This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (13 page)

A compliant Congress smoothed the way. Beneath the Capitol dome dispersal had withered, yet legislators authorized millions of dollars for Site R and its microwave network. Why? As extraordinary as Site R was, the military convincingly justified its existence and expenses as the price of warfare in the
atomic age. One didn’t have to be a four-star general to recognize the need for an alternate headquarters and channels through which commanders would mobilize the armed forces of a nation reeling from a stunning attack that destroyed its capital. Dispersal lacked this urgency. Sen. John Stennis (D-Miss.) spoke for many legislators when he said:

In my opinion, we could not do a more shameful thing than to set this example [dispersal] before the American people, which dress it up as you may, is never
theless largely a matter of those in the Government running for cover when the rest of the people will be told to stick by their posts. If additional buildings are needed, let them be added in the regular course, but not under the guise of a dispersal plan to avoid the effects of an atomic bomb, especially if the removal is for only 20 short miles.
If the military needs an additional communications center, let it be built as such
.
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(Emphasis added)

That center was Site R, built while dispersal went down to defeat. At the same time, another alternate headquarters was under construction, though not for the military’s use. Nor was it located far beyond the 20-mile line. Indeed, this facil
ity lay so close to the zero milestone marker that the distance measured in yards.

The Phoenix of Pennsylvania Avenue

Imagine
. . . standing deep beneath the East Terrace or Colonnade, which connects the White House to the East Wing. Behind you is a passageway leading to an elevator next to the paint shop in the northeast corner of the White House basement. In front of you is a steel blast door. You enter a corridor six feet wide. Facing you is the windowless wall of a small guard room; on your left, to the east, is a ramp up. You walk the length of the corri
dor, leaning into the incline, then turn right. This hallway is narrow and short, ending at two tiny adjoining chambers with air-tight doors. You pass through, again turn right. On one side is a medical dispensary, with several small, connecting rooms; on the other side, men’s and women’s restrooms. Walk west down the corridor and descend a set of stairs—now you enter a spacious, open, fluorescent-lit room full of communications equipment: switchboards, telephones, encryption devices. The walls are painted, asphalt tiles cover the concrete floor. Four rectangular columns support the three-foot thick ceiling overhead and separate the communications center from the adjoining map room. Walk through the map room and the gas-proof door in its northwest corner, and you again pass the guard room, ending up where you started. Although you’ve just walked around the White House’s atomic bomb shelter beneath the southeast grounds, you bypassed several features, including an apartment, well and pump, diesel generators, and a corridor and ramp connecting this facility to an older bomb shelter beneath the East Wing.
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On September 14, 1950, Lorenzo Simmons Winslow did more than imagine such a place—he drew it. Winslow was the White House architect,
and for the next two years, he presided over the construction of an atomic bomb shelter similar to the one described above. Although revised blueprints altered the layout and the number of rooms, the shelter was built directly beneath the East Terrace, it reaches underneath what is now the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, and it connects to both the northeast corner of the White House basement and the bomb shelter built beneath the East Wing.

Winslow began designing the shelter in July, at the request of Rear Admiral Robert Dennison, the naval aide to the President. Among his duties, Dennison supervised Shangri-La (later called Camp David), the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. Truman didn’t much care for Shangri-La, but he loved to cruise the Potomac in the naval yacht
Williamsburg
; Dennison readied the vessel for every trip. He also carried the President’s war file.
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This last duty had prompted Dennison’s interest in a new shelter for the White House. What good was the war file if the commander in chief didn’t survive an opening attack?

The White House’s existing shelter, built in 1942 during construction of the East Wing, was inadequate for the atomic age. Located in the south half of the basement, the shelter was certainly sturdy and well equipped. It had seven-foot thick reinforced concrete walls and floors and a nine-foot thick ceiling sheathed in steel. As planned, the shelter was a 40-foot square space “with a tiny island of a presidential bedchamber and bath in the center, encased in walls three feet thick.” Small rooms built alongside the shelter’s walls housed toilets, a pantry, and a kitchen; ventilation equipment; and a diesel generator to provide electrical power. The shelter also connected to a tunnel extending from the northeast lawn of the White House to the neighboring Treasury Building on East Executive Avenue. (Soon after Pearl Harbor, the Army set up a temporary bomb shelter in vaults beneath the Treasury Building and excavated this tunnel.)
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However, the shelter was small, and it lacked an independent water supply and protection against radiation. In July 1950, Dennison, along with the Secret Service and the Army, persuaded Truman to authorize the construction of a new shelter. The Korean War had heightened concerns about the vulnerability of the White House; furthermore, Dennison wanted to build the shelter before the massive renovation of the White House, now eight months along, was completed.
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Two years earlier, structural engineers had discovered the President’s house was literally pulling itself apart. The 1902 expansion of the State Dining Room and the 1927 rebuilding of the roof and attic had over
burdened nineteenth-century wooden mortise and tenon beams. By 1948, these flaws were manifesting themselves in ever more ominous ways. In January, as he greeted guests during an official reception, Truman heard a crystalline shiver from the Blue Room chandelier directly over his head. Concerned as well by vibrations in the floors of the family’s quarters, he ordered a thorough survey, leading to the discovery of the beam stresses. Months later, a leg of First Daughter Margaret’s grand piano broke through her bedroom floor. Further investigation revealed the White House needed
nothing short of a new foundation and frame. The Trumans decamped to Blair House and Congress created the Commission on the Renovation of the Executive Mansion. Headed by the curmudgeonly Senator Kenneth McKellar (D-Tenn.), the Commission included three other members of Congress and two Truman appointees, architect Douglas W. Orr and Major General Glen E. Edgerton. The Commission, which first met in June 1949, oversaw a project that lasted almost three years and cost close to seven million dollars. The entire interior of the White House was gutted (fixtures and floors were dismantled and removed), and a steel frame replaced the wooden beams.
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Winslow was responsible for the renovation’s drawings and plans, making him the logical choice to design the shelter. The architect, who favored tweed suits and sported a carefully groomed mustache, was commonly described as modest and unassuming, a devoted family man whose hobbies included his vintage car and painting. In fact, Winslow was also proud of his patrician family tree; dabbled in the occult, including seances with dead presidents; and documented extramarital affairs in his diary. He came to the executive mansion in 1933, when he designed a pool for the West Terrace. Roosevelt, who swam as therapy for his poliomyelitis, loved the pool, and he soon entrusted Winslow with more White House projects. An amateur architect, Roosevelt frequently presented Winslow with his own sketches. Another man might have resented these intrusions, but Winslow encouraged them, cementing his position, and Truman kept him on.
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During July and August, Winslow delegated responsiblities and began designing the new shelter. He had to answer several important questions. First, how deep should it be? If he wanted to encase it in bedrock, then the excavators would have to dig 70 feet before striking solid rock. Second, where should he build the shelter: beneath the White House, one of the wings, or the grounds? Third, where should he place the access tunnels and entry points? Their location required alterations to the ongoing renovation; obvi
ously the tunnels and entrances had to connect to the White House. Most important, as a structural engineer pointedly asked during one meeting, “[W]hat are you designing this thing against?” Neither Winslow nor Colonel Douglas Gillette, Edgerton’s assistant, had an answer. Everyone knew the shelter needed to protect its occupants against the blast, heat, and radiation of an atomic bomb, but no one had yet determined technical specifications.
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Winslow acted decisively. The Army Office of the Chief of Engineers and the AEC helped determine the shelter’s protective requirements. As super
vising architect Allan S. Thorn told Winslow, once the two of them had drafted an overall plan, it was “comparatively simple to have the technical men work it out.”
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With walls and floors two feet thick and the roof three feet thick, the shelter would shield occupants from the blast and radiation effects of a 20-kiloton atomic bomb detonated at an altitude of 1,500 feet. According to the Army engineers, such a shelter would also protect against ground-penetrating conventional bombs of up to 2,000 pounds.
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Winslow selected a corner in the White House basement as the access point for a
passageway to the shelter, which he placed beneath the East Terrace. As Winslow and Thorn planned it, the shelter reached from the East Wing’s west wall to the White House’s east wall and extended 120 feet south from a mechanical service tunnel being built for the renovation. Winslow also put the new shelter in deep: beneath the East Wing’s sewer line and lower than the old shelter, which lay four levels below the first floor.
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Winslow soon met with “the Boss” to show him the plans. Truman gave the nod but said he didn’t want the work to impede the renovation. On August 16, Dennison promised the Commission that the “protective measures” would bring but “minor modifications” to the renovation and would be separately funded through the office of the Public Buildings Commissioner. The Commission also worried about delays but pledged its full cooperation. Contracts for the shelter work, officially known as Project Number 49-100-9, were awarded to John McShain, Inc., the renovation’s head contractor, and to the excavation firm of Spencer, White, and Prentiss (hereafter Spencer). Expect to begin work the day after the appropriations cleared, Winslow told Thorn—there was no time to spare.
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“Project 9” actually involved four related actions: demolition and rebuild
ing of the East Terrace; modification of the northeast corner of the White House basement and installation of an underground passageway; upgrading of the old shelter; and construction of the new shelter. Thomas Jefferson had originally built the East Terrace but its current form dated to 1902, when Charles Follen McKim designed a long, airy corridor with glazed windows and a colonnade. The terrace brought guests from the porte cochere and guest entrance McKim built facing East Executive Avenue. Most of McKim’s work was razed to make way for the East Wing but the terrace remained, including its spacious coatroom, known as the Hatbox after the stackable wooden boxes once used to hold men’s hats. In July 1942, Roosevelt had the Hatbox converted into a movie theater.
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To excavate for the atomic shelter, Winslow needed to remove the East Terrace entirely. Its columns, cornices, parapets, and other stone work were kept intact to allow restoration.
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McShain began dismantling the East Terrace in September, then Spencer started the excavation, which had to be coordinated with the construction of the White House’s basement. Prior to reconstruction, the White House “basement” was really a ground floor, and the foundation rested on clay soil just a few feet below the grade. Support for the new steel frame required underpinnings 24 feet deep, where a dense stratum of sand and gravel provided solid footing. This depth allowed installation of two new levels, a mezzanine (beneath the ground floor) and a basement (beneath the mezzanine), to house mechanical and electrical equipment, maintenance facilities, and storage rooms.
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In the basement’s northeast corner, by the paint shop, McShain and Spencer built an entrance to the tunnel leading to the atomic shelter. Three connecting rooms required modification, including making the mezzanine floor two feet thick and installing an elevator with a blast-resistant door. The walls between the connecting rooms also had two six-foot wide doorways with arched heads cut into them. A corridor was added to the
area, and the entrance to the shelter passageway went into the east wall. Just south of this entrance, a secure telephone was installed.
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The passageway led from the White House to a point beneath the movie theater in the East Terrace. In all, 13 blast doors, designed to specifications set by the Army engineers, were built into this underground corridor and its entrances. As chief structural engineer Charles Barber observed, however, this design forced “the President to walk the length of the White House through a corridor containing 13 doors on the prior closing of which his safety depends.”
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The east end of the passageway provided a connecting point to the atomic shelter. The East Terrace, like the White House base
ment, needed extensive alterations. The area beneath the theater included rooms for guards, pump equipment, and a generator for the passageway. Ceilings four feet thick were poured for these rooms, and the north and south walls beneath the theater were strengthened substantially by adding underpinnings three feet thick. The corridor leading to the shelter also had walls three feet thick.
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