Customer Reviews

House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Beware of negative reviews, since this book has been singled out by the White House, Pentagon and CIA for trashing, not the least of which for revealing hundreds of highly classified historical details and the reasons why they have been hidden from public view. Having said that, Carroll's no-holds-barred look at the history and behavior of the Pentagon since its inception under FDR is on the fast track for a Pulitzer and is already getting the attention of the Nobel Prize Committee. It has become required reading in many college classes, particularly at the post graduate level. Of course, the reader of this review will ask, why? Carroll gives us a rare view of history. He holds no politician or president free from constructive criticism - - in fact, he puts them under a microscope to diagnose their socially contageous disease. Most historians write from the temprocentric viewpoint, their conclusions limited and colored by the current landscape. However, Carroll gives us the eagle's viewpoint; he flies high above past historical terrain and describes all the features in terms of consequences and their relationships to each other. In other words, he does not give the reader the politically correct vantagepoints, or the current revisionist views of the NeoComs in power in DC, but paints political, historical and social reality with the clarity of High Defintion television. His narrative immediately rings true because it is brilliantly and insightfully factual - - sometimes so brutally true that it pulverizes the often distorted, self-justified assumptions of America's war machine( the Industrial Military Complex) that he addresses. Essentially, his book explains why President Eisenhower took the unprecedented step of appearing on telelvision one week before stepping down from office to warn about a new type of Fascism forming in America, comprised of a union of Pentagon, military, corporate and religious elites - - all in favor of an unending war against the rest of the world for their own imperialistic reasons. The country has never understood the warning or that it was given by a Five-Star General. Carroll's eloquence is occasionally so precise and haunting, so emotionally personal, as to run chills down the spine and bring tears to the eyes. He does not hide his bias; nor does he have to, since the book is meticulously documented, one-fifth of the size is set aside for cited references. Instead he explains his bias by way of a thesis statment and then sets out to substantiate it in such as way that the reader sees no bias. He is most of all fair and balanced in presentation. The good news about this book is that America's greatest military secrets, and their faulty and dangerous motivations, are about to become old news. When this happens, the NeoCons will go the way of all those who abuse power and misuse democracy. Their tombstone will joins others in the graveyard of history with the appropriate epitaph about great power's ability to corrupt pervasively any society that abuses it.

Don't you wish that Amazon could somehow make a reviewer prove they have read the book? The reviewer that gave this ONE star obviously did not. I wish that Kilroy would give examples of the accusations he makes.
This is a great book about the history of the US military machine from the perpective of the Pentagon bureaucracy. It shows how Eisenhower's prediction of a Military-Industrial Complex has come true and how the Pentagon drains our economy of hundred of billions of dollars and feed us nothing but lies and deceptions.

Five hundred pages of text plus scores of footnotes-- so why wade into the challenge. First, it's well-written so the pages fly; second, it's fascinating so the time flies; and third, it'll give you insight, so you'll know more, from James Forrestall to Donald Rumsfeld. Clearly, we've got a bomb-happy war-machine on our hands with a big money sector to back it up. Iraq is only the latest and most aggressive installment. For 60 years, the Pentagon and its apologists have been confusing national security with bigger and better weaponry. The trouble is that a good portion of the public believes it, or at least wants to believe it. We dodged a couple of nuclear bullets back in the 60's, but how long can our luck hold out. Especially when we've withdrawn from so many treaties trying to control the binge. What's worse, the Pentagon and its weapons programs have taken on a life of their own, beyond the rest of us. Of course, this momentum didn't suddenly drop out of thin air. Carroll shows how it's developed over time, with a fascinating cast of characters and a few surprises. The Cold War period is even managed without the usual good-guy bad-guy Hollywood script. However, not everything in the book is roses. I don't know how he managed 500 pages without once mentioning the 700-plus overseas bases and the empire that goes with it. But I guess that's another story. Sure, the political right hates a work like this since it refuses to pander to patriotic platitudes. But the fact is no country, from Afghanistan to Zambia, has a monopoly on truth, goodness, or fellow-feeling. The trouble is military hubris is blinding us, threatening the democracy, and imperilling the planet. If Carroll can make the journey from bomb-happy air cadet to committed Christian pacifist, so can others, even if his path isn't everyone's. If people started this madness, people can end it.

This book is challenging and rewarding to read. James Carrol is a masterful writer, and he weaves his own personal reflections into this account of the setting and furthering of US military policy beginning with WWII strategic bombing of German and Japanese cities by the Army Air Force. When we moved into the atomic and soon thereafter, thermonuclear era, the early attitudes became set in stone, established recurring patterns of behavior, and also led to a viewpoint that led to many missed opportunities to ease tensions and achieve stability. Rather than detail all of these twists and turns, as some have done in earlier reviews, I would simply point out that this book does its best when showing the mentor-student relationships within the Pentagon and State Department that perpetuated the mentality and logic or, in many instances, illogic, of geopolitics and military strategy in the thermonuclear age. Carroll's very long book has some poignant episodes when dealing with his relationship with his father, and the lost opportunities for reconciliation with him after their break over Vietnam. On a larger scale, however, I thought Carroll's discussion of JFK's transition while president was compelling. JFK went from being the Cold War hawk in the 1960 election, campaigning about an illusory "missile gap" created by the Eisenhower/Nixon administration, to the Bay of Pigs and Vienna Conference debacles, to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cuban Missile Crisis was transformational for JFK, because he soon realized that the consequences of military dominance of strategic policy would have led to a thermonuclear holocaust. A few months thereafter, at his American University address, he articulated a vision for a "way out" of the thermonuclear trap of "mutual assured destruction." JFK's assassination, of course, led quickly to the dashing of any such hopes for a reversal of Cold War strategy in the early 1960s, and ensured continued military domination of strategic policy, which continues to this day.

I recommend this book because of the strong writing and well documented historical overview it provides. It is, as other reviewers have noted, somewhat repetitive in parts, but aside from that distraction, it's worth the time and effort.

It is a long time since I had the pleasure to read such a fascinating book as Carroll's "House Of War". Eminently readable, it offers a credible alternative narrative of the origin and evolvement of the Cold War: it is also a tribute to the American people, the democracy and the courage of many distinguished Americans for having sailed us safely through the dreadful decades of imminent apcalypse being tempted consciencely or unconsciencely by powerful men and interests. Humanity owes much to the wisdom of Stimpson, late wisdom of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Kennan, Reagan, Gorbatchev and many others, for having spared us from nuclear extinction.
It is an indispensable book for all who ignore the reasons of us being still alive, as well as for all who wish to continue doing so.

With the laying of the keel of the Gerald R. Ford, our Country will have twelve huge aircraft carriers. Twelve at a time when no other country has even one remotely comparable. Most of us strive to find a certain level of security in life. Most of us can recognize sufficiency in that area. And most of us can at least intuit when an extreme need for absolute security can be seen as psychosis.

Who would have thought it possible to document the concept of security utterly run amuck as emblefied by a building, forgodsake, in prose so graceful, so human that we feel the breath of the monster at the nape of our collective necks? Riveting reading even if you don't care about your own skin.