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 Kennedy's Cold War bomb shelter now a museum
By KAREN TESTA
Associated Press Writer
PEANUT ISLAND, Fla. (AP) - Take a pleasant boat ride up the Intracoastal Waterway. Look with longing at the multimillion-dollar Palm Beach mansions. Wave to passing yachters soaking up the sun. Be grateful to be alive.
At the end of this 1.8-mile ferry trip is a stark reminder of how close the world has come to nuclear war: A bomb shelter, buried 25 feet below this island's surface, built for President Kennedy during the Cold War.
The early 1960s were a time of pervasive paranoia in America - the "Red" scare. But the thickness of the bunker's cement walls, the barbed wire fence and thick brush hiding the steel-door entrance indicate even the White House thought it was more than hype.
"It was a point when the world was closer to nuclear war than at any other time in our history," Bill Rose tells visitors to the shelter, which opened as part of the Palm Beach Maritime Museum in January. The bunker was built in late 1961 as tensions heightened between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was tucked away behind an old Coast Guard station on Peanut Island, a small mass of land in the Intracoastal Waterway just north of posh Palm Beach, where the Kennedy family had a beachfront estate.
No one at the maritime museum can prove Kennedy ever set foot in the shelter - or even knew of its existence. And the John F. Kennedy Museum in Boston has no record of such a facility ever being built on Peanut Island.
That has not deterred the maritime museum from making the bunker its premier attraction on the island, home to the historic Coast Guard station. For $12, visitors can take a ferry ride from downtown West Palm Beach and tour the shelter and Coast Guard facilities.
"The cover story was it was a munitions depot," said John Grant, president of the maritime museum. "But you don't have bathrooms, you don't have a communications center, you don't have air filtration equipment in a munitions depot". "The land was leased by the Secret Service," Grant added. "What do they do? They protect the president."
Thankfully, the president never needed that kind of protection.
The shelter was completed 10 months before the standoff of super powers that culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Less than 100 miles off Florida's coast, the Soviets had set up nuclear weapons in communist Cuba. The government urged Americans to build fallout shelters in their basements and backyards. People filled grocery stores to stock up on supplies as if they were preparing for a Categor 5 hurricane.
Then, it was over.
Soviet leader Nikita Kruschchev agreed to remove the weapons. Nuclear war was averted. Americans converted bomb shelters to play pens and wine cellars. And President Kennedy was killed.
His bomb shelter was all but forgotten - except for the teen-agers and vagrants who reveled (and did goodness-know-what-else) in the secret island hideaway.
When the museum took it over several years ago, the bunker was flooded with several feet of rain water. All the original equipment and furniture was gone.
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