I’m reading Kenneth T. Walsh’s From Mount Vernon to Crawford: A History of the Presidents and Their Retreats (Hyperion 2005). Walsh is the White House correspondent for U.S. News and World Report. It’s generally an interesting book, although I’ve caught some minor errors.
On p. 142, he writes that August 1961, President Kennedy was informed that the Navy had built a bomb shelter for him on Nantucket “under a submarine surveillance base and disguised… as a ‘jet assist takeoff fuel bottle storage area.’”
Is this true? Does the shelter still exist? Is it open for tours? Any Dopers ever been there?
I don’t know if there was or not one on Nantucket. However, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The Kennedy Compound is on the Cape Cod mainland (although it is on Nantucket Sound). I would think that a nuclear bunker would close by and accessible by several means or transportation. I don’t know why they would build one on an island.
Anyway, that bunker would only apply when he was in the Massachusetts area (I would think). There were other, very large, bukers nearer Washington already in place to maintain government continuity in the event of nuclear war. A huge facility under the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia is the largest of those that is known at this time and you can take a tour of it.
Does it say where on Nantucket? I’ve been there a number of times and don’t recall any sub surveillance base. (Though, to be sure, they don’t always advertise such bases.)
No, it doesn’t say. And I should add, this was for JFK’s use if he was at Hyannisport when Really Bad Things started to happen. If he were at the White House or Camp David, I’m sure there were other, closer places he’d go.