The Pentagon: A History (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Washington Post journalist Vogel provides an incisive history of the Pentagon both as an architectural construct and as an American symbol, though not as an institution. Vogel traces the politics and design considerations involved in planning a new home for the previously scattered War Department (forerunner of today's Department of Defense) in the early 1940s. Wartime conservation subsequently forced builders to use the least amount of steel possible, and much concrete. The Stripped Classical building—erected in 16 months at a cost of $85 million—was made with five sides chiefly because it lay on remnant acres between five appropriately angled roads. At the time, it was a massive undertaking: five concentric rings of offices, 17.5 miles of corridors and a five-acre central courtyard. Vogel demonstrates how planners conceived the structure as fitting into L'Enfant's original plan for Washington, D.C., and goes on to depict it as a national icon. In this vein, Vogel describes the building as a target for protesters during the Vietnam War (with special attention to October 1967's March on the Pentagon, immortalized in Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night), and, of course, the 9/11 attack. Throughout, Vogel artfully weaves architectural and cultural history, thus creating a brilliant and illuminating study of this singular (and, in many ways, sacred) American space. Photos.
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by James Mann

The Pentagon was built upon a foundation of lies, secrecy and cost overruns. When the gargantuan five-sided structure was being constructed with miraculous speed at the start of World War II, the officials responsible for the new War Department headquarters told a series of untruths about what was in the works.

At the time, Congress and the press were asking too many questions. Harry Truman, the junior senator from Missouri, had skillfully homed in on excesses in military spending. When the plans for a new office building for the U.S. military were brought before the Senate on Aug. 14, 1941, Sen.

Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan was puzzled. "Unless the war is to be permanent, why must we have permanent accommodations for war facilities of such size?" he asked. "Or is the war to be permanent?" And so, as Steve Vogel recounts in The Pentagon, the military officials in charge of constructing the new War Department headquarters dissembled. They claimed that the building would be much smaller than it was and that it would have considerably fewer people working there than it did. They repeatedly lied about money, at first claiming the building would cost less than $35 million, then later raising the figure to $49 million, when in fact they were hiding expenses of over $75 million.

Amazingly, they even told whoppers about how many floors the building would have. War Department officials had originally promised Congress the building would have only three stories -- but the "basement" turned out to be a fourth floor above ground, with a "sub-basement" beneath and a "sub-sub-basement" under that. Then, before the building was completed and after they had fessed up to four floors, War Department officials secretly added a fifth floor on top of the whole thing, burying the plan in congressional documents as merely "fourth floor intermediate."

The result was an edifice so overwhelming that no one could quite get a handle on it. By mid-1942, a joke was already making the rounds (still told in various forms today) about a messenger who got lost in the Pentagon and came out a lieutenant colonel. When Dwight Eisenhower moved to the Pentagon after commanding allied forces in World War II, he went astray on the way back to his office from the general officers' mess. "I walked and walked, encountering neither landmarks nor people who looked familiar," he recalled. Giving up, he asked a stenographer where he could find the office of the army chief of staff. "You just passedional Cemetery. In 1941, the War Department was supposed to move into a new building in Foggy Bottom, where the State Department is now located, until President Franklin Roosevelt decided that with war appdaily, requiring about 5,500 tons of sand and gravel, 937 tons of cement and 115,000 gallons of water every day," writes Vogel at one point. If you like sentences such as that one, you'll love The Pentagon. If not, you'll wish that its sometimes-ponderous 500-page narrative had been edited down to perhaps 350 pages.

Vogel's other problem, not necessarily of his own making, is that the book's leading character, Gen. Brehon B. Somervell, isn't all that interesting. As the Army official in charge of supply and logistics, Somervell supervised the construction of the Pentagon. From his vantage point in the Senate, Truman considered Somervell a martinet who "cared absolutely nothing about money." But Somervell was mostly a bureaucrat's bureaucrat, which doesn't make for great reading.

The most interesting character in The Pentagon is Roosevelt. In the midst of impending war, he took the time to oversee the details of the Pentagon's construction. He made the choice for the site. (When Somervell tried to lobby for a different tract of land in Arlington, Roosevelt told him, "My dear general, I'm still commander-in-chief of the Army.") The president was also closely involved in the building's design -- as he had earlier been for National Airport, Bethesda Naval Hospital and even the Jefferson Memorial. How many presidents, in the modern era, would get involved in the architecture and the construction of federal buildings? (Not too many, one

hopes.)

Indeed, the Pentagon's quick recovery from the Sept. 11 attack is due in part to an accident of Roosevelt's design. He had at first envisioned that after World War II, the War Department would be cut back in size and moved out of the Pentagon building, which would then be used as a repository for government records. So Roosevelt ordered Somervell to build the Pentagon with floors of unusual strength to hold lots of heavy file cabinets. "Sixty years later, Roosevelt's tinkering paid off," Vogel writes. When American Airlines Flight 77 rammed into the building, its core withstood the blow.

The Pentagon endured; the damage was repaired within a year, well before the beginning of the war in Iraq. Roosevelt's dream of turning the Pentagon into just an ordinary file repository remains unfulfilled.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 656 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (June 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400063035
• ISBN-13: 978-1400063031
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #544,072 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The extraordinary life and times of a unique building and the men who built and rebuilt it, June 24, 2007

By	Jerry Saperstein (Evanston, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

Brehon B. Somervell isn't a name you hear much. He was a Brigadier General in the months before America's involvement with World War II. He foresaw the need to consolidate the U. S. Army's command in a single structure rather than the seventeen locations it currently occupied in Washington, D.C.

Over a weekend, he and his surprised aides created the basic plans for what was then the world's largest building, what we know today as the Pentagon.

Somervell not only was responsible for the Pentagon, but ultimately managing the supply system that kept 13 million U.S. troops around the world supplied with bullets, beans and everything else they needed. General Richard Groves went on to manage the Manhattan Project which developed the first nuclear weapons.

The story of the fulfillment of Somervell's vision is absolutely fascinating. Steve Vogel is an exceptionally able writer who brings to life the daily adventures of men and women who more than sixty years ago built and then populated the Pentagon. There isn't a dull page in the book as Vogel describes the race to complete the building, which Somervell had said would take a year. The enormity of task and how ordinary men rose to meet the challenge comes across powerfully in Vogel's prose.

Vogel traces the decades of the building's life, how it was manipulated, expanded and altered to meet the needs of successive generations. (President Roosevelt, we are told, didn't forsee any military need for the building after WWII and had planned on it becoming an archive. As it turned out, that insistence was fortuitous.)

The story includes an interesting retelling of the great march on the Pentagon in 1967. Vogel reminds us that Bill Ayers, a radical, succeeded in getting a bomb planted in the Pentagon which narrowly missed killing several cleaning women. An unrepentant Ayers published a book bragging about his exploits on September 11, 2001.

Vogel tells the story of September 11 and the heroic efforts to rebuild the Pentagon.

Overall, Vogel has thoroughly explored this bit of history and produced a compelling book about one of the largest structures ever created, the men and women who built it, occupied it and those who rebuilt it. A must-read for military, engineering and history buffs.

Jerry

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WW2 Era Comes Alive!!, June 7, 2007

By	General Disarray "pageturner" (Richmond VA) - See all my reviews

Vogel makes the WW2 era come alive in this enteraining and informative look at the history of the conception, design and construction of the largest office building in the world. While the front line guys were defending the free world from the axis powers, the Corps of Engineers and others were working just as hard in DC to get the headquarters building built. Also included is the 911 attack and amazing reconstruction from the devastation.

READ AND ENJOY!

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars History Comes Alive, June 17, 2007

By	J. Ellis "Stagedoor Josh" (New York City) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A brilliant achievement. Perhaps the finest history book I've read since David McCullough's "The Path Between the Seas" and "The Great Bridge." There isn't a dull page uninteresting paragraph in the entire book. What is most fascinating is you need not be interested in the military to find the book thoroughly engrossing.