Garrett M. Graff

“Tyler himself narrowly escaped death as president when an explosion occurred while he was a passenger on the USS Princeton in 1844.…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Alaska, the push for greater command survivability revived one of SAC’s earliest 1960s-era plans for an alternate command post (ALCOP), a rail-mounted…

— Garrett M. Graff

“attack. “One of the awkward questions we faced was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack,” a participant recalled years later.…

— Garrett M. Graff

“George H. W. Bush said simply, Offutt “has the most sophisticated command-and-control outside Washington.” Offutt”

— Garrett M. Graff

“Then, instead of relying on income and property taxes to fund the government and the nation’s war mobilization, planners suggested that it…

— Garrett M. Graff

“The head of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr., promised all 60,000 employees loans to build fallout shelters—and arranged to sell any employees construction…

— Garrett M. Graff

“September 11, 2001, and the subsequent anthrax attack on the U.S. Congress restarted a focus on COG and COOP planning that continues…

— Garrett M. Graff

“ID issue would bedevil countless FEMA officials in the days ahead—the agency’s barebones IDs, which lacked many standard government markings like an…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Kennedy, who had campaigned strongly on the “Missile Gap” issue, soon discovered as president that the Soviet Union didn’t have the 500…

— Garrett M. Graff

“A specific new fear—that a whole city could just disappear in an instant—permeated the American consciousness in the wake of Hiroshima and…

— Garrett M. Graff

“The security offered inside a bank safe even became fodder for a 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone, in which mild-mannered, bookish…

— Garrett M. Graff

“OUTPOST MISSION, the presidential helicopter search-and-rescue team in Pennsylvania, was also disbanded in 1970, as atomic weaponry progressed to the point where…

— Garrett M. Graff

“In 1994, the FBI discovered its agent Robert Hanssen—a longtime spy for the Soviet Union—had on August 7, 1989, placed in a…

— Garrett M. Graff

“and departments planned to operate with even fewer staff: The National Mediation Board only had slots for its chair and an alternate;…

— Garrett M. Graff

“The Health and Human Services emergency command post, just a block from the National Mall in Room 313-10 in its headquarters basement,…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Together, they represented a vast bureaucracy hidden in plain sight: For every dollar that FEMA spent preparing for natural disasters, the agency’s…

— Garrett M. Graff

“In what commanders and technicians realized in hindsight was a bad decision, the test messages were identical to the real alert messages…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Then, one night, while daughter Margaret played the piano upstairs, the floor indeed gave way and the piano crashed through, sending plaster…

— Garrett M. Graff

“During his first week on the job, McNamara sat down with the Pentagon’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG), which had just completed…

— Garrett M. Graff

“roadway, got trapped under an overpass. FEMA created its own mobile command center effort, known as Mobile Emergency Response Support (MERS) units—eventually…

— Garrett M. Graff

“One informed theory holds that the secret procedures have a specific, defined role for a small, preselected set of congressional leaders—perhaps as…

— Garrett M. Graff

“After initial annoyance about the surprise drills, the Pentagon quickly saw value in the president’s interest. “It is the first time in…

— Garrett M. Graff

“age COG—except for one minor problem. There was no clear communication system that would ensure the nation’s leaders didn’t end up living…

— Garrett M. Graff

“disrupted by the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear weapon. If Green Pine was knocked out, SAC brought online in October 1967 the…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Hundreds more staff could join the ship in an emergency. (One young Navy ROTC officer, Bob Woodward, who went on to be…

— Garrett M. Graff

“the weeks following the war’s end, Truman announced a redesign of the presidential flag—the first since the Wilson years. Chief among the…

— Garrett M. Graff

“The Pentagon maintained dozens of other specific relocation facilities for various agencies and units, including a backup facility for the Navy at…

— Garrett M. Graff

“As part of a hidden-in-plain-sight construction project between the National Mall and the Potomac River in Washington, the U.S. Navy spent more…

— Garrett M. Graff

“McNamara’s Lincoln Continental had idled at the curb outside Kennedy’s house, its high-tech radio car phone keeping an open line to the…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Eisenhower was certain any war with the Soviet Union would become a nuclear war, and any nuclear war would escalate into a…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Urban architecture would be reimagined around atomic survival to ensure a single bomb couldn’t do too much damage. They would be built…

— Garrett M. Graff

“The programs and planning are buried inside innocuous-sounding entities like the Pentagon’s Center for National and Nuclear Leadership Command Capability, FEMA’s Special…

— Garrett M. Graff

“In many ways, after many decades, many billions of dollars, and countless advances in technology, the federal government’s basic plan to escape…

— Garrett M. Graff

“few civilians understood that so much of FEMA’s resources went to its primary mission behind the scenes—coordinating the nation’s COG efforts—and that…

— Garrett M. Graff

“since Carter had already decreed that he’d stay to command and refuse to be evacuated in an attack, Brzezinski decided to die…

— Garrett M. Graff

“crews, added to the unfolding chaos around Washington. It’s possible—perhaps even likely, given a study of the morning’s timeline—that reports of the…

— Garrett M. Graff

“to be recorded as they were under normal circumstances. Just beyond the public areas lay a sprawling multifloor substructure of 153 classified…

— Garrett M. Graff

“As the network of limited-access highways grew, the Pentagon carefully negotiated the minimum vertical clearances over the interstates to ensure that its…

— Garrett M. Graff

“inside forget they were hiding in an underground bunker. Under normal circumstances, personnel approaching the PEOC would arrive at its locked vault…

— Garrett M. Graff

“At the Pentagon, for instance, in the NMCC’s secure Emergency Actions room, military officials could find anyone in the Constitution’s line of…

— Garrett M. Graff