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But wooing the hard-nosed business community to a strange—and expensive —new cause was not easy, and Virg Couch decided that the best method to convince business leaders was in personal confrontation. He took to the road, speaking at Rotary Clubs, conventions, board meetings—any gathering of businessmen that would tolerate him. He still spends half his life traveling and lobbying. At a recent meeting of the American Society for Industrial Security, Couch was introduced as a man who "has not remained aloof in an ivory tower or vacuum as some Government officials are inclined to do ... Because of this shirtsleeve working approach to his job, he has developed a program which is practical, down to earth, and workable." Says Couch, of the industrial efforts now taking place: "What is happening in industry is a great thing to see. More and more employees are looking to industry to keep them informed on civil defense. And industry is preparing itself better every day to pass down solid information. It is taking on more responsibility and that's the way it should be. It is better for industry to be paternalistic than for the Government to be."
Setting the Example. Yet without being over-paternalistic, government at the federal, state and local levels has at the very least a responsibility for setting a civil defense example. So far, the show has been sorry. The White House, to be sure, is equipped with a yawning bomb shelter that dates back to Franklin Roosevelt's day, and a stand-by Pentagon, tunneled deep under Maryland's Catoctin Mountain, is equipped and ready for use as a wartime defense headquarters. More than 30 top Government agencies are prepared to evacuate to secret "relocation centers" in a 300-mile perimeter around Washington. A series of emergency laws is on file, to be invoked by the President, and a presidential succession list of twelve names—from Vice President Lyndon Johnson to Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg—is ready if death strikes the White House. Yet for all the urgent Administration talk, only one member of the Kennedy Cabinet—Postmaster General Edward Day—has a shelter in his home.
On a state level, the situation is worse. Only three states* have complete, blastproof underground installations where business can be carried on in relative safety. Just three others are under construction, including Governor Nelson Rockefeller's model bunker in Albany, which can house 1,100 legislators and public employees, and sustain them with 14,000 special crackers that provide a complete, balanced diet.
Hard-rock miners have drilled a cavern 5,000 ft. under Cheyenne Mountain, near Colorado Springs, but three more years will pass before the underground headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), nerve center and central switchboard for continental air raid warnings, will move in. Even then, in many a community the communication lines to NORAD may remain perilously thin. In Miami, the main CONELRAD station is not equipped as a fallout shelter, and its link to the city's civil defense control center is an exposed land wire.