Quote by Garrett M. Graff

““Court Clerk Harold Willey was dispatched by Warren to spend a fall weekend scouting Asheville for a possible relocation facility. “Because all large cities are considered to be prospective enemy targets, a hotel in a secluded small city, wherein approximately one-hundred people could both live and work, with spaces available for a court room and clerical offices, seems a most appropriate facility for the Court,” Willey wrote in his report to the chief justice. Willey””

Garrett M. Graff

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“Humphrey had even visited the CASPER facility on multiple occasions under the cover of darkness during vacations at the Greenbrier. In 1970, after his time as vice president, Humphrey was reelected to the Senate from Minnesota, where, as a junior senator, he was no longer privy to the evacuation plans. Even though he knew that the Greenbrier existed—a fact that…

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 a catastrophe…

Garrett M. Graff

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

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

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“waned. Efforts to protect civilian life fell by the wayside and a fourth and final grim phase of nuclear reality settled over the United States. Soon grandiose plans gradually shrank to just a single, all-consuming governmental goal: protect the idea of a democratic leadership and preserve the National Command Authorities—that virtually never-ending succession line of officials authorized to launch the…

Garrett M. Graff

“updates to the nation’s nuclear weapons policies represented just the third major shift in the Cold War; following Eisenhower’s “massive retaliation” and the “assured destruction” of the Kennedy era, Carter was, for the first time, planning for a grinding long-term war. “There would be a ‘day after,’ and millions of Americans would be around to face the post-strike realities,” Odom…

Garrett M. Graff

“The president called upon the Marine emergency evacuation helicopter that the White House Military Office had stationed nearby in the event of a surprise Soviet nuclear attack. The flight across Narragansett Bay lasted just six minutes, as opposed to the hour Eisenhower would have spent on the ferry—and the helicopter, piloted by Virgil Olson, was nearly triple the size of…

Garrett M. Graff

“things went quickly awry. Thermonuclear bombs were still not well understood and the weapon, code-named CASTLE BRAVO, turned out to be three times more powerful than expected, a total of some 15 megatons. A four-mile-wide fireball engulfed everything around ground zero in under a second. Birds spontaneously combusted in the sky, and small animals as far away as 345 miles…

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 door, located…

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“literally rocketing into the sky at a seemingly impossible steep pitch as it activated for the first and only time in its history a classified system the presidential plane possessed to speed emergency launches. “There are only two 747s in the world that can take off like that—and they’re both called Air Force One,” a flight steward said, leaning over…

Garrett M. Graff

“The commission also confronted one of the strangest and most nettlesome phrases in COG operations—a seemingly unnecessary aside in the language guiding presidential succession known as the “supplantation clause,” which held that a prior-entitled presidential successor could supplant a lower-level officer who was serving as “acting president.” Harry Truman had felt that “elected” officials should always trump “appointed” officials in…

Garrett M. Graff

“The U.S. would have to “reinterpret” the Constitution to provide for preemptive searches and seizures when atomic terrorism was involved. Remarkably, over the decades…

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