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House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power Hardcover – May 4, 2006

by James Carroll (Author)

57 customer reviews

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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.

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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 momentsas in the Berlin crisis and the Vietnam Warwhen 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: 6.1 x 1.7 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 57 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,099,656 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8230 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > United States
- #12035 in Books > History > Military > United States
- #14616 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Political Science

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A. J.

Fear and Loathing at the Pentagon.

July 14, 2017

Verified Purchase

House of War provides a thorough and detailed account of American foreign policy since the creation of the Pentagon during WWII. James Carroll’s account is riveting and multi-layered, with an appealing peppering of anecdotes, many from his personal history with the institution, as his father had been the first director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Due to the latter condition, he was able to obtain candid interviews with persons who played roles of central importance to the Department of Defense and presidential administrations, such as, Robert McNamara. The writing is clear and straightforward and the analysis is cogent. He shows that although there were hawk-dove conflicts in the Pentagon and in the Departments of Defense and State throughout multiple administrations, the hawks succeeded in creating and fomenting the paranoid style that has dominated Pentagon culture since WWII and continues today. Carroll succinctly parses the foreign policy objectives and decisions of every administration from FDR to Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld and the post 911 situation. There were times where it looked like the Pentagon beast might be subdued, but the invasion of southern part of the Korean peninsula by communist forces from what is now North Korea in 1950 gave it continuing reason to thrive.
Carroll documents the role and influence that a number of key figures have played in multiple administrations over the course of this historical period. (I will refrain from issuing spoilers, but many readers will wonder why we are all still alive at this point.) His analysis and anecdotes will leave the reader alternatively amused, horrified, and sometimes deeply grieved. There are bright spots in history that provide glimpses of hope. For example, he gives credit to JFK for changing his vector after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile crisis, but this change of strategy was undermined by the expansion of military involvement in Southeast Asia. Carroll also provides an insightful analysis of Gorbachev and Reagan coming close to achieving significant levels of arms reductions, only to be thwarted by Pentagon hawks. The fall of the Soviet Union and the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 provided a similar opportunity to end cold war paranoia, but the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam furnished fresh grounds to justify the continuing hegemony exerted by the Pentagon on American foreign policy.
I think everyone should read this book. I didn’t say that every American should read this book (although indeed they should) -- I said everyone should read this book, since we on planet Earth are all affected by the Pentagon and the polices that it helps to shape and perpetuate. I would love to see James Carroll update this book with some additional analysis devoted to the current state of affairs in the Middle East, as per late Bush II and Obama administration attempts, accomplishments, and failures.

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J. Adams

A startling history of the Pentagon and the neocons

May 4, 2008

Verified Purchase

The Pentagon was supposed to be temporary but the Korean War changed that. It is the largest office building in the world now that that WTC I and II are gone. It has grown into an institution that, more and more, either controls or seeks to control the world.

Historically ruled by the most paranoid of the super hawks, its leaders have been able to silence, fire, or marginalize doves. It always needs a bogeyman to justify the budget. Bogeymen are often created through exaggeration and paranoia. During much of the height of the 50's Cold War scare, the USSR had only four ICBM's but our presidents were continually advised of a yawning missile gap and Soviet leaders hell bent on global destruction. The truth is that our own behavior has been more provocative than the Reds.

We had a golden opportunity to scale back when the Cold War ended but the war budget did not change a bit. Hence, we have transformed into an imperial nation with one tool at our disposal....the sledge hammer.

Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Bush get the credit they so richly deserve for.....you fill in the rest.

This is a great book and would get five stars but Carroll needs to leave more prose on the editing room floor. Aw heck, I just gave it five stars due to the importance and conprehensiveness.

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ct reader

Walking on a razors edge

January 28, 2010

Verified Purchase

This is a beautifully written, thoughtful profile of modern American power through the eyes of the son of Lieutenant General Joseph F. Carroll (to whom the book is dedicated). The author, a former priest and war protester, deftly examines defense policy from WW II to 2006 in a skillful narrative of major events and players.

The tale begins with the Pentagon groundbreaking 11 September 1941 (sixty years to the day before the 2001 terror attacks). America was then a `reluctant warrior' with a peacetime military and protective oceans. Three months later we entered World War II, and everything changed. Fifty million perished, and any remaining human innocence vanished with them in the ruins. Devastating weapons helped deliver victory but left a world that could neither eschew them or survive their reuse.

The struggle for postwar primacy initiated development of weapons worthy of Armageddon, fulfilling Oppenheimer's prediction that rivals would resemble "scorpions in a bottle." Euphemisms like `Mutually Assured Destruction' and `Duck and Cover' blandly masked unprecedented militarization as the planet staggering from crisis to crisis, at times narrowly avoiding nuclear conflict in conventional wars (`peacekeeping') no less calamitous to proxy hosts. All of these events are carefully related by the author.

Eisenhower warned against a "ruthless" and "insidious" foe 17 Jan 1961 (three days before JFK took office) but famously concluded "We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

That's the real question raised in this volume. Are we prisoners of a permanent `complex' that leverages fear, threats, and conflict (real or imagined) to survive and reap profits for weapons that will destroy us if ever `successfully' used? We now spend more on `defense' than all other nations combined (much of it for weapons designed to defeat long-defunct Cold War foes). Many contracts are no-bid and cost-plus (a prime incentive for incompetence and inflation).

Months after Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address, the Bay of Pigs failure, the Kennedy-Khrushchev Vienna stalemate, and the Berlin Wall construction the author met his father at the Pentagon and was charged by his father to lead his family to safety if the unthinkable occurred. In a sense, this book is the author's honest search for the deliverance of safety his father sought.

Highly recommended.

Also of interest (lest readers think the author delusional):
Richard Rhodes `The Making of the Atomic Bomb' & `Dark Sun'

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