by Castro’s army in April of that year.

Castro, desperate for international assistance, reached out to the Soviet Union’s First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, for assistance. Angered by the encroaching Western military hardware, Khrushchev proposed the placement of Soviet intermediate and medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, creating a tit-for-tat nuclear escalation and providing Castro nuclear clout against the Americans.

American U-2 spy planes documented evidence of the installations as Russian ships were heading to the island. Given that evidence, Kennedy went public with the nuclear threat, and a game of brinkmanship began between the two nuclear superpowers in October 1962.

At that same time, two composers, Noël Regney and Gloria Shayne, who were married at the time, were commissioned to write a new Christmas song. Their collaboration on the children’s song “Rain, Rain, Go Away” was an outstanding hit, so producers thought they would be naturals for composing a new light ditty for the holiday season. But with deep anxiety over the possibility of nuclear war hanging heavy over the world, they determined to write a song as a plaintive call for peace. Relying on imagery from the story of the Magi, Regney wrote lyrics that envisioned a child and a lamb speaking of sounds and signs in the night sky. Shayne composed the music with a haunting blending of Eastern and Western scale tones.

“Do You Hear What I Hear?” was released Thanksgiving 1962. The imagery was not lost on the initial audience; a star “with a tail as big as a kite” and a song “with a voice as big as the sea” resonated at a time when missiles across the night sky and mushroom clouds vaporizing oceans were constant fears. The song resolves with the Mighty King’s pleas for people to pray for peace everywhere. So moving were the haunting melody and the poignant words that Shayne and Regney said it was years before they could perform the piece without weeping.

As we know, Khrushchev backed down, and the warheads were never delivered. Kennedy agreed to pull back the missiles in Italy and Turkey. It was perhaps the closest the Cold War came to becoming hot.

You may or may not have known that little bit of history, but a call for us to see what we see and pray for peace echoes a half century later.

Suggesting Advent as a time to reset all hostilities, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor