In the early hours of September 26, 1983, at the height of the Cold War, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov was on duty at a nuclear early warning center when the computers announced that the United States had launched missiles. His training said to report it up the chain immediately. “All I had to do was to reach for the phone,” he said later, “but I couldn’t move. I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.” Something didn’t add up, so he reported a system malfunction instead. Twenty-three minutes later nothing had happened. It turned out satellites had mistaken sunlight reflecting off clouds for missile engines. One man’s calm judgment may have kept the world out of a nuclear war.
On May 1, 1969, a soft-spoken children’s television host named Fred Rogers sat before a Senate subcommittee. Funding for public television was on the line, and the chairman, Senator John Pastore, called himself a pretty tough guy. Rogers didn’t read his prepared statement. He just talked about children. He explained that his show dealt with things like getting a haircut and the anger kids feel in families, and how he ended each program telling every child, “There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are.” Then he recited the words of a song about what to do with the mad that you feel. Pastore said he had goose bumps and told him, “Looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars.”
Picture the first winter of World War I. British and German soldiers are freezing in muddy trenches, sometimes close enough to shout across to each other. Late on Christmas Eve 1914, the British troops heard the Germans singing carols and saw lanterns and little fir trees lined up along the enemy trenches. Men started calling back and forth. On Christmas Day, soldiers from both sides climbed out and met in No Man’s Land. They swapped gifts, took pictures together, buried their dead, and in some spots even kicked a football around. It didn’t happen everywhere, and the fighting started back up, but for a few hours the men who were supposed to kill each other stood side by side as human beings.
