An important synergy between the Vatican, the Italian government and the Kennedy administration helped overcome the 1962 Cuba missile crisis. The Italian government, led by Amintore Fanfani, told Washington to be ready to let the US withdraw their long-range Jupiter missiles from Italy, one of the conditions posed by Moscow.
Khrushchev demanded a missile swap two days after the Pope’s message (full text here), on October 27, a surprise for those who missed to catch the importance of the fact that Pravda, the official organ of the Soviet Communist Party, had published the Pope’s message on its front page the day earlier.
cccKennedy needed to know if his NATO allies would cooperate. Thanks to Fanfani’s precise intervention that very day, the White House received immediate confirmation that Italy was politically ready to sacrifice its missiles. This allowed the Kennedy administration to confidently seal the secret agreement that resolved the crisis.
Fanfani’s envoy was the late Ettore Bernabei, who recounted this episode in meetings with Lyndon LaRouche and eventually in a memoir book entitled [L’uomo di fiducia](https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1999/eirv26n13-19990326/eirv26n13-19990326_057-the_man_you_can_trust_discusses.pdf]. Bernabei, then head of the Italian state television network, was in Washington for a conference of TV broadcasters. He met Arthur Schlesinger that same day, thus bypassing the bureaucracy and getting the Italian government message directly to JFK.
Fanfani (and Bernabei) were part of the young group of leaders groomed by future Pope Paul VI. That grouping eventually founded the Italian Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana) during the last days of the war.
