House of War (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: basic war plan, nuclear dread, absolute weapon, Air Force, United States, Soviet Union (more...)

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; 1ST 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 (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #470,067 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

125 of 138 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 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.

55 of 60 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 (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

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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.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Carrol's Most Important Work, July 19, 2006

By	William F Harrison (Fayetteville, AR United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

James Carrol has given us three wonderful books: Constintin's Sword, An American Requiem, and his current flawed but exceedingly important work, HOUSE OF WAR. Why flawed? While this is an important book, there are several dozens of redundencies and reiterations of the same, admittedly important passages, again and again. I like Carrol's language and certainly respect his vast knowledge of events that I thought I was very familiar with, but actually had little knowledge concerning the currents and eddies roiling the tides of our common experiences. However, with better editing and an elemination of many of the reiterations, the book could have been shortened by perhaps a hundred pages. And at 512 pages of text and 142 pages of acknowledgements, notes, bibliography and index, it is a veerry long and heavy tome.

Carrol, because of his father's position as a centrally located Air Force general, and eventually first head of the Defense Intellegence Agency, has been afforded remarkable access to opinions of and inteviews with many of the players who were responsible for many of major decisions and events that were so important to the American experience from his birth in 1943 during the week the Pentagon, the House of War, was dedicated, to the current disasterous administration of the man who characterizes himself as The Decider, that very worst president of the United States, George W. Bush.

Carrol, a defrocked Catholic priest, and I am certain a major disappointment to his father and all the father's military comrades who knew him, has amazing insights in the happenings in every adminstration from FDR to GWB. He gives the first Bush presidency and the two terms of Bill Clinton and the first term of "The Decider" pretty short shift, but his knowledge and expressions of the activities and decisions, made and not made, by the presidents from FDR to RR are intelligent, informed and mostly dead on. Like most of the Eastern elite media, he considers the Kennedy brothers, at least John and Bobby, to be nearly godlike, but finds the last two southern country boy president's, Jimmy Carter's and Bill Clinton's, flaws to be unforgivable, especially Bill's daliences with Monica. I am always amazed at how all the alpha male Kennedy brothers have been so easily forgiven for their sexual escapades with the likes of mob girls and emotionally wrecked, but beautiful movie stars and who knows who else, but find it so difficult to forgive Clinton the one episode that we have proof of. However, if one ignores Carrol's obvious biases opposing Clinton and Carter, this is a fine examination of the many dangers to which we have been exposed by the activities of those occupying the White House and the House of War, and the handful of men who have tried to control it's military commander's Dr. Strangelove-tendancies to nuclear armaggedan. A fine and important read.