JFK’s Bunker Doors Reopen

By Joel Hood, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Jul. 3–There was a time in the nation’s history, when nuclear war with Russia seemed imminent, that President John F. Kennedy and his family might have sought refuge from the fallout in a small steel tunnel on a man-made island in northern Palm Beach County.

In preparation, the shelter, on Peanut Island, was stocked with all the supplies the president might need to survive a nuclear winter: military food rations, several metal drums of drinking water, radio equipment, rotary phones, a decontamination room and as many as 30 bunk beds for Kennedy, his family and his inner circle.

It was hardly Camelot. But then, these were no ordinary times, and this bunker remains a snapshot of the turbulent Cold War period.

After a two-year hiatus, the bunker was reopened for public view Sunday with a small celebration next to one of the island’s two historic Coast Guard boathouses, which were built in the mid-1930s. Palm Beach County officials closed the island for restoration and damage control after the previous two hurricane seasons. The county spent millions to remove nonnative Australian pine trees, build a small lagoon and refurbish the campgrounds on the island.

The bunker, too, has been renovated. The nonprofit Palm Beach Maritime Museum and Academy spent almost $600,000 to repair the exterior of the bunker from erosion damage when the pines were removed and to install a door that would allow wheelchair access at the rear of the structure. Some of that money also paid for repairs to the two red-roofed guardhouses, said Anthony Miller, a member of the museum’s executive committee.

“It’s special to be able to preserve something that gives people a real glimpse of how we lived back then,” Miller said. “There’s nothing else like this around here.”

The Kennedy bomb shelter, 25 feet below ground, was built in the early 1960s amid escalating tensions between the United States and Russia. Even for its time, it was seen as a crudely designed bunker, a worst-case scenario compound to give Kennedy and his family immediate safety from nuclear fallout while they vacationed in their Palm Beach mansion across the Intracoastal Waterway. The shelter was said to be just 10 minutes from the Kennedy home by speedboat.

The maritime museum acquired the bunker and boathouses in the mid-1990s with the hope of remaking Peanut Island into a destination for history buffs and schoolchildren learning about Cold War hysteria for the first time. It was a success, Miller said. Before being shut down, the island was drawing as many as 100,000 visitors a year, he said.

“It makes you realize how far we’ve come,” Miller said, standing in front of the bunker’s thick steel entrance, painted camouflage brown and green. “It’s a frightening thought that the president would have had to live in a place like this.”

Despite the recent repairs, the bunker remains about the same as it was in Kennedy’s time. A round, corrugated-steel hallway leads visitors underground. They pass through a “decontamination room” the size of a phone booth, where clothes would have been removed if they’d come into contact with atomic radiation. Then they enter into the main chamber of the bunker, which looks like half a soup can turned on its side.

There was 3 feet of standing water and sand inside the bunker when it was purchased, Miller said, so all the original furniture is gone. But over the years museum officials have painstakingly acquired authentic furniture from that era, most coming directly from the federal government.

The bunker now has two small bunk beds, lockers, a wooden desk between large flags, a ham radio and metal drums that once contained drinking water.

“I believe President Kennedy was an ordinary guy who just went above and beyond,” said Carole Marshall, a Lake Worth resident who toured the bunker Sunday for the first time. “I think he probably realized that if he had to use it, it was only going to be under very serious circumstances.

“What a treasure from history to hold on to.”

Joel Hood can be reached at jhood@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6611.

—–

Copyright (c) 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.