House of War [Hardcover]

James Carroll (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 4, 2006

From the National Book Award–winning author of An American Requiem and Constantine's Sword comes a sweeping yet intimate look at the Pentagon and its vast — often hidden — impact on America.

This landmark, myth-shattering work chronicles the most powerful institution in America, the people who created it, and the pathologies it has spawned. James Carroll proves a controversial thesis: the Pentagon has, since its founding, operated beyond the control of any force in government or society. It is the biggest, loosest cannon in American history, and no institution has changed this country more. To argue his case, he marshals a trove of often chilling evidence. He recounts how "the Building" and its denizens achieved what Eisenhower called "a disastrous rise of misplaced power" — from the unprecedented aerial bombing of Germany and Japan during World War II to the "shock and awe" of Iraq. He charts the colossal U.S. nuclear buildup, which far outpaced that of the USSR, and has outlived it. He reveals how consistently the Building has found new enemies just as old threats — and funding — evaporate. He demonstrates how Pentagon policy brought about U.S. indifference to an epidemic of genocide during the 1990s. And he shows how the forces that attacked the Pentagon on 9/11 were set in motion exactly sixty years earlier, on September 11, 1941, when ground was broken for the house of war.

Carroll draws on rich personal experience (his father was a top Pentagon official for more than twenty years) as well as exhaustive research and dozens of extensive interviews with Washington insiders. The result is a grand yet intimate work of history, unashamedly polemical and personal but unerringly factual. With a breadth and focus that no other book could muster, it explains what America has become over the past sixty years.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. If there were nothing more to Carroll's book than its chronicling of the U.S. military's amassing of power and influence from WWII to the present, it would still be valuable history. But the National Book Award winner (An American Requiem) makes the story something else altogether. "The lifetime of the Pentagon is my lifetime," he asserts, noting that the building had its dedication ceremony the week he was born; he also grew up playing in its maze-like corridors while his father worked as a high-ranking air force general. The nuclear dread that dominated the Cold War era thus plays out as personal and family drama, turning the book into "[my] long-delayed conversation with [my] father." It's strongest in its first half, where the development of atomic power and the turmoil of the Vietnam era hold the greatest personal significance for Carroll; later sections on the Reagan and Clinton eras are informative but less intimate. Carroll's approach can be poetic—he makes much, for example, of the coincidence that the Pentagon groundbreaking took place on September 11, 1941—but the emotional weight he brings to a Chomsky-like critique of American militarism results in an aggressively compelling history. Photos. (May 16)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

Carroll was born the same week in January, 1943, that the Pentagon was dedicated, the Manhattan Project got under way, and Roosevelt declared that the goal of the war was the enemy's "unconditional surrender." In this "biography" of the Pentagon, he extends these moments into a fuguelike history of American military power from Hiroshima to Iraq. The dominant theme is personal: growing up, Carroll, whose father, a general, worked in the Pentagon, saw the building both as his "twin" and as "a kind of dark woods." On the practical side, he argues that "in the nuclear age, civilian oversight of American military policy had become largely mythical," that the Pentagon had "Congress in its thrall and presidents at its mercy." And yet his most fascinating stories involve moments—as in the Berlin crisis and the Vietnam War—when civilians successfully opposed the Pentagon's monolithic power.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 672 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (May 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618187804
• ISBN-13: 978-0618187805
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #352,371 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

James Carroll was raised in Washington, D.C., and ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1969. He served as a chaplain at Boston University from 1969 to 1974, then left the priesthood to become a writer. A distinguishedscholar-in-residence at Suffolk University, he is a columnist for the Boston Globe and a regular contributor to the Daily Beast.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

130 of 143 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Timely, Gripping and Tremendous Important, April 26, 2006

By 

Emmett Miller (Burton, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: House of War (Hardcover)

This is a huge book in many ways. The history of the Pentagon is dense and often mystifying, but Carroll manages to show how it is a very human institution with his now patent insight and precision. He manages this by telling its history as a scholar, a journalist of the highest order, and sometimes as a son. Carroll's father was an Air Force general during the Cold War, whose office was located in the Pentagon where the jet struck on 9/11. This book could not have been published at a better time. There is no better way to understand what is at work behind today's headlines than by reading this book. It is at times shocking and frightening, but always illuminating and extremely intriguing. I wouldn't say it reads like a spy novel, even if it is the stuff spy novels are made of, but Carroll's style flows and carries you along effortlessly. There are few politcal heroes here, Democratic or Republican. Carroll is careful to tell this story with unwavering truthfulness, but it would be a mistake to think of this as an attack on the Pentagon or the U.S. military. Carroll has an obvious affection for the place and for the military as an institution, perhaps in spite of himself. Carroll might be the only person in America who could tell this story of immense import with such integrity and thoroughness at this time when we seem so desperately need it.

64 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First Class Personal Reflections, Solid and Thoughtful, June 1, 2006

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: House of War (Hardcover)

The author is the son of General Carroll, the first Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a former FBI special agent who entered the military with the rank of brigadier general with the mandate to create the Office of Special Investigations for the U.S. Air Force. The author is also a former Catholic priest, sympathetic to the Berrigans and those of the Catholic left who opposed the war in Viet-Nam. The book is in consequence not only an extraordinary reference work, but also a labor of love and a labor of conscience. I read it and appreciated it in that vein.

I was surprised to not see in the otherwise excellent bibliography any reference to Lewis Mumford's Pentagon Of Power: The Myth Of The Machine, Vol. II and this confirms my impression that each generation reinvents the wheel, and discovers persistent truths for itself. The author does quote Dwight Eisenhower to good effect--apart from the normal quote warning us of the military-industrial complex, General and President Eisenhower is quoted on page 206 "National Security over the long term requires fiscal restraint," and on page 387, "People want peace so much, that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it." I point to General Smedley Butler's book, War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It and to Jonathan Schell's book, which the author acknowledges, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People as excellent complements to this book.

The core concept throughout the book, very ably discussed, is that smart people can be trapped in stupid paranoid bureaucracies. The author takes great care to single out the chain of paranoia from Forrestal to Nitze to Schlesinger to Rumsfeld, Carlucci, and Cheney, with Wolfowift and Perle playing key roles as the apostles of the Cold War and the expansion of Pentagon power and money.

There is substantive morality in this book, as the author reviews the implications of the U.S. unilaterally over-ruling Churchill and Stalin and demanding unconditional surrender of Germany in WWII. The author reviews the manner in which the U.S. took what he calls "terror bombing" and fire bombing of Germany to new immoral heights, causing Churchill himself to ask if we had gone too far. Napalm was developed for that war, and in one compelling vignette the author discusses how in the final days of the war the U.S. sent over 1,000 aircraft to drop napalm on a hapless village because that is how much napalm they had to use up.

The Tokyo fires, killing 900,000 and leaving 20 million homeless are discussed, as is the use of the atomic bomb as a "signal" to Russia. The author is poignant in quoting McNamara as accepting responsibility for two great war crimes--the fire bombings in WWII, and the failed bombings on North Viet-Nam. See my review of the superb DVD documentary with McNamara, The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara where I itemize the 11 lessons this great man shares with us.

The other two themes that drive this book, apart from self-interested paranoia and the suppression of individual conscience to the "tide" of bureaucratic politics, are the manner in which the Pentagon in general, and the services in particular, have deliberately ignored good intelligence and manipulated the threat in order to increase their budgets, at the same time that the domestic political process has found that corrupting intelligence in order to feed the military-industrial complex leads to more bribes to Congress to pay for more television ads which keep the same individuals in power over the years--as Ronald Reagan pointed out, there is less turnover in the Congress than in the Politburo, and this author makes it clear that the American public cannot trust the Pentagon, the White House, or the Congress to be honest about the threat or prudent with the taxpayer dollar. Right now, today, the National Ground Intelligence Center, the Army's intelligence center, is under investigation for having an officer specifically assigned to manipulate, modify, and exaggerate the "official" database on ground force threats so as to justify bigger more expensive systems that are not actually needed nor affordable. The Air Force and the Navy are guilty of similar lies. Our military leaders are normal honorable human beings, but "the system" sweeps them along in ways that would shock any citizen.

Another major theme in this book, and it is especially timely as we confront Iran, is that the US has consistently failed to understand normal nationalism, and instead chosen to interpret the Soviet Union, Iran, China, Islam, and the African nations as part of a grand conspiracy. Institutionalized paranoia, and bureaucratic politics (see my review of Morton Halperin's Bureaucratic Politics And Foreign Policy in which one "rule" is "lie to the President if you can get away with it") lead to pathological budget-driven decisions that REDUCE national security as well as the integrity of both the nation's policy process and the nation's budget, over time.

The author quotes General Lemay, who demanded the U-2 program for himself, as saying that he would launch a pre-emptive war without Presidential authority, if he felt America was threatened. As the Pentagon consolidates its total control over all U.S. national intelligence agencies, we can but lament the very high probability that we will see Iraq times ten as the Pentagon "manufactures" or "perceives" threats that would not be validated by a truly independent intelligence authority.

The author is very careful, as am I, to avoid confusing the "malevolent impersonality of forces they cannot control" (page 302) with the essential goodness and honor of the individuals that serve in the Pentagon and the services. He quotes McNamara on page 303 as saying "Wars generate their own momentum and follow the law of unanticipated consequences."

The author ends on a positive note. He praises Jonathan Schell, and MIT PhD Student Ms. Randall Forsberg, the latter responsible for The Freeze campaign that ultimately influenced President Reagan and the Congress.

This is a very fine book. Good notes, index, bibliography. This book has soul.

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Polemic but with Massive Bibliography and Footnotes, May 23, 2006

By 

Richard L. Tradewell "Veteran for Peace" (Costa Mesa, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: House of War (Hardcover)

James Carroll has written a polemic to document the rise of the permanent warfare state in America over more than half a century. It is a scholarly work written at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass. Pages 517 to 608 are footnotes of his source material. Pages 609 to 623 are a Bibliography followed by an extensive Index.

Readers may disagree with Carroll's conclusion, namely that the Department of Defense is now dominant over both the legislative and executive branches of government and leading us inevitably to unending war. But he must not be dismissed as a liberal crank.

There are conservatives in America who believe that the Founders established limited government, a tradition of non-involvement in foreign wars, and civilian control over the military. Carroll's arguments are dismissed at our peril.