In October of 1962, during a bit of unpleasantness that came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the general secretary of the Soviet Union wrote long and rambling but, on balance, rather conciliatory letter to the president of the United States.
It was so friendly, in fact, that the Soviet Politburo quickly issued another, more formal and much more bellicose letter of its own.
In an act that, to oversimplify things quite a bit, averted global thermonuclear war, John Fitzgerald Kennedy just pretended that he hadn’t seen the Politburo’s letter and answered the one from Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.