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I’M SITTING IN A non-descript movie theater in the basement of a hotel called The Greenbrier in the Allegany mountains of West Virginia. This little cinema doesn’t look like much, of course. A few hundred hardwood seats. A screen. An American flag in the corner. But this is the room that would have served as the seat of government (whatever was left of it, that is) had the Russians ever dropped the Big One on Washington.
For decades, no one except a select few members of Congress, military leaders and, of course, the president knew that there was a spartan—but fully equipped—fallout shelter underneath the Greenbrier’s lavish West Virginia wing.
The secret finally came out in 1992, thanks to an article in the Washington Post. The story created a sensation at the time—the Cold War was technically over, yet Congress still had a fallout shelter under one of the country’s most-expensive hotels!—so the bunker was mothballed. It’s still open for tours though. So, during a recent trip through West Virginia, I gladly forked over $27 of this magazine’s hard-earned money to see a part of America’s Cold War past that never showed up in those duck-and-cover films.
But this bunker is no mere relic. Walking through the would-be House and Senate today serves as a refresher course on the notion of security in a world where threats no longer come from Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles launched from the Soviet Union, but from atomic briefcases or common boxcutters in the hands of freelance madmen. And it’s a handy reminder that government secrecy and cronyism go hand in hand in any era.
I got the eerie, past-is-prologue feeling from the moment that tour guide Mia Decker began recounting the history of the bunker and the Greenbrier resort. For more than two centuries, the rich and powerful came to White Sulphur Springs to take the waters, be pampered by an attentive staff and, later, lose a few balls on the Greenbrier’s championship golf courses. During World War II, German, Japanese and Italian diplomats were detained here. The Greenbrier is so much a part of American history that during the Civil War and World War II, it was turned into a military hospital. Robert E. Lee and Dwight D. Eisenhower visited their recuperating troops here. While Lee died long before golf became a political pastime, Eisenhower often returned to the Greenbrier for a round or two.
So it was no coincidence that in the 1950s, the Greenbrier’s plans for a new wing would somehow get entangled with President Eisenhower’s plan for a massive fallout shelter. The hotel got its wing and Eisenhower got his “relocation center”—and taxpayers picked up the $14-million tab for the bunker.
It all sounded like the 1950s version of how the Bush Administration is handing out Iraqi reconstruction contracts to campaign contributors—until Decker pointed out that Eisenhower’s Greenbrier boondoggle had a pure motive: Ike believed that our democratic form of government had to be preserved as more than mere symbolism. The Greenbrier bunker—as well as the corresponding shelters for the executive branch, the judiciary and top military leaders—was built by the Pentagon to maintain “continuity of government” (which is ironic, considering that in too many countries, the military sits like an angry, chained-up dog waiting for the very vacuum of power that Eisenhower sought to prevent).
When it was finished in 1961, the so-called “Project Greek Island” could house all the members of Congress and allow them to run the “country” from their secret underground lair for 30-60 days. But no one—not even most of the hotel’s staff—knew about it. Two huge blast doors—25-ton, 18-inch-thick steel fortifications that you’d think couldn’t be hidden—were concealed behind false “Danger: High Voltage” signs and wallpaper so gaudy that no one even wanted to look at it, let alone peer behind it. Part of the bunker was often used for trade shows back then. Even the movie theater that would have been the House of Representatives was used to actually screen films.
Of course, the public never got to see the decontamination rooms, the water plant, the generators, the Congressional dormitories and the cafeteria-which held boxes of dehydrated scrambled eggs, beef sausages and (ironically) the chicken à la king that would have kept the Congressmen and Senators alive. But there were suspicions in town.
“The cover story was that it was a ‘government storage facility,’” said Decker, who grew up nearby. “Of course, we all knew there was more to it than that, but this was the 1960s! It was an entirely different world. We didn’t ask questions! There were no crusading journalists or CNN. We had a sense of patriotism that does not exist any more.”
I found myself disturbed by Decker’s definition of patriotism as a state in which citizens must turn off their inquisitive minds in favor of an unwavering fealty to the government that is supposed to work for them. In Decker’s day, it would have been disloyal to question why our government was building a fallout shelter for itself under a luxury hotel. Decker even spoke contemptuously about Ted Gup, the Washington Post writer who revealed the secret bunker in 1992 and about the “sense of betrayal” that the “good and decent people” of White Sulphur Springs felt by the article.
But those same “good and decent people” were actually betrayed by the government they worshipped and the secret the government kept. After all, Gup has said that highly placed people within the government wanted the bunker to be tossed into the dustbin of history, if only because it was so implausible in the first place. If Congress had indeed been evacuated—as it nearly was during the Cuban Missile Crisis—it might have signaled to the Soviets that we were about to launch a first strike, prompting the Soviets to try to beat us to it. The bunker—and the “good and decent people” who ran it—would have been the cause of the government’s own demise.
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Later, Decker led us through a once-modern communications room, where members of Congress would have addressed whatever was left of the nuked nation. Despite its mundane, government-issued foam ceiling and gray walls, this was a freakish, Strangelovian place. Congressmen would have given their calm and resolute speeches in front of a seasonally adjusted photo of the Capitol dome, a national symbol that probably would’ve been destroyed in any nuclear attack anyway.
After the tour, I went back to the briefing room to chat with Paul “Fritz” Bugas, who ran the bunker from the early 1970s until its secrecy was compromised. For him, like me, the briefing room is hardly just an artifact.
“A room like this reminds us that the perception of leadership is vital during a crisis,” he said. “As flawed as they are, we look to our elected leaders at those times.”
Of course, Bugas worked in the bunker during the height of the Cold War. It would be difficult for people of my generation to understand the fear, the paranoia and the overarching sense of dread that accompanied those days—except for the fact that we’re living in them. Our first reaction to anything today—from a subway delay to a plane crash—is terrorism. That explains why, during the recent blackout, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg got on the airwaves as quickly as possible to reassure everyone that someone was in control and that the power outage was not a new terror attack. As a result, his words helped calm the public and prevent a repeat of the looting and arson that accompanied the last major citywide loss of power.
And it hardly needs to be pointed out that former Mayor Giuliani did the same thing from his own underground bunker just a few hours into the morning of September 11. For Bugas, events like that show that the Greenbrier’s mothballed bunker remains relevant—if only as a metaphor.
“After September 11, we were reminded how important our work had been,” he said. “There’s such an awareness of security now in this country. I mean, you take your belt off at the airport without question because you know it’s important. So was this.”
Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post who should have won an award for an exposé on JFK’s Cold War bunker in the basement of a Manhattan courthouse. His Web site is at www.gersh.tv
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
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