You're right, and the historical record supports a stronger version of the claim than most people making the FEMA joke realize. The emergency-rule architecture predates FEMA by three decades — FEMA in 1979 was a reorganization that inherited it, not the origin point.
The lineage runs roughly like this. From the Federal Civil Defense Administration's creation in 1950 onward, the planning assumption was that a nuclear attack would make normal constitutional government temporarily impossible, and the question planners asked was never whether extraordinary executive rule would follow — only how to pre-package it. Truman and Eisenhower's planners drafted standby legislation like the Defense Resources Act, kept ready to be passed (or simply invoked) on attack day, covering conscription of labor and property, price and wage control, and rationing. The Operation Alert exercises of 1955–1961 rehearsed exactly this: in the 1955 iteration, Eisenhower's simulated proclamations were sweeping enough that participants and observers understood the post-attack regime as martial law in substance, whatever it was called, with the exercise assuming rule by presidential decree over essentially the whole economy.
The most striking artifact is the "Eisenhower Ten" — secret standby documents from the late 1950s that would have placed entire sectors of national life under appointed emergency czars, several of them private citizens (corporate executives chosen in advance), with no election, confirmation, or statute behind them. They stayed in force, apparently forgotten, into later administrations. Kennedy's public standby orders of February 1962 — EOs 10995 through 11005, the ones that became famous in militia pamphlets decades later — put pieces of this on the public record: standby federal control of communications, energy, food, transportation. Nixon's EO 11490 in 1969 consolidated the whole apparatus. There were also standing plans to revive wartime censorship (the Wartime Information Security Program and a standby Office of Censorship), and serious internal debates in the 1950s about suspension of habeas corpus after attack. The Church-era Senate Special Committee on National Emergencies found in the mid-1970s that some 470 emergency statutes were available to a president, several emergency declarations had simply never been terminated, and Congress passed the National Emergencies Act in 1976 partly in reaction.
So when FEMA was assembled in 1979 from the civil defense and preparedness agencies, it received this body of doctrine as a going concern. And the personnel link makes your point even more directly: Louis Giuffrida, Reagan's FEMA director and the man behind Rex 84, had written an Army War College paper in 1970 — nine years before FEMA existed — on martial law contingencies that contemplated mass detention of Black militants. The 1980s FEMA controversies weren't a new agency developing dark ideas; they were thirty-year-old nuclear-era emergency doctrine being repointed at civil unrest and migration scenarios, which is precisely what alarmed people when it surfaced during Iran-Contra.
One refinement worth making, because it sharpens rather than softens your point: the planners mostly avoided formal martial law — military rule displacing civilian authority — as a doctrinal matter. What they built instead was pre-authorized civilian executive rule by decree: standby orders, appointed administrators, suspended normal process, all under nominally civilian control. Functionally similar from the citizen's perspective, but it means the honest description isn't "FEMA was designed to impose military dictatorship" — it's "the civil defense tradition FEMA inherited pre-supposed that constitutional government would be suspended in extremis and pre-wrote the instruments of its replacement." The instruments were civilian, which the planners considered the safeguard, and which critics reasonably consider a distinction without much difference if the moment ever came.
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