Ambassador Ortiz: Lessons from a Life of Service

6: In the Heart of the State Department

The Undersecretary of State, Christian Herter, who was my new boss in the State Department, was a former Governor of Massachusetts and a gentleman of the old school. President Eisenhower had created the Operations Coordinating Board as an action arm of the White House. The board was comprised of the undersecretaries of key departments and the heads of other agencies. The Board’s primary responsibility was to oversee the implementation of the foreign policies determined by the National Security Council and approved by the President. Every week I’d attend the OCB meetings as a State Department action officer. Sometimes I was assigned special tasks. Our positions on the board gave us great access and authority. We conveyed the decisions of the White House regarding policies and their implementation directly to the appropriate agencies. If the President approved an NSC decision to begin negotiations for foreign military base rights, for example, I would communicate the specific instructions and determine a timetable and its compliance. The job put me at the center of executive power in Washington during a very critical time. It gave me access at the highest levels into the White House and federal agencies. It was a most amazing, wonderful position for a junior officer.  6 In the Heart of the State Department I served with the OCB for two years. It was a heady time, but not without its challenges. Once, about the time that radical young military officers were becoming a factor in Libya, the President asked for a memo on what was going on in that country. I had a role in the preparation of the memo. Eisenhower would only read one-page memos, so we sent him a summary on the situation in Libya. Foolishly, we wrote that King Idris was seventy years old and definitely “over the hill.” We said that the king could not be expected to last much longer and that the young colonels were going to take over the country. The President sent the memo back with a note: “Surely you know that I’ll be seventy soon.” I was terribly embarrassed. One particular event during my time at the Operations Coordinating Board made a profound impression on me. I was informed that I would be leaving the city for a day. I was not to tell anyone—not even my wife—where I was going and was required to sign a form obligating me not to reveal what I was to see. A bit puzzled, I put together a travel kit and told Dolores that the State Department was sending me on a field exercise. The next morning, a van collected me and several others and we drove towards Thurmond, Maryland, which is very close to Camp David, the President’s retreat. The road we were following, a rather wide, well-paved thoroughfare, led directly into a tunnel in the side of a mountain. We paused at heavy steel gates that sealed the tunnel’s entrance. The doors slid back and we entered. The road curved and then we came to another heavy steel door. When we stopped we found ourselves in an underground warren of passageways. In due time we learned the purpose of this extraordinary trip. Because of our jobs and our knowledge, we had been chosen to be that part of the American government that would take control of the country’s foreign policy if a nuclear attack destroyed Washington, D.C. If nuclear war came to pass, this underground labyrinth would be our safe refuge, because no nuclear weapon then extant could penetrate the mountain. During the orientation we were shown a list of the primary Soviet missile targets in the United States, according to U.S. intelligence  CHAPTER SIX sources. Washington was very close to the top of the list, of course, but to my horror I saw that specific sites in New Mexico were there also. I was stunned. The orientation revealed a chilling scenario: if there were any indication of an imminent missile strike, we would be contacted immediately and told to gather at a designated site. From there, we’d be flown by helicopter to Thurmond to go immediately underground. Once ensconced in our fortress, we would function as best we could to direct the foreign policy of the United States government. Congress had the same sort of bunker out in West Virginia...