Bunker Visit Might Encourage Candor

Forget Camp David. This is where President Clinton should bring his new national security team to talk about the myths and realities of the international power game they are about to play.

Before Madeleine Albright becomes secretary of state, William Cohen secretary of defense, Anthony Lake director of the CIA and Samuel “Sandy” Berger head of the National Security Council, they should hook up with the president and Vice President Al Gore down here.

If they want to enjoy the hospitality of the Greenbrier resort hotel, fine. But they should meet around the standard government-issue conference table and sit in the fake-leather government armchairs inside the building known as “the Bunker.”

Thanks to a weekend excursion by the Gridiron Club of Washington journalists, I was there the night after Clinton announced the quartet who will help him carry out foreign and defense policy for the next four years, and was struck by the educational value of the visit.

The Bunker is a vast underground office complex - three stories deep and the size of two football fields, hollowed out of a hill adjoining the hotel. Built under orders from President Eisenhower, the Bunker is the place where - theoretically - Congress would have met if the Capitol had been obliterated by a nuclear attack.

The president had his own nuclear hideaway under another mountain in Virginia.

For almost 30 years, until The Washington Post wrote about it in 1992, the Bunker epitomized the Cold War myth that the enemy can be fooled and the American people can be conned into accepting almost anything their government tells them.

Those now in charge of the nation’s security need to be reminded about the dangers of such myths.

All four appointees have reputations for candor and conviction. But when the crunch time comes - as it inevitably will - when they have to test their consciences against their careers, their loyalty to the chief against their duty to their country, this is the place they should be thinking about.

It is a monument to the folly of its times.

The Bunker was not designed as a bomb shelter. It was to be the alternative site for Congress after a nuclear attack. Senators, representatives and selected staff would be brought here from the smoking remains of Washington or from their home districts and moved into this self-contained underground city. The quarters were Spartan; double-deck Army bunks and communal bathrooms. (Presumably, seniority would determine who got the bottom bunks.) It had its own power and water supply and constantly refreshed provender for the cafeteria, where tourists can still see that the menu board listed the famous Senate bean soup.

The existence of the Bunker was kind of an open secret around here. The official explanation that all this construction was for a new wing of the hotel fooled few people. But even now, the people who were in charge of the facility maintain that security held - despite being told by some Gridiron members who reported from Moscow in the 1970s that they heard about it back then from Soviet military intelligence sources.

My favorite room in the Bunker is the underground TV studio, complete with four portable photomurals of the Capitol building with appropriate seasonal foliage. The idea was that a senator or representative could tape a message of reassurance to his constituents that everything was OK. (“Folks, I have some bad news - Washington has been obliterated. But I’m happy to tell you that River City has been awarded a $1.2 million grant to restore the beach sand washed away in last spring’s floods.”)

It would be worthwhile for the members of the new national security team to see the Bunker for themselves and reflect on the way that each era breeds its own folly. In the Cold War years, no one seriously questioned the need for such a “secret” facility, argued about its cost or wondered how much reassurance a taped TV message from a senator or representative would bring to a nation devastated by a nuclear attack.

It was the same mindset that allowed two presidents to conceal from the American people the reality of what was happening in Vietnam - even though the enemy obviously knew who was losing the war. It is the same psychology that let Clinton this year pretend to the American people that Saddam Hussein had been punished for his attack on the Kurds, when in fact Saddam had won everything he sought.

Maybe a visit to the Bunker would encourage these folks to choose candor over concealment and rebuild the only resource on which a democracy can base its foreign relations - public trust.