[NJARC] 48 year anniversary of the White House Hotline

[Pete Malvasi]

I came upon his story re the famous "Hotline" red phone in the White House to the Kremlin - thought the refs to early TTY would be interesting here:


Forty-eight years ago today, in 1963, the diplomatic hotline between Moscow and Washington went into service. This was not yet the famous "Red Telephone" that is so often spoofed by Hollywood but, instead, a pair of dual telegraph lines connecting a system of Teletype machines and cryptography units on each end, a concrete connection between bitter enemies. The hotline was introduced to the American public on August 30th with a one-line statement from the Defense Department, which only said, "The direct communications line between Washington and Moscow is now operational."

The hotline was one of the few arms-control measures that the United States and the Soviet Union had been able to agree upon since the beginning of the Cold War 17 years earlier. Given this, one might have hoped for more ceremony for the hotline's first use, but there wasn't even an official exchange of messages or greetings, just a Teletype operator test phrase that read, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back 1234567890," and a return message from Moscow that was completely unintelligible to the United States operators, but at least demonstrated that all the characters on the Russian machines were working correctly.

The line was to be used only in an emergency, and had been conceived of during the Cuban Missile Crisis the year before, when serious delays in diplomatic communications between the Americans and Russians, delays sometimes long enough to cause one side to believe that the other had deliberately ignored its message, made obvious the need for a faster way for the two world powers to relay information at critical times.

It was hoped that this new hotline would help avoid future misunderstandings, and it was intentionally designed without any kind of voice component — neither a telephone nor a radio — because of the fear that tone of voice or confusion over colloquialisms might lead to serious problems; with telegraph machines, communication was virtually instantaneous yet allowed time for consideration and reflection before replying. And so four Model 28 Teletype machines from the Teletype Corporation of Chicago boarded a plane in July 1963 and were installed in the Kremlin by August 1st, while four comparable Soviet machines from East Germany made their way to the Soviet Embassy in Washington and on to the section of the Pentagon occupied by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Each country included a year's supply of spare parts, tools, operating instructions, telecommunications tape, and encoding equipment that neither would normally have shared.

The hotline was first used in an official capacity four years later, during the Six-Day War between Israel and its surrounding nations, and it worked admirably, allowing both sides to make each other aware of military movements that had great potential for being misconstrued. The Teletype machines and radio circuits were finally replaced with telephones and satellites in the 1970s. And in 1986, a high-speed fax machine was added, so that American and Russian leaders could share large amounts of graphic information such as maps and diagrams.

In film and popular fiction, world leaders are often portrayed as giving or receiving the ultimate message — that of some Earth-destroying offensive — on a hotline such as this, and certainly for those who lived or grew up during the Cold War, the image and the idea of the symbolic Red Telephone became closely linked to the terrifying threat of global nuclear war. The Red Telephone in one form or another has made appearances in everything from the James Bond novels to the Batphone with which Commissioner Gordon could contact Batman whenever homicidal clowns or penguins came to call.

The Red Telephone is used only rarely, but needs to be tested every day. In the Sixties, the Americans would send baseball stats or football scores, and the Russians would reply with bits of Russian poetry, perhaps lines from Vladimir Nabokov or Boris Pasternak. Or perhaps the line might have once carried the ending to poet Anna Ahkmatova's "And as It's Going," and how,

     The bird began to sing the song of light and pleasure
     To us, who fears to lift looks from the earth
     Who are so lofty, bitter and intense
     About days when we were saved together.


FROM: Aug 30, 2011  Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keilor


Pete Malvasi