 I think we'll get started. Thank you all very much for coming to join us and to Garrett for coming to talk about his book, Raven Rock, which is both about Raven Rock, the place, and about the apparatus that that place stands for within the federal government. It's just really a terrific read that I really enjoyed if you haven't yet read it. We do have copies for sale, which I will remind you at the end of our discussion as well. And so this is Garrett's third book. He's previously written a book about the FBI, which is an institution that's in the news a little bit these days and edited Washingtonian magazine for a stretch as well as political magazine and now lives in Vermont and writes. So thank you, Garrett, for coming. We thought we'd just kick it off directly with the levels, right, with a test of sound levels. Just like you guys. And just directly, just get Garrett to talk a little bit about the book rather than reading from it. So we'll chat for a bit and then sort of open it up to the room. So the book goes back, essentially, and you have bits that you go back further in history, but essentially from the start of the Cold War up until the present day. And I wanna sort of hop back and forth over that history a bit. But what struck me, and this is sort of implicit in the subtitle of the book, which is, I think, terrifically provocative, the story of the US government's secret plan to save itself while the rest of us die. And what was surprising to me, knowing some of this history, was sort of how explicit that turn was from the sort of early days of the Cold War and sort of civil defense efforts where there really was, whether it would have worked or not is another question, but the bureaucracy was focused on trying to protect the populace at large and not just on sort of the national command authorities. And that changed over time. And you tell the story, that changed in the book, and I just sort of wanted to hear you talk about that. Yeah. Transition a bit. So thanks so much for having me tonight. Always have a special affinity for New America, so it's great to be back here. Yeah, as you mentioned, my last book was a history of the FBI and the only biography in existence of Robert Mueller. And so last Wednesday at this time, I had thought I had written my last thing about Robert Mueller in my life and now I spent the last week diving back into the last book, even as I am out talking about this one. So as you say, this is the story of an evolving technology revolution. And what has always interested me as a writer is the way that technology changes institutions. And sort of all of my books have been about that in different ways. My first book was about the 2008 presidential race and the role that technology was changing and shaping politics going forward. And then my FBI history was really the story of how technology and globalization had reshaped the FBI. And this book is effectively the story of one very specific technology and the way that it has reshaped one very specific institution, that being how nuclear weapons have changed the presidency. And this is a story that takes place over the arc of the Cold War, really beginning with Truman and Eisenhower and then pedering off in towards the end of the Reagan years and the beginning of the Bush 41 years. But then sort of comes back to the fore obviously on 9-11 and then has been reincarnated for modern times in terms of threats to the electrical grid and cyber threats and public health pandemics and sort of all of these weird things that we struggle with today. And then in the spring of 2017, back to nuclear war and Russia and North Korea in a way that we have not had as present a threat for such a long period of time. But as you say, these plans start out in the Truman and Eisenhower years as these very grand ambitious hopes. And you sort of see them unfold through several very distinct and different chapters of the Cold War where you begin with the idea of sort of Soviet bombers coming to the United States where you would have eight to 10 to 12 hours of warning. And even in that era sort of the possibility that you could evacuate whole cities or at least make a real stab at evacuating whole cities. And then the technology advances and you begin to shift first towards ICBMs and then submarines launched missiles which obviously shrink that warning time down to 15 to 30 minutes. And then the weapons get stronger and larger as you see the shift from atomic weapons to thermonuclear weapons. And then as we all know now, the arms race sort of gets just completely out of control and you end up with 30,000 nuclear and thermonuclear weapons delivered in under an hour to every corner of the globe. And effectively there's very little hope left except for these plans sort of continuing to shrink and simplify down to the evacuation of a small number of senior government officials into mountain bunkers and a really sort of odd and fascinating arrangement of vehicles and facilities that the president and the presidential successors would be evacuated to. And so this is really sort of the story of in my mind this shift of the office of the president from someone who we think of as the person that we elect every four years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November to this apparatus that actually now encompasses several hundred people in Washington and that the presidency now never ceases even when the president himself dies. And so you have the 20 or so positions of the line of succession that we all know from the 25th amendment of the vice president, the speaker of the house, the president for a time of the Senate on down to the cabinet. But then each of those cabinet agencies has its own line of succession. And so for each of those jobs you have 15, 20 people in lines of succession coming down from there. And so when you look at sort of what the presidency encompasses today and sort of the realm of the people who might be in charge after a particularly catastrophic emergency in the United States, you're talking about 400 people. And that's not the way that most of us think of the presidency, but it's part of what is actually sort of a pretty mystical idea, which is you have the body of the president, but then you have sort of this spiritual idea of the presidency such that the presidency is never vacant no matter sort of how far down that list you have to go. You do a nice job in the book of I think invoking at sort of key moments this phrase of the king is dead, long live the king as a sort of the ways in which this process you're talking about now is a sort of like modern incarnation of a sort of like dynastic succession as you know was practiced in monarchies in years past. You mentioned about 400 people and you did not say interestingly 400 people and their families. And that's one of the sort of like basic failures of planning that seemed to recur over the span of decades that was shocking to me that these plans would be made for where it's like okay, if you are the deputy attorney general or the head of the FBI or you have a slot in this bunker but your family doesn't and routinely and you have like lots of really good interviews in the book where you either talk to people or find documents or go to someone else and they say I wasn't gonna go without, I wasn't gonna like leave my wife and children. Typically it was a wife and children historically these were generally men and I'm not just assuming but the story in here. Behind and save my own hide. And I guess I'm curious like that's a, I mean there's all kinds of chaotic things that one can't foresee about what things would look like in nuclear war. But the fact that planners sort of like just neglected this like pretty profound emotional commitment that most people have to their families was so it's somehow telling to me. Yeah and it is, it's part of the core challenge that all of these plans struggle with throughout the Cold War which is the intersection of well-organized paper plans and basic human psychology. Where you broadly speaking, these continuity of government programs unfolded for decades, we spent tens of billions, probably 100 or $200 billion total on these plans and these endeavors and these facilities and yet like everyone who ever looked at them was able to come up with really obvious things that they didn't do. Chief among them the challenge of evacuating families. And this is literally something that occurs during the very first evacuation drill during the Eisenhower years in the 1950s, Operation Alert that we used to run in the 1950s these incredibly elaborate national evacuation and civil defense drills. And you would have, I mean the entire country involved. I mean the stock exchange would shut down. Every taxi in New York City would pull over and drop off its passengers and they would go into fallout shelters and everyone on every bus in New York City would be dropped off at the curb and given a special bus pass to be allowed back onto the bus at the conclusion of the evacuation drill. And during that very first Operation Alert there's sort of this moment that is captured in the newspapers at the time where all of the wives of the cabinet sit there and watch their husbands be evacuated by helicopter and limousine across the city and they play poker together and sort of don't love the idea that their husbands are being evacuated away, particularly when they discover that all of their husband's secretaries are also being evacuated because memos don't type themselves in the bunker. And so this is something that recurs sort of time and time again and it comes up in the Cuban Missile Crisis where you have officials who are pretty wary of whether they actually go to the bunkers and leave their families behind in Washington to come what may. This is still a problem in our modern plans. I talked to someone in the book who was part of these continuity of government plans and procedures during the Obama administration. I mean up until 127 days ago or something like that. But so these plans still all exist and I was out on the streets today and saw the blue and gold helicopters from the first Air Force helicopter squadron flying above the city today. And like those are up there practicing to evacuate high level government officials every day over the skies in Washington. Like anytime you see them they're the only helicopters that fly low and over the city that are not the DC police helicopter or the Park Police helicopter. And like what they're doing up there is practicing being ready to evacuate. So this guy that I spoke with, there was a one of those designated helicopters was going to land wherever he was and evacuate him to one of these bunkers. And he told me like, he's got two young daughters and he's like, if that helicopter lands on my daughter's soccer field on a Saturday morning, like there's no way that I am waving goodbye to my daughters on the sideline of the soccer game and like getting in that helicopter and flying away. And like it's just sort of this funny thing where sort of over time there are some very minor accommodations made for families. Congress at least expanded their bunker at the Greenbrier, which many of you are probably familiar with, so that it could accommodate families. Although notably the family accommodations are outside of the blast doors. So you could get really close to the bunker and have a bunk bed, but like if the nuclear bomb hit really close you're still not surviving. And then after the Cuban Missile Crisis, at least for the White House, they decided that White House families and sort of cabinet families would report separately to Fort Reno. So that if you know Fort Reno by AU, there's that series of water towers that you see up there. That's the highest point in DC. That's the highest point in DC. So the tallest building there is not actually a water tower. It's built to look like a water tower, but it's actually one of these continuity of government facilities and was part of the presidential communications network that existed during most of the Cold War. And there was sort of a whole series of those blast hardened towers around the capital, stretching out to Raven Rock, stretching out to Mount Weather, stretching out to some of these other facilities. And so the idea was that the families of White House and cabinet officials would report there and then would be sort of like put on buses and bust out to other facilities. Yeah, I wonder, I mean, numbers obviously multiply, people have families, but that, so some of this historical was sort of, reasoning was just purely logistical that like, well, we have a limited amount of space, but the sort of the way you put it in the subtitle that you're saving your own skin while the rest of us die. And I wonder if, you know, if one's family is brought along too, it even more explicitly introduces that sort of like distinction of like, we're saving ourselves rather than a, we are absolutely necessary to the functioning of this country. Yeah, and that was the argument all along, was that families are not necessary to the continuation of the United States. And I think that sort of part of what's interesting about thinking through these plans is the extent to which this question of what are you going to preserve about America very quickly becomes a pretty existential question about what is America? Are you trying to preserve the presidency? Are you trying to preserve the three branches of government? Are you trying to preserve the totems of our history? So, yes, there was a set of these plans about evacuating the president and the cabinet and the members of Congress. There was also a set of these plans where the National Archives sat down and decided that it was going to evacuate the Declaration of Independence before it would evacuate the Constitution. That the Library of Congress decided it would evacuate the Lincoln's Gettysburg Address before it evacuated the George Washington's military commission. And one of my favorite details in the whole book is that through the Cold War, there was a specially trained team of park rangers in Philadelphia whose job it was to evacuate the Liberty Bell in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. And sort of the idea that there would be these, to mix my metaphors here, like in that scene where like in the movie Independence Day Bill Pullman is standing in the back of the pickup truck like rallying the country for its new fight for freedom. Like what are the things that Bill Pullman should have with him that he can point to to be like this is still America? And the answers are like the Liberty Bell, the Declaration of Independence and like a president of the United States. So, a president is an interesting turn of phrase and that struck me as one of the other sort of major psychological flaws that persisted through decades. Cause a lot of these plans and I wanna get to this are sort of like chaos of chaotic situations fall apart for sort of chaos is difficult to manage. But there are some flaws that are just obvious. This was the family that we were discussing. The other is the enormous amount of effort that's put above everything before the Constitution, before the Liberty Bell on protecting the life of the president and taking the president to somewhere where he can communicate. Most presidents seemed pretty uninterested in this. Both as a matter of, despite the many resources being spent budgetarily, I'm like actually spending time like doing the drills. And part of the reason they don't wanna spend time doing the drills is the recurring thing of presidents being like, you know what, like get the vice president out. The secretaries of defense being like, ah, the deputy secretary of defense. And, you know, this sort of like a captain goes down with his ship idea. And that seems, and I'm trying to remember in the book, some presidents were sort of more adamant about this than others. I mean, is it fair to say that uniformly presidents sort of wanted to go down while, I mean, it's this sort of tension between being able to communicate and being able to survive. Yes. And that's exactly, that's one of the central tensions in so much of this planning is that you can either, you can't both be secure and be in communication. And you saw that actually really come to, come true on 9-11. When we were able to get President Bush into Air Force One and up into the sky where he was safe in Sarasota, Florida. But that came at the cost of him being able to be in command and in control of the US government apparatus that was unfolding on the ground before him. Both in the like actual terms, I mean like literally being out of communication, but also being invisible to the country and sort of out of touch at a really crucial moment. And then that was sort of true throughout these real crisis moments during the Cold War where you see Truman and Carter and Kennedy in these sort of the heat of the moment make a decision that they're gonna stay at the White House, they're going to die and that they're going to be other people that they ship off to the bunkers. And that that is very much part of the actual planning during the Cold War that you end up with the A team of the presidency, which is the person that is actually elected. And then the B team, which are, which is basically the vice president and the speaker of the house. And then the C team, which are like the cabinet officials who sort of scattered to the wind and you hope that they end up in a bunker in Denton, Texas or Maynard, Massachusetts or up in the presidential doomsday planes, the airborne command post and that like one of them is left alive at the end of this. And this is where you end up with this program that grew out of the 1980s during the Reagan years that I actually think is really important to trying to understand the way that we reacted to 9-11, which was known as the presidential successor support system, PS3, which was an entirely classified program at the time that had former high ranking government officials like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, people who had been White House chiefs of staff, who had been cabinet secretaries actually waiting, actually being evacuated from their civilian private lives into these bunkers to be the White House chief of staff in waiting. And so the idea was that if you were the agriculture secretary, if you were the commerce secretary, if you were sort of one of these designated survivors, designated successors who had just no idea what you were doing running the government, no idea about the nuclear authorities or our defense capabilities, like don't worry like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld would be waiting in the bunker to run your government. And they drilled this. I mean, every year, these official, Dick Cheney was in the private sector and Dick Cheney I think was a congressman during part of this, Donald Rumsfeld was a CEO and they would just disappear from their lives for on a Tuesday morning and no one would know where they were and they would run off and run these exercises for a few days or a few weeks. So it was 1980s, it was the Reagan years. But we don't know. But part of this, it's interesting of course is we don't know whether there are modern analogues to this. So we don't know whether Ben Carson or Betsy DeVos ends up in a bunker somewhere, whether a Dennis McDonough or an Andy Card might be like standing there, hi, I'm your new White House Chief of Staff and I'm ready to run the government. And so in some ways I hope that there is a version of that program that still exists today. Well, I mean, one of the things that I really loved about the book is the way, I mean, I think so much of this sort of like secret history, just sort of like getting it out into public is to the extent that you've succeeded, which is large, is sort of interesting in and of itself as a sort of like quirky, here's a, you mentioned on 9-11, I don't know, Air Force One took off like very quickly in Florida using like a system that hadn't been seen in public before. And it's just like interesting on the days of it. But this, what you alluded to now is a sort of like existential lens onto American society. I thought was really powerful in the book. You talked, I think, different from this system in the 1980s earlier on, if I'm remembering in the 50s under Eisenhower, but correct me if I'm wrong, a sort of a system of cards basically given to sort of captains of industry who had a sort of like shadow czar like you're gonna run all the transportation in the country, like in the nuclear emergency. And the fact that that was like almost certainly not constitutional or legal, but was just done, and sort of that system and whatever modern day analog might exist sort of gets at the relationship between industry and government. I think it's a lot more complicated than many people like want to let on even in their own mind. I'm curious about this sort of like relationship between industry and government like as seen through the lens of this story. And I think that you're right, that this ends up being a surprising thread through the story is the role of the private sector in these plans in a couple of sort of different buckets where you have a set of companies that are really, really tightly involved in these plans. I mean, AT&T ran dozens of these government bunkers. I mean, they were actually AT&T facilities. AT&T employees fully staffing these communications bunkers up and down the East Coast and sort of stretching out into the West. And then you have sort of a bunch of other companies that just have large roles in American society who go out and set up their own bunkers. Westinghouse and General Electric and all of these other companies around the countries have their own relocation bunkers. IBM kept a relocation bunker where each vice president in descending order had a slightly smaller desk and they even kept the name tags fully updated on each desk so that everyone would know precisely what their desk was in the bunker. And then you have, as you said, these private individuals who are brought into these plans both at very high levels where as you say, during the Eisenhower years there was a set of nine CEOs, mostly CEOs, although one of them was actually Eisenhower's personal accountant who were going to be deputized, who had been deputized. I mean, they had the paperwork that would step in as superstars to run all of the nation's manufacturing, all of the nation's transportation, all of the nation's housing. All of the nation's food. And each of them would be given a sector of the U.S. economy to run until some point in the future where we could return to basic capitalism. So you have that on the high level. And I guess at that time, World War II was still fresh in people's minds. An analog, a smaller scale analog of that had run the American economy for a few years. And even, and that sort of proceeds through every sector. So you had journalists in Washington who were pre-deputized, Washington bureau chiefs and network vice presidents who were pre-deputized as the wartime censors who would step in and censor their colleagues' work. And you even had an emergency press pool who would be designated to be evacuated along with the president and designated successors so that there was always a reporter somewhere close to the president to receive whatever press releases the U.S. government was handing out. So you have sort of that on the one national level but then down on the local level, like you could also get emergency evacuation passes if you owned a bulldozer because like you would need, like we would need a lot of bulldozers after nuclear war. And so we were interested in ensuring that people who knew how to drive bulldozers survived the war. And you know, this is again all continuing to the present day. I don't know whether bulldozer drivers still get evacuation passes but like there are all sorts of special relationships with defense contractors and communications companies around the modern day analog of these plans. And you know, CenturyLink right now is laying new communications cables to Raven Rock like right now overnight tonight through the center of Wainsborough, Pennsylvania as part of like CenturyLink's big integration into this plan. So as we move towards the present day sort of in the book I wanna talk about, well Congress first and the other branches of government. I think the story of the Greenbrier which you tell very nicely in the book was sort of like already known probably more perhaps of all the Cold War bunkers the one about which the most has been written publicly. And you sort of speculate towards the end of the book that the gang of eight who have been much in the news as of late may have a sort of like special role in what you refer to as enduring constitutional government about which little is known. And I'm just wondering if you could sort of like tell us what couldn't make it into the book but you sort of like could establish a little bit on what the legislature would look like in the event of one of these cataclysmic events in the past. So one of the things that I think is important to understand about the legacy of these plans is it's really during the Cold War where you begin to see the balance of power between the legislative branch and the executive branch tip pretty dramatically towards the executive branch that the idea of war as we have understood it throughout our history has always been something that Congress was involved in that it was Congress that declared war. Eisenhower makes very clear and this is now sort of commonly accepted nuclear procedures that like nuclear war is the president's personal prerogative. And so we end up with like this very weird imbalance in modern life where like if the president wants to send a few hundred troops to another country like theoretically he needs congressional permission to do that but if he wants to destroy every living thing on the planet he can do that by himself at any time anywhere in the world. And so Congress understands this and is pretty uninterested in being part of the continuity planning through much of the Cold War because they understand that there's just not much of a role for them. And Congress moves slowly and requires some level of consensus and it might be months before Congress sort of gets back to really functioning in the way that it was pre-war and that by that point sort of all of the big decisions would be made by the executive branch anyway. And so it was really with great reluctance that Congress even bothered to build the Greenbrier itself. But Congress at the time was not even going to be particularly well served by the Greenbrier. If war happened while Congress was in session they would be taken down to Union Station and put on a special train out to the Greenbrier. Well that presupposed the amount of time it would take to get a train to Union Station and get it out of the blast zone in Washington which was unlikely for a variety of reasons. And then if Congress, if war happened when Congress was not in session no members of Congress other than the senior leadership were actually told where the bunker was at all. And so the procedures were that members of Congress after nuclear war were to find their local FBI field office where there would be sealed envelopes waiting for them with instructions of how to report to the Greenbrier. And so that sort of, that plan had its own shortcomings. The modern version of these plans though I think are pretty interesting in so far as what we know. So you have, as you mentioned, the most secretive level of these plans today are called enduring constitutional government, ECG. And that is the set of plans that deal with how the three branches of government would work together. And from what little we know they bear almost no resemblance to normal modern government and that they are entirely geared at preserving the spirit of the Constitution not the letter of the Constitution. And that they seem to imply some type of super empowered responsibility for some very small number of surviving members of Congress that might be as small as one to four to eight members of Congress. And sort of one of the hints that we have of this is everyone in Washington sort of knows the parlor game of who the designated survivor is at the State of the Union or a presidential inauguration sort of the member of the cabinet who gets hidden away in a bunker. Well, beginning in 2002, after 9-11, we began hiding away one member of Congress also. And there is now a designated survivor for Congress also. The first one in 2002 was Tom DeLay, the minority whip at the time. And so like that naturally begs the question, like what good is one member of Congress if everyone else is dead? Like one member of Congress can't do anything. It's not even two members of Congress, like one from each body. And so you can sort of tell that there's some type of special powers that those people receive in the wake of the activation of ECG. And we just don't know exactly what that means. And that to me is one of the weird troubling problems with the modern set of these plans, which is I get that there's all sorts of reasons for tactical secrecy around certain aspects of these plans. Who exactly is going to be evacuated where? What are the communication capabilities of specific vehicles or specific facilities? But it does sort of seem like we could know who potentially could be in charge after nuclear war. And it seems like that might be something that is worth not just knowing but having a chance to debate and discuss upfront in part so that those people have legitimacy after an incident where they pop up and say like don't worry, I have this official looking piece of paper here that says that I'm the person in charge and that I have all of these special powers that you have never heard anything about. Yeah, I mean, when the 25th Amendment was, I mean there was a realization that like, I mean it seems bizarre but it's just a testimony to how long ago 1787 was that the Constitution really doesn't like adequately provide for the succession of the vice presidency, which is just like, like they just like from the modern eye, it looks like they just kind of forgot about it, which is crazy. And when we sort of realized that this was a problem, there was a public discussion and the 25th Amendment was passed. And like there's nothing, like it's there after all the other amendments and before the ones that came after it. It seems just sort of like fundamentally not okay that all of these plans, I mean sort of just echoing your comments now. And I'm, I guess I'm curious what, I mean there doesn't seem to be any sort of political constituency for doing anything about it, maybe for fear of sort of like being seen as a nut job talking about the apocalypse. Yeah, and again like there's a whole set of questions about things we don't know about. You raised the 25th Amendment. There are problems that we know about the 25th Amendment right now. Like it is actually not at all clear from the Constitution that the Speaker of the House or the President Pro Tem of the Senate are legally allowed to serve as President of the United States. No less in authority on the Constitution than James Madison himself is on the record arguing that the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tem of the Senate are ineligible to serve as President of the United States. The short argument being that only members of the executive branch are eligible to head the executive branch and that you can't bring in members of the legislative branch who are not constitutional officers for the executive branch in order to, it's more, it's slightly more complicated than that but that's the short version of it. So we remember the mockery of Al Haig during the Reagan assassination attempt of him standing there and saying like, I'm in control here at the White House when he was not just not in charge there at the White House but was actually like fourth or fifth in line for being in charge. But it turns out that if something happens to the President and Vice President, the Secretary of State has a pretty good argument that he is the next President of the United States. And so it's not that hard to imagine a scenario where you have a 35 year old army captain standing watch at Raven Rock, the relocation facility for the Pentagon with Rex Tillerson on one phone and Paul Ryan on the other, each of them claiming to be the legitimate President of the United States and to have nuclear command authority. And like, I don't really think we should be waiting until that moment to rely upon the constitutional judgment of that 35 year old army officer standing watch on that particular shift at Raven Rock or Mount Weather or on the Presidential Doomsday plane. That seems like a question that we could actually answer right now. And again, those are the questions that arise of the things that we know about. So what are the questions that would arise about the things that we don't know about? So I wanna give the third branch of government equal time and then open it up to questions so that other people get a chance because I got questions for you all night. But I mean, the body sort of like a natural, the people who would like, at least, if there was time and if they were in communication resolve these sorts of questions is the Supreme Court. And you tell a sort of like very interesting history interwoven of the Supreme Court's plans over time where there are certain sort of periods where they're like, all right, like we too need a plan and like we need a really good law library because like we wanna do a good job. So, you know, they find like small colleges, I think in North Carolina and they like, you know, someone from the court goes down and like is their library good enough? Like, and they're like, yeah, I guess it is. And then, and then like at other times where there's this almost like nihilism on the part of the court, it's like, you know what? Like, if the world goes to hell, no one's gonna listen to us anyway. So like, why bother? Yeah, so there are two, as I was writing this book and sort of doing the research, there were two Christopher Guest movies that came to mind in this. One was the Supreme Court relocating to this luxury mountain resort, the Grove Park in Asheville, North Carolina, which some of you might have been to at one point. It's this beautiful inn up on a hill, great golf course. Better than the Greenbrier? Not better than the Greenbrier, but actually designed by the same person. And they, and sort of the idea of like the Supreme Court, like having the court, holding court in these reception halls. And then the other, which, and this is a digression, then I'll come back to the Supreme Court. So the National Gallery built a farm out in the Virginia farm country that was like the Curator's Cottage that they fully stocked and then had all of these secure vaults for the paintings of the National Gallery. And I just sort of have these ideas of this like Christopher Guest movie about like the Supreme Court in this like luxury mountain resort amid nuclear war. And then this different movie of the like National Gallery Curator like sitting there eating his dinner on this like farm with all of these priceless paintings all around him as nuclear war breaks out all around. So the Supreme Court was just not exact for the reasons that you say, like the Supreme Court works even more slowly than Congress. And so the Supreme Court made a pretty quick decision that they were just going to be completely irrelevant during the Cold War, which was reinforced because all of the drills were during the summer when the Supreme Court is on recess. And so the Supreme Court justices didn't see any reason to return to Washington just to evacuate. And so they never participated in any of the drills. But Earl Warren, when he was Chief Justice, was given one of these emergency passes. And he said, I don't see a pass here for Mrs. Warren. And the officer from it was the forerunner of FEMA. FEMA is the agency that runs all of these plans says, well, you know, sir, you are one of the most important officials in the US government, so you get a pass. And he said, well, if there's no pass for Mrs. Warren, then I guess you'll have room for another really important person. And that's been effectively their plan all the way through. Now again, like these plans, particularly when you get to modern day, and we begin to think about the continuity of Congress and the continuity of the executive branch, like they intersect in really complicated and challenging ways. Someone's gotta swear in a new president. Well, so someone, you need sort of someone in that role, but also, you know, so the Supreme Court is theoretically the person that Rex Tillerson and Paul Ryan would go to to say which one of us is president. What happens if you've lost more than three Supreme Court justices in whatever this attack is and the Supreme Court doesn't even have a quorum in order to answer that question? Take some questions, gentlemen in front and then back and we'll work our way back. Hi, I'm Robert Schroeder with International Investor. I'm not having read your book. Let me get to the second part of the subtitle and the rest of us left to die. It's one thing if we're just left on our own outside of these people who are favored for the bunkers. It's another thing if we're hampered from evacuation. I was sharing with the audience an experience I had where I saw Route 66 closed down completely from traffic in order to let some VIP traffic through. I can imagine the reverse easily happening and let me create a scenario for you to ask you to comment. Let's say instead of nuclear, we have a biological attack. There's more time involved, but clearly there's a very contagious lethal disease and they have time now to assemble the members of Congress, Supreme Court, anyone else who can and will. But do you envision a situation where perhaps the rest of society is hampered from an evacuation in order to first get the VIPs out? So this is an interesting question. In part because for everyone here in this room and at least who lives in Washington, you know how any rainstorm or minor snow flurry reduces the city to complete and total gridlock during absolutely non-panicked times. And so the government ends up with these incredibly detailed plans about how to evacuate urban areas. And the plan for D.C. has every ward going out different roads in different directions, which then sort of makes sense on paper, but then when you actually are reading the plan, like two of the wards cross perpendicularly outside seven corners, so you can imagine how quickly that comes to a halt as two fleeing populaces have to come to a four-way stop. But these plans really drive and change over the course of the Cold War, which is one of the reasons that the president ends up with all of these different vehicles. One of the things that we sort of forget about is that basically everything that we think of as part of the modern majestic imperial presidency is a fancy tool to launch nuclear weapons from wherever the president is. Marine One, Air Force One, the armored motorcades are effectively just secure tools to ensure that the president is in communication with the national command authorities wherever he is in the world. And the first presidential helicopter flight is as part of one of these evacuation drills because expressly the fear of traffic gridlock on the roads would, you know, requires the president to take to the sky. A funny digression here for people in Washington because you know how government works and you know how sort of inadvertent decisions end up creating long-standing conditions. The Air Force was actually supposed to fly the president in helicopters. And the first presidential helicopter flight during operational alert 1957 was aboard an Air Force helicopter. The Air Force bought two presidential helicopters. And they were those sort of plexiglass bubble helicopters that you would remember from the opening scenes of MASH. And as I was previously saying, these drills always took place during the summer. And you know how hot Washington summers are, particularly if you put someone in a plexiglass bubble for 45 minutes on their way to Camp David. So Eisenhower gets in the helicopter, it takes off, and he bakes every second of the flight to Camp David. And the helicopter lands and he says, you know, I'm never getting in that infernal contraption again. And so the Air Force didn't have any larger helicopters at the time. And so the next time the president needs to fly in a helicopter, he gets in a marine transport helicopter and yada, yada, yada, that's how we have Marine One. And so like if the Air Force had had an air conditioner aboard their helicopter in July 1957, the Air Force would probably still be flying the president of the United States. But these plans, I think sort of one of the things that is so interesting about these is, we spent most of this time talking about sort of the nuclear command side of this. But when you begin to talk about the civilian population, the way that it would unfold after a nuclear war, every aspect of government had its own post-nuclear war role. So the post office was the agency that was going to be in charge of registering the dead and coming up with the list of people who had survived. So getting into prop time. So this is form 810 of the US Postal Service, which is you would receive this postcard when you reported to a refugee camp in the United States. And on the back here, you would write down the members of your family that were still alive in that particular refugee camp. And then it would be mailed off to your other surviving families and the post office would figure out where they were in other refugee camps. And this is sort of how the country would reassemble. The post office was also meant to deliver vaccines. Well, so during the Cold War, you had sort of all of these sets of plans of the park service would run the refugee camps because the park service land wasn't going to be targeted during a war. So you would flee out into the Blue Ridge Mountains or Yosemite and your friendly neighborhood park rangers would be standing there to usher you into the post-war apocalypse. And then of course, the US Department of Agriculture was the agency that was going to be in charge of feeding and rations. And the IRS had its own sets of plans about how they would levy taxes on nuclear damage property and institute a national sales tax in order to raise revenue after a war. Because not even nuclear war stops the IRS. So all of these plans though have been updated and modernized for the modern threats. So the post office sort of doesn't have like a bunch of these forms anymore for figuring out who is still alive in the United States. But they are the designated agency for distributing medical counter measures in the event of as you've mentioned a biological attack or a public health pandemic. So like the next time you are thinking about like what your holiday tip to your postman or postwoman should be, like remember that's the person who's going to bring you the Ebola vaccine. And you definitely want to be on the like earlier side of receiving the Ebola vaccine. No, they were actually very, you know they really thought this through and they decided that it wasn't going to be fair to use pre-disaster tax valuations. And instead you, they would have to sort of reassess everyone's taxes after nuclear war. But they're, but you know sort of all of these plans have these weird wacky little quirks to them. So the Federal Reserve had its bunker in Mount Pony, Virginia about 90 minutes south of Washington that's now the Library of Congress Audio Visual Archives. And they, you know, they had a bunker where the Fed chair and the Board of Governors and all of those high level officials would go. They also had a bunker of about $2 billion cash that would serve to bridge the currency needs of the country during what they calculated for the 18 months before the Bureau of the Grading and Printing. Well, so what's funny though about this is again like in the way that the government makes decisions that $2 billion was in $2 bills because during the 1970s when they first introduced the $2 bill and like no one in America wanted to use a $2 bill they were like, well, what can we do with a whole bunch of surplus $2 bills? And they're like, we'll save them for the nuclear war. And so once you would have no choice about which currency you were using we would all be happy using $2 bills. Hi, my name is Simone Williams. I'm a student at American University. I have two very brief questions if you allow me. So my first question is if either in the book or through your research if you found anything about the continuity of government during a transition period so I eat either before inauguration or after inauguration when those deputies aren't filled and things of that nature. And then my second question for you is a little bit more on your thoughts on what like with Congress and the Supreme Court stepping aside in the beginning of the Cold War saying we're not needed at this portion. Like what does that truly say about what we think America is? Cause when you think if the Declaration of Independence is one of those important documents that's the balance of government which requires all three branches but yet two out of the three branches are stepping aside. Yeah. And I think that's sort of part of what's really interesting about this is figuring out this balance which I don't think we ever figured out and I don't have any reason to believe we have figured out now between preserving the spirit of the Constitution and the letter of the Constitution during one of these disaster times. And we haven't even gotten into sort of the attendant issues of this which is it's pretty clear that any sort of large scale disaster would involve the suspension of habeas corpus, the declaration of martial law, sort of the suspension of all of these civil liberties that we normally consider pretty central to the functioning of our democracy. During the Cold War, we're all familiar with the president's football, the nuclear briefcase that followed the president. Well, the attorney general during the Cold War had his own sort of attorney general's football that was filled with all of these pre-written executive orders and proclamations, suspending habeas corpus, declaring martial law, providing for the roundup of thousands of pre-selected subversives, declaring that people of foreign nationalities had to register with the government immediately after a declaration of war. I mean, sort of all of these things that we under normal circumstances would think would be abhorring to our civil liberties. And then your first question about the transition and so the transitions are particularly strange moments in the already wacky world of government continuity programs. And actually, Norm Ornstein here in Washington has done a lot of work on this particularly after 9-11 and sort of pointing out like, this is not the functioning government that we actually think we would want if an attack happened on inauguration. Because, and again, I am not a constitutional scholar so I'm briefly summarizing pretty complex legal questions. But sort of the gist of it is basically if something happens during an inauguration, well, then it falls back on the most senior ranking Senate confirmed person of the previous administration. And so like if something had happened during the 2001 transition from Clinton to Bush, we would have actually ended up with President Larry Summers being sworn in rather than George W. Bush because Madeline Albright as Secretary of State at that point was born overseas and so Larry Summers was sort of the most senior official who would have stepped into that void and like everyone who was expecting George W. Bush's president would have been pretty surprised to discover Larry Summers who has a couple of ideological differences that he would have led the nation forward with. And this was operative in the real world, right? This is still operative in the real world, yeah. There was a delayed, I remember in the book you mentioned a delayed resignation until like a day after the, I remember if it was Gates. Yeah, and so during 09, you had Gates carry over and so Bob Gates would have been president of the United States. The two gentlemen in the back and then we'll go in. Harry Jaffe, Garrett was my editor at Washingtonian Magazine, so those days. I have two very homework questions. I live in Clark County, Virginia in the shadow of Mount Weather and there's a local myth that there's a tunnel from Washington, D.C. 60 miles out to Mount Weather that you find any tunnels. So there are rumors both of that tunnel and then there's a rumored tunnel between Camp David and Raven Rock. And I have no reason to believe that such tunnels exist in part because such a tunnel would be such a massive undertaking engineering-wise and that based on the extensive newspaper coverage of the original excavation of Raven Rock, it seems hard to imagine that an even larger tunnel would have remained hidden. But what they did do at Raven Rock, they might still do it, I don't know. But there are these massive reservoirs, I mean, lake-sized reservoirs inside Raven Rock for drinking water for the heating and cooling systems and they would run pranks on the new security forces and tell them that they were running submarine drills and to go stand on the edge of the reservoir and to report back when the president's submarine arrived from Camp David. While we're on tunnel questions quickly, you mentioned towards the end of the book a construction in East Potomac Park for like a decade. Any sense of what that construction meant? Yeah, so there have been all sorts of these programs, or all sorts of these facilities have been sort of built and expanded, particularly on the communication side. Since 9-11, Raven Rock has had hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space added to it in Pennsylvania. And then there was a year-and-a-half long construction project, which some of you might have even noticed on the north lawn of the White House where they dug this enormous hole in the lawn, spent 18 months lowering massive blocks of concrete down into it and told us that they were repairing the air conditioning system. And then, as you say, there's been another facility that the Navy has been building for the better part of a decade in East Potomac Park that has something to do with the cops. Up until 2004, can you just be clear? That has something to do with continuity of government, something to do with communication systems. But where that tunnel actually goes, we don't know, although it does seem that that tunneling is responsible for some of the settling of that whole spit of land out there, including the settling around the Jefferson Memorial. Yep. Literally work at Mount Weather. But I don't have an invitation. I would imagine in the event of a war, there's a big crosshair on Mount Weather. Is that, do you have any sense of whether that's true? So this was actually a doctrine question during the Cold War, where in a confusing way that sort of only begins to make sense in the confusing world of nuclear strategy of mutually assured destruction, the thinking was that you wouldn't actually target the hardened command centers of each country because you'd need someone to turn war off after war has started. And so there was sort of a conscious doctrine, whether or not it was actually true, or would have held true. But one of the funny things with Mount Weather is it does seem pretty clear that the Russians knew about it pretty early. And Mount Weather being in Blumont, Virginia, the major president's evacuation bunker. And the Russians actually tried to buy a vacation house or what they declared would be a vacation house that just so happened to be super close to Mount Weather in the 1970s and the State Department nixed it. Although the airfield there, I mentioned in the book, is really interesting tidbit about how money and power intersects, if there's no tunnel, how you get there. Yeah, so if there is no tunnel, there are this fleet of what are known as the Cogbirds, this flight of three Gulfstream jets that shadow the president of the United States wherever he goes, that are specially configured to land on a runway adjacent to Mount Weather on the farm that used to belong to Bunny Mellon, the philanthropist and heiress here in town. That, and one of these planes is always close to the president at an adjacent airport in case something happens to Air Force One itself, it would actually pick up the president and whisk the president to Mount Weather. Matt Hendrickson, another Washingtonian friend, kind of picking up where Harry left off. It sounds like through your research, you've almost been able to get into the minds of the way that the planners laid their plans out. With that perspective, do you have any kind of hunches or theories about things that are out there now that aren't yet discovered in public and if there's not a tunnel, what is there? So A, there's a whole new set of these facilities and some of them we know about and some we don't. The other thing though is, I assume that there is some modern version of something like that PS3 program that I mentioned that would basically provide for adequate leadership around presidential successors. And as I said, I sort of hope that there is something like that because we don't want some of these more junior cabinet secretaries sort of rudder-less after an attack. In the back, and let's take, we're kind of running up against time but I do want to give everyone a chance to ask a question, so go ahead and then let's come up with a few questions. Thank you. John, I'm a better employer though, not on any of these bunker lists, I'm afraid. I'm really curious about the government estimates everything, plans for everything. And during the height of the Cold War, I could see how a lot of this would make sense for a more limited attack on Washington and New York. But for the full scale, how many thousands of warheads? Yeah, I mean tens of thousands. Tens of thousands, complete destruction of US. What did they actually think they were gonna be running besides other people on the bunkers and the Liberty Bell and the copy of the Constitution? So part of this is, and I was surprised to read these reports, but even under an absolute worst case scenario, you would still have huge chunks of the American population surviving. And whether that number ended up being 60 million or 80 million or 100 million, who knows, and I don't think we probably actually have a real good grasp of what that ends up being. But at least from the initial attack, you would still have tens of millions, perhaps even 100 million Americans survive. Nuclear winter wouldn't be awesome afterwards. Like the fires wouldn't be awesome afterwards. So there would be a bunch of second order and third order issues. But that's what Ben Carson and Betsy DeVos can sort out down the road. So let's bundle the remaining questions here in the front together and give the area a chance to make concluding remarks. Hi, David Priest. I'm curious, archival research on sensitive national security topics is hard. Getting interviews from people about literally existential topics is hard. You had accessed information about sites like we can presume at least Camp David still functioning in some of the purposes that you wrote about. You had to consider the ethics of this. You had to consider what can I write about and what crosses a line that I may have heard and may have some ideas on, but it's still sensitive enough that this could be a vulnerability. How did you draw that line and were there things that you decided not to include that you found and you thought were decent, but you just decided, no, we don't need to put that out there. Yeah, so there are two things that were really helpful in the research of this. One is the government has no idea what it declassifies or what it is keeping classified. And so in multiple different presidential libraries, I would be going through and you would get to one folder and it would still be classified and then you get like six folders further on and there'd be that exact same file declassified. And so there was a lot more in the public domain than I thought. The second thing is LinkedIn is sort of this amazing modern tool for reporting on sensitive government subjects because in a way that would be like nearly impossible, 10 or 15 years ago, you can now find the people who piloted the presidential doomsday planes in the 80s and 90s and you can find people who worked at Raven Rock because they listed on their LinkedIn profile. I will not say that I had a particularly high success rate in getting those people to respond to my interview requests but certainly a lot more luck than I would have had 10 or 15 years ago. And then sort of to your final question, like yes, there was all sorts of stuff that I ended up keeping out of the book. Both from a speculative nature about the modern plans and then also sort of like the where and when of some of the modern facilities and plans. And partly that's because I think just there's a level of it that does, where there is a good argument for continued secrecy but then also like that you get the gist of all of this through the course of the whole book and that there were sort of, there were lots of little details here and there that I kept out for sort of one reason or another and some of them were just based. I think we're about at time. So I know there are more questions but Garrett will stick around and sign books for a little bit. So you can still ask them but thanks for a really interesting talk. Yeah, thanks for having me. You had a great book. Thank you.