How the Cuban missile crisis gave Batman his red phone

In October 1962, the leaders of the two most heavily armed nations on Earth could not call each other. As the United States and the Soviet Union stood closer to nuclear war than ever before, messages between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev crawled through telegrams, embassies and couriers. The fix that came out of that scare, a direct line between Washington and Moscow, went on to inspire one of pop culture's most recognizable props: the red phone Commissioner Gordon picks up when Gotham needs Batman.

Thirteen days in October

The crisis unfolded quickly, and a handful of dates tell the story.

1. October 14, 1962. An American U-2 spy plane flown by Major Richard Heyser photographed Soviet missile sites under construction in Cuba, about 90 miles from the US coast. The deployment was Moscow's answer to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, which had tried to topple Fidel Castro, and to American missiles stationed in Turkey and Italy within range of Soviet territory.
2. October 16. Kennedy formed the ExComm, an emergency committee of the National Security Council, to weigh his options: air strikes, an invasion of Cuba, or a naval blockade.
3. October 22. Kennedy went on national television, revealed the missiles and announced a naval blockade. He officially called it a "quarantine," because a blockade is legally an act of war.
4. October 24. Soviet ships approached the blockade line in the Atlantic and turned back at the last moment. Americans were by then preparing in earnest for a nuclear war.
5. October 27, "Black Saturday." The most dangerous day. A U-2 was shot down over Cuba, killing Major Rudolf Anderson. An American destroyer dropped depth charges on the Soviet submarine B-59, which carried a nuclear torpedo, and the weapon came close to being used. That night Robert Kennedy met secretly with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and signaled that the US would remove its missiles from Turkey if the Soviets left Cuba, a deal kept secret for years.
6. October 28. Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would dismantle its Cuban sites in exchange for an American pledge not to invade the island.

A superpower standoff by bicycle courier

The terrifying part was not only the weapons. It was how slowly the two sides could talk. Messages passed through the Soviet embassy in Washington, where they were transcribed and encoded, and then a Western Union messenger on a bicycle carried them to the telegraph office. Each exchange took hours, at a moment when minutes mattered.

The delay got bad enough that, at the decisive moment, Khrushchev skipped the formal channel entirely and broadcast his acceptance of the deal over the radio. He feared that a slow cable might give Kennedy time to order an attack on Cuba.

The idea of a direct link had been floated in the 1950s, but it took this near miss to make it happen. Superpowers that were racing each other into space were still moving their most urgent messages by bike.

The hotline that was never red

On June 20, 1963, the two governments signed an agreement in Geneva creating a direct communications link. It became operational on August 30, 1963, and it was not a telephone. It was a teletype connection, sending typed text. It later moved to fax and then to email. The first test transmission was as mundane as possible: the typists' pangram "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back," followed by a string of numbers.

None of that stopped the public from imagining a phone. The press called it the "red line" or the "red telephone," and film cemented the image. Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) has its president calling the Soviet premier on the hotline, and the idea of a single, special phone reserved for the end of the world stuck in the popular imagination, however far it was from the clattering teletype in reality.

Gotham gets its own hotline

That Cold War atmosphere, with its emergency link between two powers, found its way into Batman comics. The device that became the Bat-Phone was created by writer Bill Finger and first appeared in Detective Comics #328, cover-dated June 1964, two years before the Batman television series premiered.

At first it had no name. It was simply an unlabeled device Commissioner Gordon used to reach the Dynamic Duo, part of the "New Look" overhaul that editor Julius Schwartz ordered to refresh the character. Before anyone called it the Bat-Phone, the comics called it the "Hot-Line," a barely disguised nod to the Moscow to Washington link the newspapers had nicknamed the red phone. This is not a fan theory: it is the explanation most comics historians accept, and it reflects the very real anxiety of the period.

Adam West makes it red

Finger's creation had been in the comics for two years when the live-action series starring Adam West arrived in 1966 and gave it its name. Producer William Dozier wanted strong recurring elements to keep viewers hooked, the same instinct that led to the creation of Barbara Gordon for the show.

The TV version is the one people remember. The phone was red, with a black button where the dial should be, and it sat under a clear dome on a desk. There was one in Bruce Wayne's study at Wayne Manor, one in the Batcave and a mobile unit in the Batmobile, plus the matching line in Commissioner Gordon's office at police headquarters.

There was a clever detail, too. The Batcave line was connected to a reel-to-reel recorder with prerecorded answers, in case Batman could not pick up, so his secret identity was never at risk. Usually it was Alfred the butler who answered, without Gordon or Chief O'Hara ever knowing who was on the other end.

The name escaped the show entirely. "Bat phone" is still everyday slang for a private number reserved for high-priority calls, used by people who have never watched an episode.

Still ringing

The phone has been updated over the decades. In The Joker (Volume 2) #2, it became a red smartphone that lets James Gordon reach selected files on the Batcomputer through Batman's private satellite network. The essence is unchanged from Finger's 1964 original: a restricted, direct line between two figures of authority for moments of crisis.

The Cuban crisis still echoes through games, too. Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) opens at the Bay of Pigs, and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004) is set in 1964 and builds its plot on the crisis's secret settlement. Batman, meanwhile, has become one of gaming's most familiar heroes through Rocksteady's Arkham series, which began with Batman: Arkham Asylum in 2009.

It is a rare case of a real historical moment, full of tension and the risk of catastrophe, turning into one of the most memorable objects in popular culture without losing the thread back to where it came from. Every time Gordon lifts that receiver, a little of October 1962 comes with it.

Platforms: PCPlayStationXboxSwitch