The Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges works with all currently public correspondences between former Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, and former U.S. president, John Kennedy. Spanning just less than three years, this time period (1960-1963) is marked by its historical intensity. The Berlin Wall was erected, the checkpoint Charlie standoff pushed the already feeble balance of world power to a brink, and the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world the closest it’s been to thermonuclear war. Yet despite the turmoil largely defining the surrounding historical canon, somewhere between the lines their exchanges reveal an endless nuance within crisis.

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The project began researching the Cuban Missile Crisis, looking to the direct exchanges between the leaders to fill in the gaps of the historical record.  Almost immediately, I was struck by the leaders’ language; it appeared loaded and laced with built-in meaning outside of its direct context. It was a linguistic collaboration between the two most powerful individuals on opposing sides of the Iron Curtain, bypassing not only language barriers and their associated obstacles of translation and transcription, but also hyperbolized ideological divides.

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The project tracks the linguistic motifs embedded in the exchanges and defines their significance within the accompanying key linked here. 

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Highlighting every sentence of the correspondence, the first key follows a tonal analysis. I track emerging motifs as they developed in the correspondence. The secondary follows selected terms, which are evidence of a mutually constructed language developed by Kennedy and Khrushchev.  My interest in both is how they point to larger conflicts and negotiations in the years of the Cold War.