Carroll is the author of the 1996 National Book Award-winning memoir An American Requiem, and his latest impressive offering may garner similar tributes. His father was a military man who worked in the Pentagon, so as a young boy he was familiar with the labyrinthine corridors of that massive building. Like the White House, the Pentagon and what it refers to go far beyond just the name of the building; these "terms" connote entire institutions, and, as is obvious from this book's title, Carroll's domain here is the U.S. military. Carroll begins his highly detailed, copiously researched (there are 100 pages of notes), and unequivocally mesmerizing account with a strategy-oriented discussion of the concept of unconditional surrender, by which World War II ended. Even if readers are at first puzzled about where such a discussion may lead, they will soon pick up the thread through this amazing report, by which the author charts the history of the Pentagon, from its actual construction as a building to seeing its rise as a massive governmental unit that has a life unto itself and exists without significant control. As witnessed here, its weight on our national life continues to a phenomenal degree. Certain to be one of the most-talked-about nonfiction books of the season. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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. His New York Times Bestseller Constantine's Sword is now the subject of an acclaimed documentary, directed by Oren Jacoby and distributed nationally by First Run Features and Red Envelope Entertainment.
From The Washington Post
Has America become the new Sparta? Although the Soviet Union collapsed more than a decade and a half ago, the United States will spend roughly $561 billion this year on national defense -- in real terms, more than in any year of the Cold War except 1952, the height of the Korean War buildup. In the wake of 9/11, have we become a bomb-first, ask-questions-later superpower -- a threat to world peace, as a majority of Europeans polled in 2003 saw us? For James Carroll, the answer is an anguished yes. His weighty House of War aims to explain the mechanics of this spiritual decline and show how what he sees as a consuming paranoia and vengefulness became lodged in the national soul. For Carroll, who won the National Book Award in 1996 for his memoir An American Requiem, the central dynamic is a familiar one: The wildfire growth of the military-industrial complex, the perpetual refocusing of foreign policy through a military lens and a mindless reliance on nuclear weapons have led to America's moral fall.
Carroll begins his story with the groundbreaking to construct the Pentagon building at a site called "Hell's Bottom," on the Virginia side of the Potomac, on Sept. 11, 1941 -- 60 years to the day before al-Qaeda terrorists slammed American Airlines Flight 77 into the building. Those two late-summer days bracket a downward arc that begins in earnest with Franklin D. Roosevelt's demand for unconditional surrender from America's foes in World War II -- a call that Carroll argues prolonged the war by leaving no way for the Axis powers to sue for peace.
From this starting point, the book's narrative follows a predictable itinerary: the firebombing of enemy cities in World War II, the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, the chronic overestimation of Soviet military capabilities, the Vietnam debacle and the renewal of superpower tensions during Ronald Reagan's presidency. Finally, there is 9/11; for Carroll, America's decision to respond to the assault by invading Afghanistan and Iraq -- instead of launching "an internationally coordinated law enforcement effort" -- was the fulfillment of the visions of revenge and destruction that possessed America during the Cold War and a way of "counterbalancing [the] trauma." Intertwined with this account of epic public events is a very personal story -- of Carroll's disillusionment with the Air Force (in which his father was a general), his coming of age in John F. Kennedy's Washington, and his work as an antiwar Catholic priest during the Vietnam era.
Although House of War aims to chronicle the rise of a vast impersonal force, Carroll tells much of his story through vignettes of key figures. Among the best are those of Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the officer who built the Pentagon and ran the Manhattan Project, and Gen. Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff who was scarily eager to use nuclear weapons. On the more heroic side are Henry L. Stimson, the World War II secretary of war who foresaw a ruinous arms race if atomic weapons were not brought under international control, and, interestingly, Robert S. McNamara, the much-vilified Vietnam-era secretary of defense who, in Carroll's telling, realized at the time that "the arms race had brought less security, not more, to both the United States and the Soviet Union."
Through such figures, Carroll captures the irrationality that ran through the Cold War as apocalyptic weapons were piled ever higher. He writes of a cascade of errors that swelled into a cultural "Niagara." During the superpower standoff, Carroll writes, "the Pentagon remains an engine room, generating a current that flows inexorably toward the edge of the abyss."
But if House of War is good at recounting the most fearful aspects of the Cold War, it fails to puts them in context. Moreover, many readers will question the essentially pacifist perspective that Carroll brings to his work. He focuses obsessively on nuclear weapons and clearly does not believe in nuclear deterrence. Implicitly, House of War takes the position that it is immoral to threaten an act -- a nuclear strike -- that itself would be profoundly evil. That paradox unnerved many serious strategists, especially in the 1980s. But many also came to see the threat as the tolerable cost of a tense but cold conflict. Despite close calls, deterrence worked -- buying Washington time to let Soviet communism implode. For Carroll, the success of this approach seems less important than the shadow of fear that fell over his own country.
This ambitious, often overreaching book becomes particularly scattershot in its second half, where Carroll's animus often gets the better of him. For example, he criticizes President George H.W. Bush for reacting inappropriately to the fall of the Berlin Wall and missing "the opportunity to sacralize such a pure triumph of the democratic spirit and of a human rejection of violence." He is blind to the masterful role Bush played in winding down the East-West conflict and the self-abnegation involved in not taking a victory lap that would have humiliated Moscow.
Ultimately, Carroll never makes good on his subtitle's promise to explain "the disastrous rise" of American power, words that are drawn from Eisenhower's farewell address, in which he warned of the growth of the "military-industrial complex." Whatever one thinks of that complex, has the rise of American power really been disastrous? Undoubtedly, for the "sideshow" countries of the Cold War -- Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador and Honduras, to name just a few -- it was. Carroll gives a death toll of 21 million in the proxy conflicts of the Cold War. Even a far smaller number would have been appalling; while the United States is not responsible for all those casualties, that awful statistic underscores the danger of subordinating everything to the single goal of defeating an enemy -- a lesson worth recalling amid current administration rhetoric about a "long war" against Islamist terror.
Still, after World War II, the globe suffered no conflicts of the kind that claimed at least 80 million lives between 1914 and 1945. Western Europe remained free and grew extraordinarily prosperous, and (tellingly) the states of Central and Eastern Europe emerged from their Soviet captivity strongly pro-American. Meanwhile, democracy took root in much of the Pacific Rim and other parts of the world. The Cold War was not always pretty, but it was certainly not a disaster.
"Are we beasts?" a shaken Winston Churchill asked after reviewing the devastation that the Allies visited upon German cities. It is a question that the republic should ask itself regularly. The last few years suggest that something has gone awry in the way America exercises its power, though it is unclear how much of this is a reaction to the trauma of 9/11 and how much of it is more deeply rooted, how much we are driven by the Pentagon's "Niagara" and how much by other elements in our culture. For a persuasive analysis of what has happened, we will have to await a better effort than House of War.
Reviewed by Daniel Benjamin
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE
ONE WEEK IN 1943
1. Hell’s Bottom
A year after the Al Qaeda attack, at a rededication ceremony on September 11, 2002, much was made of the post-9/11 repairs having been completed in a mere twelve months. No one seemed to know that the entire Building had been constructed from start to finish in less than sixteen months. It was made of cement for which 700,000 tons of sand were dredged from the Potomac riverbed next to the site. The river’s edge is key to the Building’s impression, evoking a forbidden temple of the timeless past, as if looming over the ancient Nile.1 The picturesque lagoon that sets off the River Entrance, like a plaza waiting to receive the barge of Cleopatra, is a vestige of that dredging.2 Relatively little steel was used in the construction — those ramps instead of elevators — because it was needed just then for bullets, shells, and tanks. Planners took for granted that once the war emergency had passed, the hulking edifice would be handed over for civilian use: a depot for government records or — and this is what my mother told me, which is why I always believed it, even after learning it was a myth — a facility for the care of wounded and disabled veterans, the ramps built for wheelchairs and gurneys. The largest hospital in the world. My mother’s devotion to this idea was sacralized when my brother Joe was stricken with polio, making her a haunter of hospitals, a connoisseur of ramps. Joe’s polio, in turn, transformed into worship her devotion to the similarly stricken, but nobly unbowed, President Roosevelt. He was photographed visiting the Building just before its completion in January 1943, but there is no record of his using a wheelchair there.
In fact, Roosevelt was deeply conflicted about the Pentagon. As assistant secretary of the Navy during WorldWar I, he had ordered the construction of barracks-like “tempos” all over Washington, and these eyesores were still there twenty years later, despoiling especially the Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The structures were a source of self-rebuke to Roosevelt. The War Department alone occupied seventeen separate facilities around Washington. To consolidate the offices in one handsome place, FDR had personally overseen the construction of a new headquarters building at 21st Street in Foggy Bottom, but no sooner was it completed than World War II broke out. By mid- 1941, the Army had mushroomed to a million and a half men; the new headquarters was instantly inadequate, and senior Army officials told the president they would never use it.3 Though its entrance was decorated by a huge, undiplomatic martial mural — helmeted soldiers in combat — the building would become the headquarters of the State Department, which it remains to this day.
The size of the space was not the only issue. The freshly empowered Army wanted its new building to be set apart from the so-called Federa West Executive Area, apart from entanglements with, and the limits of, the seat of government. In a time of peril, the Army was not about to be treated as just another bureaucratic function, alongside Interior and Commerce and Indian Affairs. The Army would transcend. Senior military officials immediately began scouting sites outside the city — this despite the explicit terms of congressional appropriations for construction within Washington.4 A site in Virginia appealed to the Army because, for one thing, District of Columbia architectural supervision would not hinder the mammoth scale envisioned by departmental planners. Yet even across the river the initial site selection proved controversial. The D.C. Fine Arts Commission, chaired by Roosevelt’s cousin Frederick A. Delano, reached across the Potomac to denounce the “flagrant disregard”5 of context in the Army’s wish to build at the western end of Memorial Bridge. The site was then occupied by Arlington Farms, an agricultural research facility — all that was left of Robert E. Lee’s original plantation, the rest of which had long before been seized by the federal government to serve as the national cemetery. Recovering from the punitive impulse of that requisition, Washington had, in the 1920s, established a symbol of reconciliation between North and South by aligning an axis along Memorial Bridge between Lee’s becolumned mansion atop the hill at Arlington and the Lincoln Memorial, which was completed in 1922. Joined to Lincoln in this way, Lee was thus linked along the Mall to George Washington and the Capitol. The proposed new War Department building, just below the Lee mansion and directly on that axis, would destroy the geographic symbol of national reconciliation.
When that was pointed out too President Roosevelt, he ordered the War Department building moved about a mile downriver. At the same time, considering the architects’ plansssss for the hulking structure, FDR ordered the size of the building reduced by half. Among other considerations, the president expressed concern for the psychological effect on those who would be employed amid such dominating impersonality.6 He also affirmed that, after “the present emergency,” the War Department headquarters would be returned to Washington where it belonged; no permanent headquarters building would be necessary in Virginia. Roosevelt found himself declaring that the Army could make do, as the Navy would, with yet more tempos. (The Navy Annex was constructed to be temporary, but to this day it sits on the Arlington ridge, above the Pentagon.)When the general in charge of the project objected to these terms, the president said, “My dear General, I’m still Commander-in-Chief of the Army.”7 The general complied, but only partially. The new downriver site was accepted — an unsightly shack-ridden wasteland called Hell’s Bottom. It was a former airfield and railroad yard littered with abandoned tin hangars and rusted-out boxcars. But without Roosevelt’s knowledge, the general declined to reduce the size of the Building, and with the help of Virginia congressmen, he protected the appropriations needed to make the construction permanent. By then the Building’s architects, led by G. Edwin Bergstrom, who had also designed the Hollywood Bowl, had completed drawings for the upriver site at Arlington Farms. The original design for that now abandoned location called for a simple rectangular footprint, but access roads required one corner of the rectangle to be cut off, leaving an asymmetrical five-sided building. What Bergstrom did was to even up the five sides, producing — voilr — the Pentagon. When the site was moved downriver, the polygonal shape was no longer required by the limits of the roadways, but such was the hurried pace of the project that the architects did not change the design. Eventually Bergstrom and others would mythologize the pentagonal form of the War Department headquarters as an echo of Napoleonic-era fortress architecture.8 The true, entirely mundane origin of the design would be forgotten.
Over the next year, more than a hundred architects and nearly as many engineers worked around the clock in those abandoned airplane hangars, turning out drawings for the more than fifteen thousand laborers, who often didn’t wait for specs. Pearl Harbor was attacked almost three months after groundbreaking, and from then on the already quickened pace of construction was redoubled. “How big should I make that beam across the third floor?” one architect asked another, who replied, “I don’t know. They installed it yesterday.”9 * * * Supervising all of this work was a Corps of Engineers colonel named Leslie R. Groves, who was forty-five years old when appointed to head up Pentagon construction. He was a burly, corpulent man whose belly protruded like lips over his brass-buckled belt.10 A man of the job, Groves was an important military manager. In charge of the Army’s crash building program across the country (in 1940 the Corps’s construction budget skyrocketed from $20 million to $10 billion), he had already purchased half the lumber in the United States.11 Born into an Army family four years after the Battle of Wounded Knee, in 1890, which marked the end of the Indian wars, Groves had spent part of his childhood at Fort Apache, Arizona, living in the house of a man famous for killing Indians.12 His lifelong hero was General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose “march to the sea” across Georgia legitimized the spirit of total war, which after the CivilWar was unleashed on Native Americans.
Groves began as a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but when his older brother died in 1914 — of a disease contracted at the same Arlington Farms that would much later be the first site proposed for the Pentagon — Groves transferred to West Point. From then on he wore a mustache, which did nothing to soften his stern, unfriendly demeanor. Work in the Corps of Engineers was essentially a matter of management, and Groves proved himself again and again. By the time he was put in charge of Pentagon construction, his most notable prior service had been in Nicaragua, developing plans for a second (never undertaken) canal across the Central American isthmus.13 As the Pentagon neared completion, Groves was promoted to brigadier general, although for a reason having to do with his next project, not this one. Among his last decisions in Arlington was one that provided the new Building with separate eating and lavatory accommodations for “colored people” and whites. The dining areas for blacks would be in the basement, and on the other floors, at each corridor junction, double toilet facilities would be built, separated by race. When President Roosevelt visited the Building shortly before its dedication, he asked why there were so many lavatories (more than two hundred), and he was told that the Army was abiding by Virginia’s racial laws. Roosevelt had issued an order prohibiting such discrimination throughout the U.S. military only six months earlier, and he told Groves to get rid of the Whites Only signs at once. Groves obeyed. Because he was overridden by the president, the Pentagon would for a long time be the only place in Virginia where segregation was not allowed.14 Within days of Roosevelt’s visit to the new War Department headquarters, at an understated ceremony presided over by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, the Pentagon was dedicated. Wartime exigencies eclipsed such a formality in the memoirs and memories of witnesses. Honor guards would have mounted battle flags in mahogany stands, and portraits of former secretaries of war would have been unveiled. One imagines the Army band playing martial music. Perhaps a ribbon was cut. It was January 15, 1943.15
Copyright © 2006 by James Carroll. Reprinted with permission by Houghton Mifflin Company.
