The holiday carol goes, “Do You Hear What I Hear? – Said the night wind to the little lamb – Do you see what I see?”
Written in October 1962 and released before Thanksgiving as a 45 rpm single, the song sold more than 250,000-copies during the 1962 holiday season.
The husband and wife team Regney and Shayne wrote the song after watching children being pushed in strollers on New York City sidewalks. Years later, Shayne told an interviewer that though she and her husband wrote the song, they couldn’t personally perform the entire song due to the emotions surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“Our little song broke us up. You must realize there was a threat of war at the time.”
An intense standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union over nuclear-armed missiles; the Cuban Missile Crisis remains the most frightening nuclear threat the United States has ever faced.
Six-weeks before the crises, sixty-six intermediate range missile launching pads were spotted under construction in Cuba and more than 600 Soviet ships loaded with crates headed toward Cuba were identified by U. S. U-2 spy planes. All-out nuclear war seemed to be immanent.
“American B-52 bombers will soon be circling just outside the Soviet Union’s borders,” TV newscaster Walter Cronkite reported. “And this is obvious to all of us who’ve covered the last seven years of this ever more frightening cold war – the chances for a mistake, a potentially disastrous mistake, grows with each new escalation . . .”
President John Kennedy displayed levelheaded leadership during the Cuban Crisis. Two weeks after it began, on October 28, 1962, following an imposing confrontation that threatened world peace, President Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, agreed to withdraw.
Some say that during the missile crisis the President “. . . held the power of a god and the responsibility of a man.” If he stumbled, he could bring about the obliteration of half, if not all humanity.
“Do You Hear What I Hear?” – Said the night wind to the little lamb – Do you see what I see?” conjures the Cuban Crises.
