“But it would be a political disaster,” Raskin objected.
“We have to do it,” Sorensen said. “You have to prepare a program.”
At that point, Bundy, who came to the meeting dressed in shorts and carrying a tennis racket, got up, said, “I have to go play tennis,” and left the room. Kaysen and Raskin were left holding the bag.
Kennedy still had questions about civil defense, but he felt he had to approve something. First, there was the pressure from Rockefeller, which could have politically disastrous consequences in the next election if Kennedy did nothing. Second, there was always the possibility of war, and Kennedy felt that as President he should offer the citizenry some hope for survival. Third, and most important, the Berlin crisis was beginning to heat up, and Kennedy believed that having a civil-defense program would strengthen his hand, that he could move more freely if the population could be protected from an attack that the Soviets might launch in response to actions he might be forced to take. On this fundamental point, he essentially agreed with Nelson Rockefeller and Herman Kahn. On May 25, Kennedy announced that he was stepping up federal efforts for a nationwide fallout-shelter program.
When Kennedy returned from Vienna in early June, shaken by his tense meeting with Khrushchev, he started to put still greater emphasis on civil defense. In his July 25 radio and television address to the nation, explaining the Berlin crisis and his decision to add more than $3.2 billion to the defense budget, the President also announced that he was adding $207 million to the civil-defense budget—which, on top of the $104 million already appropriated, meant a 500 percent increase over the previous year. The money would go toward identifying shelter spaces with civil-defense signs, stocking the shelters with water, biscuits and first-aid kits, and improving air-raid warning systems.
Over the summer, as Kennedy grew more and more concerned with Berlin, he became increasingly enthusiastic about civil defense. He was spurred in this direction partly by his brother Robert, the Attorney General, who was an extreme enthusiast for civil defense, urging members of the White House staff to outline a program that would require everyone to join a citizens corps that would practice evacuation-and-shelter drills once a week. The President didn’t go quite that far, but on August 14, one day after the East Germans started constructing the Berlin Wall, Kennedy wrote McNamara, “I am concerned that we move… as quickly as possible on Civil Defense.”
Life magazine was planning to run, in its September 15 issue, an enormous section on fallout shelters, replete with detailed blueprints and photographs on how to build several different types of shelters in or near your own home, with a headline reading: “You Could Be Among the 97% to Survive If You Follow Advice in These Pages,” Kennedy signed a letter addressed to the magazine’s readers, dated September 7, reprinted as the article’s introduction, stating in part: “I urge you to read and consider seriously the contents of this issue of Life.”
Around the same time, the Pentagon was planning to put out its own official pamphlet on fallout. Adam Yarmolinsky, McNamara’s special assistant, took charge of the project and commissioned the editorial team that wrote the Life article to help draft it. Yarmolinsky had been given the civil-defense beat in a rather peculiar fashion. In the early spring of 1961, shortly after Kennedy ordered McGeorge Bundy to review the OCDM’s civil-defense proposal, Bundy told Carl Kaysen and Marc Raskin that they would have to find a point of contact in the Defense Department. Raskin, who was out to sabotage the civil-defense campaign from the start, ran down the list of high Pentagon officials in search of the man who would most likely share his own views on the topic. He hit upon Adam Yarmolinsky. Much to Raskin’s surprise, however, Yarmolinsky took the assignment for which Raskin had recommended him very seriously, transforming himself into a leader and public spokesman for civil defense, even building his own do-it-yourself family fallout shelter.
And then there was the fallout-shelter pamphlet. The Pentagon wanted Kennedy to go on TV to explain his shelter program and then, the next day, to send copies of the pamphlet to every single home in America—making it, as Raskin waggishly remarked in a memo to Bundy, “the most widely distributed piece of literature in man’s history outside of the Bible.” In mid-October, Yarmolinsky and his team from Life finished a draft of the booklet, entitled “Fallout Protection: What to Know About Nuclear Attack—What to Do About It,” and circulated it throughout the Pentagon and the White House for comment. Nearly everyone who saw it, especially outside the Pentagon, was aghast. White House staffers caustically referred to it as “Fallout Is Good for You.”
One section headline in the pamphlet read “Shelter Living Will Be As Healthy As You Make It.” The vision of everyone coming out of his shelters and returning to previous circumstances—“The communities that are well organized and have planned their decontamination actions will be able to return to normal life conditions”—struck most officials as “too facile.” There was nothing about the uncertainties and difficulties involved in decontamination, nothing that suggested that hospitals, doctors and nurses might no longer exist in abundance, no justification for the assumption that everyone can come out of his shelter after two weeks, no references to biological hazards of consuming fresh milk or foodstuffs that might be contaminated, no details about safe levels of radiation dosage or the area of damage that would be most endangered by blast or fire or fallout, given different sizes of nuclear explosives that might be involved in the Soviet attack.
Several White House critics were also disturbed by the class bias that pervaded the pamphlet. One passage went so far as to trumpet, “The anticipation of a new market for home shelters is helpful and in keeping with the free enterprise way of meeting changing conditions in our lives.” Illustrations showed office buildings and suburban homes with large basements and gardens—but no tenements or apartment buildings in cities, no workers in factories. One drawing portrayed a family evacuating themselves out to sea in a cabin cruiser. John Kenneth Galbraith, the witty, liberal Harvard economist and Kennedy’s ambassador to India, was deeply offended by the whole business. In a memo to Kennedy—which he prefaced by noting, “I regard this as a matter of high importance”—Galbraith dryly remarked, “The present pamphlet is a design for saving Republicans and sacrificing Democrats…. I am not at all attracted by a pamphlet which seeks to save the better elements of the population, but in the main writes off those who voted for you.”
Some White House officials felt that release of the pamphlet would create a public panic. Already, shelter mania was possessing large segments of the population, and the Administration was largely to blame. It was not only Kennedy’s forceful advocacy of fallout shelters that nourished the fever; it was that he did so in a speech about the Berlin crisis and the concrete possibility of war with the Russians by the end of the year. Newsweek reported that “fallout shelters, like the Twist, have become fashionable,” with some citizens “behaving as if they were cavemen already.” Do-it-yourself shelter kits were selling like hamburgers.
The New York Times described incidents of people in the suburbs constructing shelters clandestinely so that neighbors won’t try to invade the shelter in the event of nuclear attack. Civil-defense coordinators in Nevada and in Riverside County, California, warned their citizens to arm themselves to repel H-bomb refugees from nearby Los Angeles. The Reverend L. C. McHugh, a columnist for the Catholic magazine America, assured readers that it was ethically permissible to shoot your neighbors if they tried to break into your fallout shelter.