>> David Ferriero: Good afternoon. I'm David Ferriero, the archivist of the United
States. It's a pleasure to welcome to you the William
G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. Whether you're here at the theater or watching
us on YouTube, welcome. I'm pleased that you could join us here for
a discussion of Garrett Graff's book, Raven Rock: The Story of the US Government's Secret
Plan to Save Itself While the Rest of Us Die. Before we get started, I want to tell you
about two other programs coming up here at the McGowan Theater. Next Tuesday, July 25th, at noon, Christopher
Ullman will be here to talk about his book, Find Your Whistle. Ullman, an international whistling champion
as well as a Wall Street insider, tells the story of how he found, developed, and shares
his whistle with politicians, special-needs children, Wall Street billionaires, and
more than 400 people on their birthdays every year, including me. He'll also be giving a demonstration of his
whistling talent. In his real life, Chris is the PR person for
David Rubenstein. So it will be an interesting program. On Tuesday, August 8th, at noon, journalist
Thomas Oliphant will take us behind the scenes of John F. Kennedy's campaign to the White
House in The Road to Camelot: Inside JFK's Five-Year Campaign. Oliphant follows Kennedy from his failed attempt
to win the vice presidential nomination in 1956 to his success at capturing the presidency
in 1960. Book signings will follow both programs. To learn more about these and all of our programs
and exhibitions, consult our monthly calendar of events in print or online at arhcives.gov. There are copies in the lobby, as well as
a sign-up sheet where you receive it by regular mail or e-mail, and you will also find brochures
about other upcoming events. Using National Archives records, particularly
those of the presidential libraries, Garrett Graff's Raven Rock describes the government's
plan for continuity and how it was evolved since the end of the world war. In a nuclear age, public officials asked who
and what could be saved so the basic functions of government might go on. Doomsday planning reached beyond governmental
agencies to government cultural institutions, choosing which artifacts might be saved from
destruction. In a New York Times review, Justin Voigt wrote
that Raven Rock is a thorough investigation of Washington's long-lasting efforts to maintain
order in the face of catastrophe. In exploring the incredible lengths and depths
of what successive administrations have gone to in planning for the aftermath of a nuclear
assault, Graff deftly weaves a tale of secrecy and paranoia. Carlos Lezada, writing in the Washington Post,
says Graff covers every technicality of the planning for nuclear aftermath, but the book's
power lies in the author's eye for paradox. Decades of planning can be upturned in a moment
by reality. Here at the archives, the safety of the charters
of freedom -- the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Bill of Rights -- were
of top concern. In 1952 seven Months before the Declaration and Constitution were transferred here, Archives officials asked the Army chief of engineers for an assessment of our building. In our records is a summary of the meeting called the National Archives Building vs. An Atomic Attack. The answer, barring a very near miss or explosion
at ground zero, we should come through in fairly good shape. If we're talking about a nominal type of bomb,
not a super-duper, unquote. (Laughter.) Thankfully in the 65 years since that discussion we have not faced that kind of threat, but Continuity of Operations is still important part of planning and the National Archive's most direct role is through its operation of the Federal Register, in fact the register gets the last word in Graff's book with this statement: The rest of the nation and indeed much of
the world would tune into the emergency federal register.gov website to figure out what our nation would look like after an attack. Garrett Graff is a distinguished magazine journalist and historian, covering politics, technology, and national security. He's written for Wired, Bloomberg, and the
New York Times and served as the editor for the Washingtonian and the Politico Magazine, which he helped lead to its first national magazine award,
and wrote several books including The First Campaign, which examines the role of technology
in the 2008 presidential race, and The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War, which details
counterterrorism efforts. He is currently working on an oral history of September 11 based on his Politico article
work, We're the Only Plane in the Sky, Ladies and gentlemen please welcome Garrett Graff. (Applause.) >> Garrett Graff: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for being here. I'm incredibly excited to be here at the National
Archives and I swear they didn't pay me to start off by saying this, but this is a book
project that never would have existed without the incredible national gift that is our presidential
libraries and particularly the archivists who man them, staff them, and tell us what
is inside of them. If you've never visited presidential libraries,
I encourage you to do so. Every time I'm at one of them, I like to imagine
that's where all my tax dollars go to support. (Laughter.) So this book is effectively the history of
the real-life Designated Survivor programs, the Kiefer Sutherland ABC drama that's on
right now. And it's something I actually came to in 2011. As David said, I have covered national security
and politics in Washington for most of my journalism career. And had bumped up against these programs multiple
times. Talked to people who had been evacuated on
September 11th to some of these mountain bunkers around Washington. I talked to people who had been part of these
plans during the Obama and Bush years. I had even gotten to fly, at one point, with
the First Helicopter Squadron out of Andrews Air Force Base just south of Washington here. That practices above Washington on a daily basis to evacuate Washington officials
in the event of some catastrophic event in Washington. If you're out and about in the coming days
in Washington and you look up and see a blue and gold helicopter flying, it's the First
Helicopter Squadron practicing for a Doomsday of some sort. What really got me interested was when I was
working at Washingtonian, one of my colleagues brought in to work in the morning a government
ID badge that he had found on the floor of a Metro parking garage. It was clearly a U.S. intelligence officer's
badge. And he handed it to me and was like, I bet
this guy is probably having a bad day without this. Figure out how to get it back to him, and
I bet you can track him down. I started looking at it. And I see that there's this set of driving
directions on the back of it. And I could tell it leads out somewhere into
West Virginia. So I get on Google Maps, Google satellite,
and I start following this driving path and get out to this place in West Virginia where
there's a road that goes up a mountain, and then on Google satellite you can see there's
a chain link fence, a guard shack, the road went 50 more yards, and then disappeared into
the side of the mountain. I was like, this is a facility I've never
heard of, not on any of the maps I can find. But these are obviously part of the plans
that have been built up since 9/11. That's why I got interested in figuring out
what these plans were. It ended up being, I'm biased, I think, but
a fascinating excavation of the way the Cold War unfolded in a couple big ways. Much of my writing over the years has been
about the way that technology transforms institutions. And this became a story of really how one
very specific technology transformed one very specific institution. This is the story of how nuclear weapons changed
the U.S. presidency. And what it did, as I began to understand
this, is the arrival of nuclear weapons began to fundamentally reshape Washington in two
big ways. Because it compressed time and space in a
way that we had never had to deal with before. You know, the U.S. presidency, up until the
end of World War II, was not a particularly fast institution. As late as 1935, when FDR was on the way back
from the dedication of the Hoover dam, his car got lost in the canyons outside of Las Vegas. He disappeared for the afternoon. (Laughter.) No one knew where he had gone and when next
he would be in touch. And as late as January 1945 when Truman took over
as vice president, the vice president didn't have any Secret Service protection. He wandered around Washington unmolested for
most of the day. As long as you could get in touch with him
by the afternoon or the next morning, that was actually all you needed from the vice
president. Well, nuclear weapons actually started to
compress the decision making time, such that the president needed to be in constant communication. That the vice president needed to be locatable. And sort of on down through the U.S. government,
which I'll come back to in a second. The second is we began to struggle for the
first time with the question of what happens if an entire city is wiped out in an instant. Obviously, this was a new threat of the nuclear
age, of the atomic age. As he was saying during the introduction,
thinking about and talking about those earlier years, part of what's strange to consider
now when we look back on them is that for, you know, that first decade or so of the atomic
age, there was actually very much the idea that a nuclear war could be a survivable phenomenon. That it would be awful, for sure, but you
were talking about bombers moving slowly through, from Soviet airspace, so you would have 8,
10, 12 hours' worth of warning, plenty of time to evacuate senior officials and even
large chunks of cities. In those early years, you weren't talking
about, as he said, super-duper bombs. You were talking about mini bombs. So you maybe had, yeah, the loss of maybe
a dozen cities. You may have Washington get hit by one atomic
bomb, which at that point wouldn't necessarily even have wiped out the entire city. So you had this sort of weird moment where
the government was like, oh, well, we can actually plan and organize around how to respond
to a nuclear attack. And then you have the shift from bombers to
missiles, that you go from 8, 10, 12 hours of warning to just 15 or 30 minutes. Washington, if there was a sub marine off
the east coast, it could be 8-11 minutes of warning. One of the weirder things I discovered in
this was the Soviet embassy on 16th Street at that point, during the Eisenhower and Kennedy
years, the U.S. actually believed that the Soviets had an atomic bomb in the attic on
the third floor there. So you might not get any warning at all. Now, of course, the Soviet embassy, the Russian
embassy, is radioactive for a slightly different reason in Washington. (Laughter.) But at that point, you have not just the technology
and the warning speed change, but you also have the shift from nuclear bombs to thermonuclear
bombs, from atomic bombs to hydrogen bombs, and just the sheer scale of the arsenals begins
to expand dramatically. So the nuclear war became something much less
manageable and much less something that you could actually plan for. But for the 70 years that we have had, since
the end of the Cold War, the Continuity of Government plans were some of the most highly
classified, most secret plans of the U.S. government. And even people working in adjacent offices
wouldn't necessarily know who was part of the plans and who wasn't. When Aaron Sorkin, the director, was doing
the research of what was ultimately to become West Wing and American President, he was meeting
with George Stephanopoulos. This was 1990. Stephanopoulos was the White House communications
director. Stephanopoulos showed him what Aaron Sorkin
thought was a bus pass in his wallet, but it was actually his evacuation pass, his sort
of get out of nuclear war free card. And Sorkin actually incorporates that into
a West Wing episode some of you might remember, where Josh Lyman, the deputy Chief of Staff,
gets one of these passes from the National Security Council, walks around for the day
with a tremendous amount of guilt. Well, Dee Dee Myers, who had been Stephanopoulos’
White House press secretary pulls Aaron Sorkin aside at the beginning of the episode -- she
was on set that day -- and she said, Aaron, I think this is kind of a hokey premise because
these cards don't actually exist. Aaron was sitting there and was like, wait,
you never realized you wouldn't be protected in the event of the nuclear war and the person
literally in the office next to you would be? (Laughter.) And this ends up being -- the story of this
plan, I think, ends up being the fascinating story of an unfolding technology revolution. In many ways, these plans, which were -- with
the exception of 9/11, which I'll talk about in a second -- were never really used, but
ended up profoundly shaping and influencing our modern world. In many ways, our modern world is the result
of the Doomsday planning that the U.S. government did and never used during the Cold War. The Pentagon's desire for a decentralized
communications network that would survive a nuclear war became the first investment
that eventually became the internet. It was the first chat program ever designed,
sort of the forerunner of Skype, Facebook messenger, AOL messenger, was a program called
Emissary, originally used by government bunkers to communicate among themselves to discuss
stockpiles in the event of an unfolding catastrophe. Even when you get on an airplane reservation system like Kayak or Expedia or wherever you prefer to book airplane tickets is a dependent of Sabre that was the original program that the US designed to track in-coming Soviet bombers during the cold war to launch these evacuation protocols. Also there are some very physical legacies
to this. The interstate highway system that we use
on a daily basis around the country was originally conceived in part by Dwight Eisenhower to
speed the evacuation of cities and the movement of relief supplies and war materials around the
country. He was very obsessed with logistics and how
we would actually be able to move things around the country in the event of an attack on the
United States. That was part of the conception for what was,
when it was originally founded, known as the interstate and defense highway system in the
United States. This is also where you begin to see for the
first time the U.S. government keeping mass secrets, which it has obviously a very important
legacy in the modern national security state. Where you have the secrets of the atomic age
were the first time that the U.S. government ever had the need to keep large numbers of
secrets secret for an indefinite period of time. So before then, you had had, you know, a secret
battle plan or a secret diplomatic mission, but there were not the -- there were not the
technical secrets, not the infrastructure secrets that we now consider so much of the
core of the modern national security state. This is a world that, through much of the
Cold War, the American public had some interaction with. And that's part of the subtitle of the book,
the United States government's secret plan to save itself while the rest of us die. Those of you of a certain age, you'll remember
the 1950s and 1960s effort of civil defense. The Bert the Turtle, duck and cover drills
in elementary schools. Where if you were just able to get under your
desk in time, you would survive nuclear war. And the fallout shelter crazes of the 1950s and 1960s
and the efforts to encourage people to build fallout shelters and bomb shelters in their own backyards, and the Kennedy efforts to centralize those with the brown and orange Fallout Shelter logos you can still see rusting and graying on post offices and elementary schools around the country. It was an effort to protect the civilian population. There were these national exercises known as the Operation Alert where entire cities would come to a stop. People would practice evacuations. You had, in Washington, thousands of personnel
evacuate to these mountain bunkers in an overt manner. This was something the U.S. government practiced
openly for a number of years. Then as the nuclear weapons got stronger and
faster, the ambitions shrank to what they effectively are today, evacuating a small
number of high ranking officials, including one of whom is sitting in the front row in this room, out to mountain bunkers in one place or another outside of Washington and leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves. (Laughter.) But the constellation of facilities and vehicles
was larger and more complex than anything I could imagine when I began this research. That you don't just have these large bunkers The name of the book, Raven Rock, is a reference
to the bunker that would have served, and would still serve, as the backup Pentagon,
in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. It's literally a hollowed-out mountain with
a free standing city inside, capable of housing thousands of people from the Pentagon. There's a second bunker in Berryville Virginia 80 minutes west of Washington called Mount Weather, another hollowed-out mountain with a city inside. When I say free-standing city, I mean it's
a city with three-story buildings with their own police departments, medical departments,
facilities, cafeterias, small lakes inside the mountains that would have served for drinking
water. Power plants. Everything you need to live inside the mountain
for a month at a time. Colorado has Cheyenne Mountain, the NORAD
facility, which some of you may be familiar with from the 1980s movie War Games with Matthew
Broderick. Another mountain size bunker that is still
up and running today. I was just in it a couple months ago. They're rebuilding it and reorienting it to
protect from cyber attacks from rogue states like North Korea. These three large facilities were well known
but represented a small portion of what were more than 100 of these facilities scattered
around Washington and the United States, including regional bunkers in places like Maynard, Massachusetts
and Denton, Texas, which is FEMA, the agency that still would run these plants today, the
idea was the government would dissolve into these 8 bunkers around the country until the
government could reconstitute itself. But each department and agency had its own
bunker or relocation facility. The State Department had a cattle research
center in Front Royal Virginia, an incredibly bucolic farm where their personnel would live out
the nuclear war. The Federal Reserve had a bunker in Mount
Pony, Virginia, down near Richmond, that had room for both the Fed chair and board of governors,
but also $4 billion in cash locked away in vaults that would have served to, in their
minds, bridge the gap for the nation's currency needs during the 18 months that they estimated
the bureau of engraving and printing would need to get back to engraving and printing
currency. You had others around the country as well,
but also this strange constellation of vehicles. There was an airborne command post known as Looking
Glass, which would have served as the nation's absolute last line of defense, that flew 24
hours a day from 1962 until the early 1990s. A plane flew somewhere over the plains every
day of the year, and if everything on the continental United States had been destroyed,
there would still be a one-star general aboard the Looking Glass plane who could launch the
last remaining missiles and the communicate with our submarines around the world to launch
their own arsenal. There was a special fleet of Naval ships,
the USS Northampton and the USS Wright, that were floating command posts, floating White
Houses, one kept off the Atlantic coast for much of the 1960s and early 1970s, where the
president could have been evacuated in the event of an attack on Washington. Fun piece of Washington trivia. Bob Woodward, the investigative reporter,
actually did his naval service as one of the nuclear officers aboard a Naval command ship. So if President Johnson had ever been evacuated
from Washington, it would have been Bob Woodward meeting him aboard the plane -- or aboard
the ship to tell him how to run the nuclear war. These were the Johnson/Nixon era plans. As satellite technology improved and it became
harder to hide the Navy ships in the Atlantic, the U.S. government shifted to what continues
to exist today, the presidential Doomsday planes. These planes known by the code word Nightwatch,
this fleet of 747s that would have served, and still serve today, as the president's airborne
command posts. As we're sitting here in Washington today,
one of these planes is on the runway in the Air Force base in Omaha, Nebraska, its engines are on, it fully staffed with every type of personnel you need to run nuclear war from the sky. It could launch in less than 15 minutes to
rendezvous with wherever the president ends up being. There was a whole fleet of Gulf Stream jets
following the plane we know as Air Force 1 around the country no matter where the president was, always landing one airport away from
where Air Force 1 was landing, and it was specially designed to land at the Mount Weather
strip in Berryville, Virginia. So he would land with the Gulf Stream and
be taken to Mount Whether. These plans continue to this day. Raven Rock is fully staffed, Mount Weather is fully staffed, and NORAD are fully
staffed in the event that something should happen in Washington without any notice. This a plan that Part of what I found so fascinating about
it is as we begin to think through these questions of what you need to preserve America, that
very quickly becomes a very existential question about what is America? So are you trying to preserve the presidency? Are you trying to preserve the three branches
of government? Or are you even planning to preserve, particularly
relevant today, the historical totems that have bound us together, generation by generation,
in America? So during the Cold War, as part of these plans,
the government sat down here at the National Archives and decided that if they -- that
they would save the Declaration of Independence before they saved the Constitution. In the Library of Congress, they would save
the Gettysburg Address before they saved Washington's military commission. In Philadelphia throughout the Cold War there was a specially trained team of park rangers whose job it was to evacuate the Liberty Bell into the
mountains in the event of a Soviet threat. I have a mental picture of rangers driving
off in a pickup truck with the Liberty Bell swinging freely in the back. (Laughter.) No, no, I swear, the crack was there before
we started moving it! (Laughter.) And these plans envisioned a post-apocalyptic
government where every existing department and agency would have some post-Doomsday version
of itself. The post office was the agency through the
Cold War that was in charge of registering the dead and figuring out who was still alive. After you would show up in the refugee camps,
you would be handed this postcard that said Form 810, and you would list the members of
your family that had survived nuclear war with you. And on the back, you would list some other
member of your family who you are interested in trying to mail this postcard to and being
reunited with. There was no postage necessary. Postage was not necessary after the nuclear
holocaust. (Laughter.) And the post office would sort of collect
all these cards and sort them. The refugee camps themselves would be run
by the park service. The thinking was that national park land would
be largely untouched by nuclear war, so you would flee from Washington out to the Blue
Ridge Mountains, or in California, out to Yosemite, and your friendly park ranger would
standing there to usher you into the refugee camps. The USDA was in charge of feeding everyone
after the nuclear war. They made these detailed studies of how many
man days -- that was the measurement they used -- how many man days of edible fish and
wildlife would survive nuclear war, and how many man days of domestic pets would survive
the nuclear war, so when you emerged from the fallout shelter after the two weeks recommended
to stay in there, they would know how much food there was and would ration appropriately. In Kansas, they knew there was an average
of a 28-day supply of coffee that would be available in the event of nuclear war afterwards,
so at least for the first month after nuclear war, you could still have coffee. In the fallout shelters, meanwhile, you would
be fed ultimately 165,000 tons of survival biscuits that were manufactured in the 50s and 60s by companies like Kroger and Nabisco, that had been sealed in cans and pre-located in the fallout shelters. Each person in the shelter would receive 6 crackers a day, each cracker being worth 125 calories. The very helpful documentation that came with
the crackers suggested that, since there wasn't much to do in the shelter, each cracker should
treated as its own meal to encourage as much activity as you could have over the course
the day. The crackers, of course, were not the tastiest
that had ever been designed, and the government ultimately scrapped all of them when they
began to send some of the surplus crackers off to natural disaster survivors in Bangladesh
and Africa, only to discover that those recipients suffered severe gastric problems from surviving
on the crackers for several days. (Laughter.) Then you would have, even the IRS has very
carefully considered how it would levy taxes on nuclear-damaged property. Because, of course, not even nuclear war would
stop the IRS from looking to collect taxes. (Laughter.) And these plans sort of are hilarious in some
ways to talk about in the abstract, but were very deadly serious activities and exercises
during the time of the Cold War. To me, it's just this very fascinating and
strange history of, like, a world that has never happened and we hope never actually
does happen, but continues to exist just out of sight, even as we are sitting here in Washington
today. I think I might stop there and take questions,
because there are a lot of different directions that we could go. There are mics on either end, so if you have
a question, please stand up and come to the mic so the people watching the video can hear. (Applause.) >> Thank you very much. Couple questions. First is, when someone joins the government
and then gets a call or says, come over here, welcome aboard to the Doomsday club, how does
that work and evolve from the perspective of who's managing the overall process and
what that means to that person? It could be anything, right? You talked about everything from people talking
bells away to folks that are still there working on food processing. Anything that you can comment in that regard. What I guess happens from the perspective
of, if Doomsday occurred, those people's jobs today are slightly different at that time. What's the reality of that process, and who's
managing that whole system that exists? Plus, you know, Doomsday. >> Garrett Graff: Yeah. So in my mind, what makes these plans so interesting
is the intersection of the very carefully crafted black and white paper plans and the
human psychology that would inevitably intrude into any sort of catastrophic event. So when you talk about, like, what happens
when people are brought into these plans, one of the first questions that always comes
up is, what happens to my family? Believe it or not, this was a problem that
was literally exposed during the first exercise, Operation Alert, 1954, when Eisenhower's cabinet
evacuated to the undisclosed location that we now know is Mount Weather, and they took
all the secretaries and none of the wives. (Laughter.) There was a very chilly game of rummy that
afternoon that the wives of the cabinet played back here in Washington as they contemplated
that their husbands did not intend for them to survive nuclear war. (Laughter.) And that this is sort of a continuous problem
through the Cold War. Earl Warren, when he was chief justice, sort
of what happened, and this is pretty typical of how these plans unfold, you know, this
guy from the forerunner of FEMA at the time shows up to his office and very somberly reads
this plan to him with the evacuation path. He says, where's the path for Mrs. Warren? The man from the OEP, the Office of Emergency
Preparedness, says, you're the one of the most important men in the government. The path is just for you. He says, good news, I opened up a space for
another very important person. He hands the path back. He says, if there's no space for Mrs. Warren,
there's no point in me attending. That was true throughout the Cold War. Part of this, I was talking to someone I know
in Washington who was part of these plans during the Obama administration. And he had a designated evacuation helicopter
that would have found him wherever he was in Washington and swept him off to one of
these bunkers. And he said to me, I have two young daughters,
and if anyone thinks if that helicopter, if it lands on a Saturday morning at her soccer
game and they think I'm just going to wave goodbye to them forever and jump on the helicopter,
they're crazy. That's part of the real challenge of these
plans. Would any of them actually have worked? To briefly answer your question about the
modern analog of this, all of these have been updated for modern threats. So the post office, they don't have Form 810
anymore. But they are the agency designated with distributing
medical countermeasures in the event of a chemical, biological, or public health pandemic
in the United States. And there's a very careful, detailed plan
of how the post office would distribute, you know, vaccines or antidotes nationwide, with
the thinking that the post office is the one agency of the U.S. government that can visit
ever house in a single day. These are the things you should think about
when you next calculate the tip for the postman. (Laughter.) You want to make sure you're one of the first
houses on the block to receive the Ebola vaccine. >> What's the plan for the continuity of Congress? Second question, a follow-up to that one,
what if there's a smaller -- what if someone crashes a plane into the White House or terrorists
get access to a small technical nuclear bomb, so it's not the whole country that's blown
up, but a smaller emergency that affects the operations of the federal government? >> Garrett Graff: Yeah. So part of this story is the extent to which
the United States, under almost any of these scenarios, would be transformed into a presidential
dictatorship. That, you know, we know the presidential football,
the president's nuclear brief case that follows him wherever he goes. Well, during the Cold War, there was also
the attorney general's emergency football that followed the attorney general around,
that contained all of these prewritten executive orders suspending civil liberties, suspending
habeas corpus, instating martial law. One listed thousands of suspected subversives
that the FBI would arrest after signing a massive arrest warrant, with no cause, just
that you were on J. Edgar Hoover's list. There were thousands of people the FBI would
sweep up in an event like this. That sort of carried through a lot of these
plans, in that there wasn't really much of a role for Congress. There wasn't much of a role for the Supreme
Court. Congress had its bunker at the Greenbrier,
which probably many of you know, is in West Virginia. It's a rare facility that still is maintained
and exists in the form that it existed in the Cold War. You can go tour it. If you get the chance, it's a really fascinating
tour. You can see the room where the House of Representatives
would have convened or the Senate would have convened. That is all predicated on the 8, 10, 12 hours
of warning, that Congress would have been brought from the Hill to a special train that
would have taken them to West Virginia. I uncovered as part of the research that members
of Congress weren't actually told where the relocation bunker was, to the question of
how these plans were actually communicated. There were so many people coming in and out
of Congress all the time, they didn't want to tell each member and have this sort of
whole pool of ex-members who knew where the evacuation plans would go. (Laughter.) So if nuclear war came when Congress was in
recess or on a weekend or something, the plan was literally, members of Congress were supposed
to find their local FBI field office, and there were sealed letters in each FBI field
office for each nearby member of Congress telling them where to report for their, you
know, their evacuation facility. Now, the modern analog of this plan becomes
very interesting in the Congressional sense. The modern sense of this plan, particularly
the way the three branches interact, is known by the term Enduring Constitutional Government,
ECG, and it's the most highly classified set of these plans. We don't really have any idea what those plans
actually mean today. What we do, what we can surmise out of them,
and part of the fun and challenge of speaking to a Washington audience is there might be
someone in this room who, like, wrote the ECG plan who knows I'm entirely wrong about this. Feel free to speak up if that's the case. (Laughter.) But what we think the ECG plan entails is,
basically, some set of special powers that preserves not the letter of the Constitution,
but the spirit of the Constitution. And empowers some small, rump Congress to
act in the stead of the full Congress. Why we think this -- I mentioned at the beginning
Designated Survivor -- the presidential survivor. Since 2001, since 9/11, there has been a designated
Congressional survivor, who is hidden away during high-profile events. That makes no sense in the context of ordinary
Congress. You can't get anything done with one member
of Congress under normal circumstances. The whether you can get anything done with
535 members is another question. (Laughter.) The only reason it would make sense to save
one member of Congress is if they had special emergency powers to act until Congress itself
is reconstituted. The terrible, tragic shooting here at the
softball game a few weeks ago brought these issues up in part because Congress still has
no way to reconstitute itself if large numbers of members are incapacitated, not killed. So if there's a chemical or biological attack
that injures or puts a large number of members of Congress in a coma, Congress would be paralyzed,
and there's no procedure for Congress to continue operating like that. >> What if there's a more targeted attack,
like on the White House? >> Garrett Graff: That's where a lot of the
plans are now focused. Less around evacuation and more around devolution,
in part because of the 9/11 experience, but you may also remember there was a sarin gas
attack by a cult in Tokyo on the subway there. Those events, in the late 1990s and 2001,
focused the government on keeping these facilities running 24 hours a day, because in the modern
context, actually the most likely threat is that something happens in a very localized
way in Washington, but then leaves, you know, the other 329 million Americans, you know,
completely fine, but leaderless. So that's why these mountain bunkers are still
manned today, 24 hours a day. >> Thank you. >> I'd like to ask two questions. First, as you described, in a moment of national
emergency, only a small number of artifacts can be preserved. The Declaration of Independence and not the
Constitution, for example. But I imagine a lot more can be preserved
digitally. I wonder if there are provisions for the digital
preservation. >> Garrett Graff: Yeah. A lot of these plans are also artifacts of
their time. So one of the things that the government was
most concerned about in, you know, the '40s, '50s, and early '60s were maps. They built all of these, like, redundant map
storage facilities around the country because of the fear of, you know, maps at that point
only existed in paper. And so you only would have, you know, if something
happened to the Pentagon, like you would lose all of the maps of Eastern Europe. And so, you know, that's no longer that much
of a concern. And much of this is now focused on digital
backups and -- more distributed document preservations than
existed back then. >> So much of what's in this building is preserved
in 1s and 0s? >> Garrett Graff: Yeah. >> And the second question is, you mentioned
Greenbrier. As you described it, I gather it's no longer
an active facility but something people can tour. Was there a story of how it was discovered
and could then no longer be used as a facility? A reporter found out about it? >> Garrett Graff: Yeah. A Washington Post reporter by the name of
Ted Gup announced the facility to the world 25 years ago, actually this May. It was two months ago. And in reality, the facility had largely served
its purpose by that point anyway, I mean, the Cold War was winding down. The extent to which the Russians, the Soviets,
knew of these facilities has always been a semi open question. There was a point during the, I think there
was the Nixon administration -- it might have been Johnson -- where the Soviets announced
that they wanted to buy a weekend vacation house for their diplomats that just so happened
to be located atop Mount Weather. (Laughter.) And they swore it was just a total coincidence. The State Department ended up nixing it. But the expectation was that the Russians
knew of many of these facilities anyway. We actually now understand that actually Robert
Hanssen, when he was spying for Russia and the Soviet Union, actually delivered a set
of Continuity of Government plans to the Russians at one point. But there's sort of an interesting question
about the Greenbrier specifically. Because the thinking is -- and we don't know
who Ted Gup's original source was -- but that that was part of a bureaucratic tussle at
the time about whether these facilities should be wound down anyway. And indeed it very quickly was. I tell the story in the book of how the morning
after these -- after the Washington Post story ran. So the bunker was run by a front company that
purported to be the audio/video techs for the Greenbrier, this company called Forsythe
Associates. So the Forsythe Associates staff, the morning
after the Washington Post story, are out on the loading dock of the bunker, drilling through
the computers, and the first thing actually came was a truck to take away the small arms
locker that had been at the Greenbrier during the Cold War. The people stood on the loading dock, like,
what are you doing? And the guy who headed Forsythe Associates,
sort of the head FEMA worker on site, said, do you want to try to explain to members of
Congress who we would have been using these weapons against in the event of the evacuation
of this bunker? So they really hustled to close that thing
down pretty quickly. >> Thank you. >> Garrett Graff: All right. Last question down here. Or maybe I'll take two quickly. >> What year did Clarence Thomas give the
oath of office to Barack Obama? >> Garrett Graff: I don't think he did. Wasn't it John Roberts? >> Thank you. >> My question. What happened to the badge you found with
driving directions to West Virginia? (Laughter.) >> Garrett Graff: We got it back, actually,
to them. It was a funny, typical story. What happens when you call secret facilities
in Washington is they don't answer with -- they just tell you the extension number of reached. So like 3793. So we called the watch number on the badge,
and we're like, yeah, we've got this badge. He was like, how did you get this number? (Laughter.) I'll take one last question here. >> Remember 9/11, when we sort of didn't know
where Dick Cheney was for a while? Was that part of a man? Why was Cheney seemingly more protected than
Bush? >> Garrett Graff: Bush was in Florida at that
elementary school and was put aboard Air Force 1 and sort of hid out on Air Force 1 for the
day. It's this great moment that illustrated the
central paradox of a lot of these plans, which is the challenge of these plans is you can
either be secure or you can be in control. And most of these plans, you can't do both. So Bush was secure, hidden aboard that plane,
doing, by the way, and I wrote a whole piece about being aboard Air Force 1 that day, and
am absolutely convinced that President Bush made the right decision as the commander in
chief of the United States in that moment. But he received, as we all remember, tremendous
criticism for not doing the Rudy Giuliani thing and marching straight down to Ground
Zero. We saw that ripple through government, where
Donald Rumsfeld, his first reaction to being at the Pentagon when it was struck on 9/11,
was he went to the crash site and helped carry wounded people out on stretchers who were
wounded in the attack. It was a tremendously courageous thing that
bonded him with the military in a very profound way at that moment. But it was absolutely the wrong thing for
him to do as the secretary of defense and a key member of the national command authority. Because during the 90 minutes that were the
central moment of that attack, he was still in danger at the Pentagon. You know, the right thing for him to do, according
to every protocol for 70 years, some of which, by the way, Rumsfeld wrote when he was defense
secretary the first time around in the 1970s, was to get on a helicopter and get out of
the Pentagon. In fact, that's what Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy
defense secretary, did. He evacuated to Raven Rock that day. And Cheney was at the White House bunker under
the north lawn of the White House and as we remember him disappearing to a lot of undisclosed
locations that fall. A lot of that was Camp David and Raven Rock,
among other facilities that he went to. All right. Thank you very much. (Applause.) >> There will be a book signing in the National
Archives bookstore. We'll be there in a few moments.
Wait, isn't that from Fallout 3?