The World and Everything in It: October 24, 2022

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Andy Warhol and Prince are at the center of a legal dispute at the Supreme Court. A copyright fight.

NICK EICHER, HOST: All right. Glorious hypotheticals on this week’s Legal Docket.

Also today the Monday Moneybeat, we’ll talk about the economic policy rollout that rolled up the prime minister of the UK and listener questions for economist David Bahnsen.

Plus the WORLD History Book. This week marks the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, October 24th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Now news. Here’s Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: 2.4 million migrant encounters » Migrant encounters at the U.S. southern border have soared to a new record high, almost two-and-a-half million over the past year. Democratic Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar said that follows nearly two million the year before.

CUELLAR: Plus if you add the getaways, that’s going to be over 5 million individuals in just two years.

Cuellar said he disagrees with Vice President Kamala Harris’ recent claim that the border is secure.

Border officials just released the figures for the fiscal year. It shows that they stopped 2.4 million migrants—either trying to cross illegally or gain entry without prior permission. That’s more than twice the highest level during former President Donald Trump's administration in 2019.

With the surge has come a sharp increase in migrant deaths at or near the border.

Lt. Christopher Olivarez with the Texas Dept of Public Safety:

OLIVAREZ: So many human smuggling cases play out along the border where these human smugglers are placing the lives of these migrants in danger. And at times, some of them are being killed because they’re involved in these high-speed chases.

Officially, some 750 migrants died over the past year at the border or in smuggling-related accidents. But experts say the actual number is likely much higher.

Judge sides with California baker over same-sex wedding cake » A California judge has ruled in favor of a bakery owner who declined to make wedding cakes for a same-sex ceremony because it violated her Christian beliefs.

The state of California sued Tastries Bakery in Bakersfield, arguing owner Cathy Miller discriminated against the couple and violated a state civil rights law.

Miller’s attorneys argued that she has First Amendment rights to free speech and religious expression. And Kern County Superior Court Judge Eric Bradshaw agreed.

An earlier decision in the same court also went Miller’s way, but an appeals court later overturned it and sent the lawsuit back to the county.

Ukraine » President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is asking the Ukrainian people to conserve electricity. He said “the stability of our state energy industry depends” on it. That follows repeated Russian attacks on Ukraine’s power grid just as the weather turns colder.

A cab driver in Kyiv said rolling blackouts started on Friday.

AUDIO: [Ukrainian]

He said the outages lasted 2 to 3 hours each. More rolling blackouts are expected in the weeks ahead as power crews work to repair the damage from Russian attacks.

Xi gets third term » Chinese leader Xi Jinping has become the country’s most powerful dictator since Mao Zedong.

On Sunday, he was officially named to a third term as head of the ruling Communist Party in a break with tradition.

U.S. Congressman Michael Waltz noted that Xi Jinping also promoted allies who support his vision of tighter control over society.

WALTZ: All with a major step toward what he sees as his legacy, and that’s returning China to become the global superpower.

The 69-year-old Xi took office in 2012 and is expected by some to try to stay in power for life.

Trump subpoena Jan. 6 panel » Former President Trump has reportedly told associates that he’ll consider complying with a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee if he can answer questions during live televised testimony.

Committee vice chair Liz Cheney was asked on Sunday if the panel will consider having Trump testify publicly. She did not directly answer the question, telling NBC’s Meet the Press:

CHENEY: He’s not going to turn this into a circus. This is not going to be his first debate vs Joe Biden and the circus and the food fight that that became. This is far too serious a set of issues.

Cheney said the questioning could take place over multiple days.

Box office » At the weekend box office, a new superhero flick soared to first place.

TRAILER: My son sacrificed his life to save me. These powers are not a gift, but a curse...

Black Adam starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson hauled in $67 million domestically in its opening weekend. Worldwide, it opened with more than $140 million.

The rom-com Ticket to Paradise starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts finished second with $16 million.

I'm Kent Covington. Straight ahead: Andy Warhol and Prince are at the center of a legal dispute at the Supreme Court. A copyright fight.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Monday, October 24th and you’re listening to The World and Everything In it from WORLD Radio. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time now for Legal Docket.

Today, we focus on one oral argument heard this month at the U.S. Supreme Court.

It involves two celebrities who are no longer with us. Music artist Prince whose music you heard at the start and visual artist Andy Warhol.

Prince died in 2016. Warhol died 29 years earlier, in 1987.

REICHARD: The years-long legal battle here is between Warhol’s estate and rock ‘n roll photographer Lynn Goldsmith.

Goldsmith took a series of photographs of Prince in 1981, before his rise to world wide fame.

Three years later, Prince became a superstar with the album Purple Rain. Vanity Fair magazine wanted to do a feature piece on Prince, so it paid Goldsmith for the rights to one of her photos.

Then the magazine commissioned Andy Warhol to create an illustration based on that photograph. Vanity Fair published his creation titled “Purple Fame” in 1984.

EICHER: So far, so good, as far as Goldsmith knew.

But years later, Goldsmith found out something else: that Warhol had made a series of images from her photo.

And that’s a problem.

Because she’d agreed for him to use only one. She also found out that Vanity Fair’s parent organization paid the Warhol estate $10,000 to use his series of silk screen images.

But with no credit to Goldsmith and, crucially, no money to Goldsmith. She says that violates her copyright. And litigation ensued, starting in 2017.

Her lawyer, Lisa Blatt, at the Supreme Court:

BLATT: Indeed, Warhol got the picture only in 1984 because Ms. Goldsmith was paid and credited. Petitioner responds Warhol is a creative genius who imbued other people's art with his own distinctive style. But Spielberg did the same for films and Jimi Hendrix for music. Those giants still needed licenses. Even Warhol followed the rules. When he did not take a picture himself, he paid the photographer. His foundation just failed to do so here.

REICHARD: In other words, Warhol’s estate just didn’t follow the rules.

But the lawyer for Warhol’s estate, Roman Martinez, told the court, oh, yes, we did:

MARTINEZ: Both courts below agreed and Goldsmith doesn't dispute that Warhol's Prince Series can reasonably be perceived to convey a fundamentally different meaning or message from Goldsmith's photograph. The question in this case is whether that different meaning or message should play a role, any role, in the fair use analysis. Our answer is yes. Warhol's transformative meaning puts points on the board under Factor 1 of the four-factor balancing test.

That would be the fair-use analysis. Courts have to consider four factors, as he says, to see whether a follow-up work is a fair use under the law.

Only two of the four factors are really relevant to this case. Factor one is the purpose and character of the follow-up work.

His lawyer argued Warhol’s image is about the nature of celebrity.

MARTINEZ: Its meaning or message was about the dehumanizing effects of celebrity as applied to Prince. The Goldsmith photograph, as she herself said below, she was testifying as to what she was capturing was a photo- realistic portrait of Prince that showed him as fragile and vulnerable.

And there’s the distinction: transformative use.

But is that transformative enough to count as fair use and therefore not an infringement of copyright?

Blatt for the photographer said absolutely not:

BLATT: Petitioner's colloquial definition of the word "transformative" is too easy to manipulate. The act also gives creators and not copiers the right to make derivative works that transform the original into new ones with new meaning. If Petitioner's test prevails, copyrights will be at the mercy of copycats. Anyone could turn Darth Vader into a hero or spin off "All in the Family" into "The Jeffersons" without paying the creators a dime.

Blatt’s brief pointed out how similar the Warhol painting is to the photograph: the angle of Prince’s face; an eye partly covered with his hair; the shadows created from the light Goldsmith chose for the photo shoot.

If the justices could ever be said to be having a good time ferreting out these arguments, it was this case. They went to town with the hypotheticals, as if to pay tribute to their recently retired friend Justice Stephen Breyer, the king of the hypothetical.

You’ll hear Justice Clarence Thomas mention “Orange Prince.” That’s the particular Warhol creation from the series published without credit to Goldsmith.

THOMAS: The -- let's say that I'm both a Prince fan, which I was in the '80s, and --

KAGAN: No longer?

THOMAS: Well – -- so only on Thursday nights. But let's say that I'm also a Syracuse fan and I decide to make one of those big blowup posters of Orange Prince and change the colors a little bit around the edges and put "Go Orange" underneath. Would you sue me for infringement?

MARTINEZ: -- would the -- would the Warhol foundation sue you if you were to do that?

THOMAS: Well, you're their lawyer, so --

MARTINEZ: I -- I can't comment on whether we would sue you. But I think the question of whether that would be fair use, I mean, it sounds like you're asking me to consider that there's, like, a different meaning or message associated with the work. I don't think that's the only part of the -- the inquiry. I think that everyone recognizes that at Factor 1, the ultimate goal here is to figure out whether the follow-on user is doing something sort of creative that matters. 

THOMAS: Oh, I'm just waving it in the -- I'm waving it during the game with a big Prince face on it, “Go Orange.”

MARTINEZ: Yeah. I -- I think that in -- in circumstances like that, it's very unlikely if it was just one of you that -- that -- that anyone would see you.

THOMAS: Oh, no, no. I'm going to market it to all my Syracuse buddies. (Laughter.) 

MARTINEZ: So I think, in that case, the -- a court would -- would quite reasonably look at that and say that this is not the kind of -- of productive creativity promoting use that is -- is --THOMAS: So, in other words, you would sue me? (Laughter.)

MARTINEZ: I would not sue -- I – I -- I think that -- I think that you would probably have a very weak case against me, Your Honor.

Well, Justice Elena Kagan got back to serious.

KAGAN: Indeed, we expect Hollywood, when it takes a book and makes a movie, to pay the author of the book. But I think moviemakers might be surprised by the notion that what they do can’t be fundamentally transformative. I mean, mostly movies are tons of new dialogue, sometimes new plot points, new settings, new characters, new themes. You would think new meaning and message. So why is it that we, you know, can’t imagine that Hollywood could just take a book and make a movie out of it without paying?

Martinez answered that the usual book-to-movie transition doesn’t inherently change the meaning or message of the book. More than that, the natural follow-up work for a successful book is a movie. That’s factor four of fair-use analysis: the potential market for the original work.

Chief Justice John Roberts wasn’t finished with the hypotheticals:

ROBERTS: Mr. Martinez, let -- let's suppose that I think you can do this with technology instead of the mood that Prince is conveying in the Goldsmith photograph. You put a little smile on his face and say this is a new message. The message is Prince can be happy. Prince should be happy. Is that enough of a transformation? The message is different.

MARTINEZ: I -- I think you would certainly have to consider the new meaning or message as part of the inquiry.

So, he’s saying yes. Martinez did think that would be transformative enough to count.

But Justice Amy Coney Barrett thought maybe Martinez was doing too much emphasizing one factor over another. (Remember, factor one is the purpose and character of the follow-up work. Factor four is the potential market value of the original work.)

BARRETT: …it seems to me like your test, this meaning or message test, risks stretching the concept of transformation so broadly that it kind of eviscerates Factor 1 and puts all of the emphasis on Factor 4. I mean, when you've been asked about book to movie and -- and -- and, you know, songs, you keep flipping to Factor 4. So, if a work is derivative, like Lord of the Rings, you know, book to movie, is your answer just like, well, sure, that's a new meaning or message, it's transformative, so all that matters is 4?

MARTINEZ: I don't think that Lord of the Rings is -- has the -- has a fundamentally different meaning or message, but I would have to probably –

BARRETT: The movie?

MARTINEZ: -- but I would probably have to learn more and read the books and see the movies to give you a – (Laughter.) - definitive judgment on that. And I recognize reasonable people could probably disagree on that.

Justice Samuel Alito asked Martinez to get into the nuts and bolts:

ALITO: How is a court to determine the purpose of meaning, the message or meaning of works of art like a photograph or a painting? Should it receive testimony by the photographer and the artist? Do you call art critics as experts? How does a court go about doing this?

Martinez answered, just as in another copyright dispute the high court decided back in 1994.

In that case, the rap group 2 Live Crew made a parody of Roy Orbison’s 1964 hit “Oh, Pretty Woman.” They titled their rendition “Pretty Woman.” Let’s listen —and we will let you do so on our understanding of fair use

AUDIO: [MUSIC]

2 Live Crew won because the Supreme Court ruled that the commercial character of the group’s parody was just one element to consider. There were others. Market harm, for example.

But that’s music, this case deals with photography. Besides, Blatt countered, that her client’s photo isn’t parody.

But the justices really didn’t seem to buy the idea that a new meaning, by itself, is enough to constitute fair use. They seemed to be looking for something else.

Two things we know: Artists need to generate income from their work. And two, there’s nothing new under the sun.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: the Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Time now for our weekly conversation on business, markets, and the economy. Financial analyst and adviser David Bahnsen is here.

He’s head of the wealth management firm The Bahnsen Group. David, I hope you’re doing well, good morning to you!

DAVID BAHNSEN, GUEST: Good morning, Nick. Good to be with you. Doin’ great!

EICHER: David, I want to get after listener questions ASAP, but before we do, I want to follow up from last week, our first questions had to do with Europe and one specifically on the UK. And, of course, since last week, we’ve had historic developments. Prime Minister Liz Truss became the shortest-serving PM ever and we can trace it to a poorly handled rollout of economic policy. But, ah, what happened?

BAHNSEN: Well, there's a couple of things that went wrong. I think that it's a really important reminder to conservatives, to I would say it should be a reminder to men and women of the Christian faith: when you have things you want to get done, and you believe you are right, you have an obligation to take seriously the way in which you do it, the line I'm very fond of is that piety is no substitute for technique. So to go in and say we're going to implement a certain economic policy, but not first go through the process of how financial markets are going to respond or not get a budget impact report, to say you want to do a big subsidy to people directly for their rising electricity bills, but then you also want to cut taxes, and you're not going to do analysis of the budget report, I think that the vast majority of what you wanted to do, would be in the end very good policies. But I don't believe that the right way to implement good policies is without incrementalism, or with, with a rush. There's a sense in which the technique has to matter as much as what you're trying to get done substantively. And when you look back to things because you're using an economic analogy here, with Truss’s attempted implementing economic policy, her mentor in English parliamentary history is Margaret Thatcher; [in] the United States, we had Ronald Reagan, but they took a long time to really build consensus, and to do the necessary pre-work to implement the cogent policy. And unfortunately, this backfired on Truss. And as you say, she's now in the history books for all the wrong reasons.

EICHER: All right, listener question time. Let’s begin with Ryan Jones of Bloomington, Indiana. He says he appreciates your analysis every week, David, and says he’s new to the world of investing.

JONES: … but it seems to me that by investing in a company, I may unintentionally incentivize the company to make decisions that prioritize growth of my investment over love of neighbor when those ideals may be at odds with one another. How would you advise someone who wants to responsibly invest their money in a way that does not incentivize growth of capital over love of neighbor?

Thank you, Ryan, and I should say, David, that we have received many questions similar to Ryan’s that touch on this subject of sort of ethical investing. For example Caleb Newsom, who is a seminary student. He wrote to ask your assessment of “Biblically responsible investing.” Specifically, he wants to know “how important is it that Christians avoid funds which have ties to companies that support abortion and other sinful practices”

What do you say?

BAHNSEN: This general topic is a very, very important one. It's one I've written about and lectured about all over the country and believe that the conversation needs to continue. But I want to start with a very important fact that could clean up some of the premises. When you invest in a company, you're not giving the money to the company. The company has already gotten their money. When they do a stock offering, they get money. And then when we go buy stock, we're buying in the secondary market. So Bob is buying stock from Paul and Paul is buying from Jenny and, and Jenny's buying from a mutual fund. You know, everyone is trading with one another, the money's not going straight to the company.

Now, perhaps someone feels that that's not relevant if you're still symbolically supporting what the company does. This is what I think the Apostle Paul meant by we're in the world and not of the world. There is inevitability of commercial touch with sin on this side of glory. And after the fall and before the second coming, this is unavoidable. The question is, what within Christian conscience and a Christian intentional desire to advance the kingdom is the right way to approach it? I believe that when you're talking about companies that are pursuing growth, they are pursuing the creation mandate, God asked us to cultivate the earth to grow. And then our task in creation is to extract the potential out of what God made. And so that company's doing things by providing goods and services that meet the needs of humanity, this is, in fact, even if one has no Christian epistemology, that they are effectively doing what God created mankind to do, and us supporting that commercially in the marketplace, I think is a good thing. But then when a company in the task of doing such begins getting distracted, supporting bad behavior, you have a better chance of influencing that behavior as a shareholder than you do as a non shareholder.

So that myself, guys like Jerry Boyer, there's a whole new project that is taken off out of the Alliance Defending Freedom, that is really seeking to hold companies accountable to stay focused on their objective, which is supposed to be creating shareholder value. You create shareholder value by what? By growing profits. You create profits by what? Producing goods and services that meet the needs of humanity. So I see these things as being very potentially looped together in a virtuous cycle. But along the way, I Romans 14 is still in effect - if someone's conscience doesn't allow them to own stock in a company, that I think that that's fine. But my own belief is that even when you go to a company that you think does good things, and then they are buying their products from a company that ships with a company that does bad things, that is simply the inevitability of this ‘invisible hand’, Nick, of the marketplace. So my view on it is meant to be more transformational. I want to own stock in companies, where we think they're doing a good thing for investors. But if they're doing a bad thing in society, we want to go reform that, we want to take dominion in the boardroom, take dominion in middle management and ultimately in the C suite. So there's a lot of stuff to unpack here. It's hard in our time constraint. But that's a kind of high level view of how I would approach this subject.

EICHER: Last batch that we have time for today, David. We’ve received lots of questions about mortgage interest rates. Jacob Roberts is very typical of those:

ROBERTS: My wife and I bought a house in December of last year when the rates were just above 3 percent, and now they are more than twice that. If we were to buy the same price house today, our mortgage payment would be almost 50% higher. That makes me not want to move for a very long time, and I'm sure that's true for many others as well!

Could we see the housing market stagnate in the future if people who locked in low rates become unwilling to sell? And second, do you think the market will correct itself for the artificially low rates we've had for over a decade? In other words, is it possible for higher mortgage rates to translate into lower home values?

BAHNSEN: Could we see the housing market stagnate in the future, if people who locked in low rates become unwilling to sell? And second, do you think the market will correct itself for the artificially low rates we've had for over a decade? In other words, is it possible for higher mortgage rates to translate into actually lower home values? Yeah, it's not just possible, it's inevitable, it is already happening. And I will argue it's a very good thing, when prices are distorted.

Think of it this way: if you are getting on a scale, and it's telling you a certain weight, and that weight is wrong, and then they fix the scale, and now your weight goes up because the scale is working. Is that a good thing or a bad thing to know the accurate weight, an artificially low interest rate created an artificially high value in houses. So to have them reprice around something more normal to the equilibrium of supply and demand to something more in line with wage growth, with with normal economic ratios of affordability relative to income, those are good things, I do believe that there will be a impact to housing prices, and one of those factors will be exactly what Jacob said, which is people that can afford to trade up and get a bigger and better home, that's always a certain percentage of housing market activity. And it won't happen when someone will be trading from a lower price home with a two and a half percent mortgage to a higher priced home at a six or 7% mortgage. Now, six or seven is still not that high in the grand scheme of things. It's incredibly high in the last 15 to 20 years. And I think rates will end up coming down when the Fed ends up having a kind of stasis in the Fed funds rate. But I don't know how much lower it'll go. I don't think it'll keep going higher. But again, somewhere in between what the low was a year and a half ago, which was a dramatic distortion of monies and so people who were able to buy at those low rates or refinance, they locked in something quite valuable. But to the extent that it was creating an artificial unaffordability of housing, I not only think it will adjust that, I think it should adjust that.

EICHER: All right, terrific batch of questions this week. Please keep your questions coming. One way or another, we will address all of them. And we’d be most grateful if you could record your question, in your voice, on your phone, and send us a file to feedback@worldandeverything.com.

David Bahnsen is founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group. His personal website is Bahnsen.com.

David, talk to you next time. Thanks again!

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, October 24th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Remember just a few weeks ago the controversy President Biden generated over Russia and Ukraine? He told a group of Democrat donors that the threat of nuclear war was as great as it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Well, that crisis was 60 years ago this week.

EICHER: Yes, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and the Soviet Union truly to the brink of nuclear war. While the crisis lasted 13 days in October, the chain of events that caused it began much earlier.

WORLD’s Harrison Watters did the background research, and Paul Butler has this week’s WORLD History Book.

KENNEDY: I John Fitzgerald Kennedy do solemnly swear…

PAUL BUTLER, REPORTER: At John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, he inherited a covert military operation codename: Operation Mongoose.

The CIA led plan was to train Cuban resistance fighters to overthrow Communist dictator Fidel Castro with U.S. air and sea support. The invasion was to take place along the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy expressed doubts with the plan, but agreed to let it go forward—as long as U.S. involvement was covered up.

Publicly, Kennedy insisted that America would stay out of Cuban affairs.

KENNEDY: There will not under any conditions be an intervention in Cuba by United States armed forces…

But on April 15th, 1961, four American airmen died in the first sortie of an invasion.

KENNEDY: They were serving their country. The flight that cost them their lives was a volunteer flight…

Bombers arrived ahead of the fighters sent to protect them and Castro’s forces shot down two B-26s. And that was only the start of trouble.

In the end, of the 1,400 Cuban resistance fighters trained in a $13 million program—nearly 300 were killed. More than one thousand were imprisoned. Four months into his presidency, Kennedy’s reputation on the global stage was badly damaged at the Bay of Pigs.

FIDEL CASTRO:

By contrast, Fidel Castro’s reputation in Cuba was strengthened after mobilizing the country to repel what he called “imperialist invaders.” Castro appealed to the USSR for protection and weapons—the very thing the US was trying to prevent.

NIKITA KRUSCHEV:

Russian Premier Nikita Kruschev saw the fiasco as a way to solve a problem of his own. In 1958 the United States installed missiles in Turkey—a member of NATO since 1952.

So when Castro came begging for an alliance and weapons, Kruschev saw an opportunity to put the US in check. He could place Soviet missiles just 90 miles from Florida.

During the summer of 1962, the Soviets began secretly shipping missile parts and personnel into Cuba aboard cargo ships. That fall, CIA analysts examining high altitude photos of Cuba with magnifying glasses discovered the unmistakable signs of missile bases under construction. The following day, Kennedy met with the Executive Committee of the National Security Council or ExComm.

JFK TAPE 28: This is the result of the photography taken Sunday, sir. Medium range ballistic missile site…

The committee discussed the feasibility of an airstrike, but without knowing just how many missiles were in Cuba Kennedy feared a second Bay of Pigs—or worse. So Kennedy decided on a more cautious course of action.

Six days later, Kennedy addressed the nation.

JOHN F KENNEDY: Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive Missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.

Kennedy laid out his plan for responding to the threat of these missile bases to the Western Hemisphere.

KENNEDY: To halt this offensive build-up, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated…

A blockade cutting all ships off from Cuba would be considered an act of war. So ExComm chose a quarantine instead. It would prevent all ships—except those carrying food and fuel—from sailing to Cuba.

KENNEDY: It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States...

Because there was no direct line of communication between the White House and the Kremlin, Kennedy passed a letter on to Kruschev through Foy Kohler, his ambassador to the Soviet Union.

In response to Kennedy’s warning about the dangers of nuclear war, Kruschev tipped his hand by agreeing with the President. He offered to pull the missiles out of Cuba if the United States agreed to announce they would never attack Cuba.

NEWSCASTER: If Kruschev elects force, he has really then given us no choice at all…for the world can not forever endure this sort of Soviet pressure…

While Kennedy and Kruschev exchanged letters, American warships played chicken with Soviet ships and submarines.

NEWS CLIP: Washington…the White House emphasizes the arms quarantine on Cuba will continue. The Defense Department also reported at least a dozen Soviet ships bound for Cuba turned back...

The world’s two superpowers were standing toe to toe as the world held its breath. Then on Saturday, October 27th, Cuba shot down an American U2 spy plane—killing the pilot.

That afternoon, Kennedy and ExComm talked through possible responses…now that the Soviets had fired the first shot. Several committee members pushed for an air strike or invasion. But President Kennedy was convinced Kruschev had not authorized the missile strike. He doubled down on finding a diplomatic solution.

Kennedy’s proposal? If the Soviet Union pulled missiles out of Cuba, the US would secretly pull missiles from Turkey, though Kennedy wouldn’t announce the move for 3 or 4 months. And if the Soviets did not accept the deal within 48 hours, Americans would invade Cuba. The meeting ended without a deal.

On Sunday morning, October 28th, Kruschev met with the Presidium—the Communist Congress. They decided the risks of nuclear war were too great and pointed in America’s favor..

CLIP FROM WAR AND PEACE IN THE NUCLEAR AGE: ‘This is Radio Moscow. Premier Kruschev has sent a message to President Kennedy today. The Soviet government has ordered the dismantling of weapons in Cuba, as well as their crating and return to the Soviet Union.’

By November 21st, the Soviets had pulled all missiles and nuclear bombers out of Cuba. The following April, Kennedy pulled American missiles out of Turkey.

The two leaders established a Telex hotline to connect the White House and Kremlin in hopes that better communication would help avert future crises. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamera later explained that Kennedy’s commitment to diplomacy required a counter-intuitive approach to victory.

ROBERT MCNAMERA: Give your opponent an out…Look at the options that you are considering from his point of view. Try to pick an option that achieves your purpose at minimal cost to him - political, military, otherwise - that avoids pushing him into an emotional frame of mind in which he is likely to lash out irrationally with great cost to him and you.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Paul Butler.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: an update on transgender school policies in one key state.

And political turmoil in the UK: what’s next for the Tories as they look for a new prime minister.

That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio.

WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says: Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. (1 Tim 4:7-8 ESV)

Go now in grace and peace.

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