The posting also includes excerpts from interviews conducted by William Manchester while researching his book, The Death of a President (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), which shed light on the Football arrangements during the Kennedy administration. It remains unclear whether the four vice presidents who held the office between Johnson and Mondale were assigned Footballs, but so far there is no evidence to suggest that they were. This was in keeping with Mondale's substantive and innovative role in national security policy. Today’s posting by the National Security Archive includes several documents about the contents of the PEADs and the Carter administration’s efforts to revise directives considered “badly out of date.” The President’s second cousin, Hugh Carter, Jr., who played a leading role in White House emergency planning, said he was “concerned that the entire PEADs series is obsolete given the total devastation which could be expected from a thermonuclear attack.” By 1980, the PEADs had been revised and updated and were ready to be placed in the President’s “emergency portfolio.”Īlso included in the posting are documents on the Carter administration’s arrangements to assign a Football to Vice President Walter Mondale, with one permanently stationed at his residence. McDermott, who led the federal Office of Emergency Planning in the 1960s, said the purpose of the documents was “to clothe the President with formal emergency powers,” although he said some were of “doubtful legality,” perhaps because they included the suspension of habeas corpus, a declaration of martial law, and the authorization of mass arrests and arbitrary detentions. During the Cold War, and possibly later, they included proclamations and executive orders known as Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) for use in a national emergency. While the existence of the Football has been known since the 1960s, reliable details about its contents have been relatively scarce. military personnel traveling with the President have carried a special case known variously as the “satchel,” the “black bag,” the “emergency actions pouch” and, as it is perhaps best known, the “Football.” Epitomizing presidential control of nuclear weapons, the Football and the military aides who carry it enable the President to make decisions about the use of nuclear weapons in the event of a sudden military crisis. Washington, D.C., J– A set of highly secret emergency action plans kept inside the closely guarded “Football” that traveled with the President at all times and that would give the federal government sweeping emergency powers were of “doubtful legality,” “badly out of date,” and “even illegal,” according to top government officials whose views are memorialized in declassified records posted today by the National Security Archive. FOIA Advisory Committee Oversight Reports.
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