dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Didn't know this… from Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Plan to Save Itself - While the Rest of Us Die (pg xiv)

"As I am winging my way back to California tomorrow, I will still have the black box aboard," Nixon had said the day before at the White House. The black box was colloquially known as the Football - the briefcase, carried just a few steps from the president by a military aide, that contained the country's nuclear attack plans. The Football was the key to this vast and ever-growing arsenal, the Nuclear Triad of bombers, ICBMs, and submarines that kept the Soviet Union at bay, and it was always at the president's fingertips.

But not today. No one had told the president that, by one of the only measures that truly mattered, his presidency had already ended. The military aide never boarded the plane with the Football; the briefcase wasn't in its normal place on Air Force One, secured in the communications center just behind the cockpit. Even before Gerald Ford took the oath, the White House military had already taken from Richard Nixon the very power that defined his office.

In fact, days before the administration's dramatic denouement, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger had issued an unprecedented set of orders: If the president issued any nuclear launch order, military commanders should check with either him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before executing them. Schlesinger feared that the president, who seemed depressed and was drinking heavily, might order Armageddon. And on that August morning, the military and White House aides had left the nuclear codes with the incoming president.

In a country with no bejeweled crowns or royal thrones, the black Football briefcase is perhaps the only physical manifestation of our nation's sovereign, the outward sign of presidential power. And on that day it had already abandoned Richard Nixon.