Read The Pentagon: A History Online
Authors: Steve Vogel
The Pentagon: A History (47 page)
No such admission was made publicly, of course. The War Department produced several confidential reports in the later years of the war justifying the Pentagon—including one ordered by Somervell when Senator Truman had been sniffing around the project. Together the reports made a strong case for the building’s effectiveness, and they argued the cost overruns were unavoidable due to changes to the site and size of the building. Ironically, Somervell and Groves were so defensive about the Pentagon that these reports were never released to the public, out of fear that they would merely stir up more controversy.
“Imagine what the War Department’s situation would have been—today in the midst of grueling war—if the Pentagon had not been built,” read a draft of one of the reports presented by Renshaw to Somervell in January 1944. “It is the nerve center of the military effort…. The Army does not have to imagine the handicaps resulting from being scattered in many different buildings in different locations. It remembers the days before the Pentagon was built. The speed and efficiency it has helped to produce has saved and will save the lives of many of our soldiers.”
It was a claim impossible to prove, yet entirely justifiable. The top echelons of the War Department’s command, control, and communications were concentrated at the Pentagon in a manner that previously had been impossible. It is hard to imagine that the days, hours, and even minutes shaved off decisions—from putting new weapons into the hands of soldiers to the formulation of broad strategy—did not make a difference and did not save American lives.
Still, the Pentagon had failed miserably in one goal: putting the Army headquarters under one roof. While the high command and the administrative and staff activities requiring the most interaction and centralization were housed in the Pentagon, the War Department had grown even beyond the scope of Somervell’s ample imagination. The Pentagon was able to provide only about half the seven million square feet of office space the War Department needed in Washington in 1945. At war’s end, the Army was scattered in more than thirty buildings around town.
The eighth wonder of the world
Little more than two weeks after Japan’s surrender, a new suggestion for what to do with the Pentagon was unveiled by the building’s commandant, Colonel Henry W. Isbell. On August 31, 1945,
War Times,
the Pentagon’s weekly newspaper, published the commandant’s proposal to make the building “the eighth wonder of the world.”
An enormous five-sided, twenty-four-story office tower would be built in the Pentagon courtyard. It would add as much as two million square feet of space, room for another ten to twelve thousand workers. The tower would “solve the government’s space problems for the next 50 years,” boasted Isbell, who included a familiar pitch: With the tower, the Pentagon could house the War Department “under one roof.”
Washington newspapers picked up the story, publishing preliminary sketches prepared by a War Department architect that showed the massive tower rising improbably to the sky from the Pentagon’s courtyard. A dome would sit atop the building, holding an eternal light that would burn as a memorial to Americans killed in the war. “What Washington’s skyline needs is something that sticks up,” Isbell told reporters. “Why, the Washington Monument is nothing but a needle and a towering skyline is practically an American symbol.”
The town was aghast. For one thing, the proposal carried the implicit suggestion that the War Department would remain so large after the war that the Pentagon needed to be expanded rather than shut down. Then there was the tower itself. “The Pentagon as it stands is pretty bad and a tower wouldn’t make it any better,” Louis Justement, a prominent Washington architect, told the
Star.
Frederic Delano had retired three years earlier, but his old board, the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, went on record as being horrified by the idea. After a few weeks of public ridicule, the tower idea faded away. The proposals to convert the Pentagon into a hospital or university fared no better.
It was George Marshall who had the best sense of what direction the Pentagon might take after the war. Marshall had never given up his belief that the Army and Navy should be together under one roof. In May 1944, two weeks before D-Day, he and Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, who shared Marshall’s conviction of the need to bring the services together, decided to give it another go.
“Following up on our conversation of Tuesday last—and apropos of our endeavors—which came to naught—to get together in the Pentagon Building in the autumn of 1942, I wish to confirm that I am agreeable to make another try at it,” King wrote Marshall on May 26, 1944. “I still think—as I did then—that it is worth while to consider whether one service cannot, in some lines, do everything that the other service requires.”
Marshall’s staff, still bitter about the 1942 episode, was not as magnanimous as their chief. Some thought they were being set up. “I believe the Navy is bluffing and has no intention of moving,” Major General Otto L. Nelson told Marshall’s deputy, Lieutenant General Joseph McNarney. Even Stimson, so enthusiastic a proponent at the time, bowed out, declining comment when Marshall showed him King’s letter. The 1944 effort died because of staff inertia.
Now, with the war over, the time seemed ripe to try yet again. In November 1945, during his last days at the Pentagon, Marshall once more pushed the idea. “I think it would be a tragic mistake if we do not make every positive effort to put the Army [and] Navy under one roof,” he wrote. Patterson, now secretary of war, picked up the effort and took it a step further, inviting both the Navy and the State Department to move into the Pentagon.
Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who had taken office after Frank Knox died in April 1944, was cool to the idea, telling Patterson it made little sense for the Navy to move people into the Pentagon at a time both services were cutting jobs. The State Department likewise declined the offer. For now, the Pentagon remained the exclusive province of the Army.
If we get a decent peace
Franklin D. Roosevelt had also left behind his wishes for the Pentagon. One month before he traveled to Yalta—where, ill and exhausted, he met with Churchill and Stalin for a final conference on the fate of Europe—and three months before his death at Warm Springs, the president reiterated his vision for the building. “It has been my thought that after the war is ended all the personnel records of the Armed Forces should be placed in the Pentagon Building,” Roosevelt instructed Harold Smith, his budget director, in a memorandum written on January 8, 1945.
Roosevelt had never given up his pet scheme to convert the Pentagon into an archives after the war. The War Department, as he had insisted in the past, would then move into the New War Department Building in Foggy Bottom, which would be expanded. The Navy Department would move into a similar building to be constructed next door. “The plans are ready to go ahead with,” the president told Smith.
“The War Department will doubtless object to giving up the Pentagon Building, but it is much too large for them,” Roosevelt added, “if we get a decent peace.”
An officer shows Brazilian visitors a model of the Pentagon in the concourse during a post-war tour of the building in 1946.
I want to take the oath
At 9:45
A.M.
on the morning of September 17, 1947, James V. Forrestal decided he could wait no longer. “Get the Chief Justice down here at noon,” the secretary of Navy directed his staff. “I want to take the oath.” Aides rushed to round up senior military commanders, senators, and the press. An assistant scrambled to find a Bible. Forrestal, a lapsed Catholic, did not have one in his office at the Navy Building on Constitution Avenue.
President Harry Truman had hoped to officiate at the historic occasion, and an elaborate White House ceremony marking the swearing-in of the nation’s first secretary of defense was set for the following week, upon the president’s return from an inter-American conference in Brazil. But as the battleship USS
Missouri
steamed back from Rio de Janerio on September 15, carrying the president, Truman received a cable from his trusted aide, Clark Clifford. Sent at the behest of Forrestal, it warned of a burgeoning international crisis at a time of deep tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. The communist government of Yugoslavia, locked in a territorial dispute with Italy, was threatening to seize the Adriatic city of Trieste, which was occupied by a small force of American and British troops. Forrestal was concerned that his ambiguous status—confirmed by the Senate but not sworn in—“might signal indecision to Moscow,” Clifford reported.
Truman, alarmed by Clifford’s message, scrapped plans for the full-dress ceremony. “The President responded during the night with instructions that I should be sworn in immediately and take action to see that all available reinforcements were provided” for the allied force in Trieste, Forrestal recorded in his diary on September 16.
Forrestal and Clifford went ahead with the plan on September 17. Minutes before noon, Chief Justice Fred Vinson arrived in Forrestal’s office. The military service chiefs—General Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral Chester Nimitz, General Alexander Vandergrift, and General Carl Spaatz, formidable war heroes all—looked on as Forrestal, grim-faced and wearing a gray business suit with a polka-dot tie, prepared to take the oath. A broken nose from a Princeton boxing match gave the wiry Irishman the perpetual look of a tough middleweight—“rather pugnacious,” Eisenhower thought. It was not just the nose, though. “He has the bearing given to goodhearted gangsters in the movies,” one observer wrote. “There is the suggestion of the possibility of violence and the surface of perfectly constrained restraint.”
Amid “an atmosphere of urgency, drama, and tension,” as Clifford later wrote, Forrestal raised his right arm and placed his left hand on the Bible held by Vinson. With that act, the provisions of the landmark 1947 National Security Act would go into effect at midnight. It was the most sweeping military reorganization in American history, creating the National Military Establishment, which would be renamed the Department of Defense two years later. The Air Force was split off from the Army as a separate service. The War Department was renamed the Department of the Army. The act formally established the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it created the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council.
Forrestal crossed the Potomac River the next day to inspect his new headquarters—the Pentagon. Though it seemed an obvious choice, there had been uncertainty about where the secretary of defense would set up. A Forrestal aide recommended that the headquarters be established close to the White House and that the Pentagon be left to the Army. After his nomination in July, Forrestal told reporters that no decision had been made about the location of his headquarters, and no announcement that the Pentagon had been chosen was made until August 28. But Truman told Forrestal in July he was to move into the Pentagon. Angered by the Navy’s continued resistance to unification, Truman did not want the first secretary of defense to be seen as a Navy partisan; the move into the Army building would be symbolic of unification. Even so, Forrestal’s advisers treated the decision as tentative for a week before concluding that the president would not change his mind.
A Navy band gave Forrestal a fond farewell when he left the Navy Building, striking up “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” as he drove off. No band was on hand to greet Forrestal at the Pentagon when the secretary of defense officially moved in on the morning of September 22, 1947. The Army viewed Forrestal suspiciously. During his seven years with the Navy, Forrestal had battled the Army on many issues, most prominently unification. Yet Forrestal—a deferential man, his pugnacious looks aside—was taking pains to be accommodating and to keep his arrival low-key.
Forrestal’s advisers wanted to change the Pentagon’s name to the “National Defense Building,” and they consulted with the Public Buildings Administration on officially making the switch. On the morning of September 22, Marian Bailey and the other telephone operators dropped their traditional “This is the War Department” greeting, and callers instead heard, “This is National Defense.” Road signs went up directing drivers to the “National Defense Building.” But when reporters asked if this was to be the building’s new name, Forrestal balked. The Pentagon would remain the Pentagon.
Most noteworthy of all, Forrestal did not presume to evict the secretary of the Army, Kenneth Royall, from the suite above the River entrance formerly belonging to the secretary of war. Instead, he opted to take the offices Somervell and Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson had occupied on the Mall side during the war. He left the grander suites once home to Stimson and Marshall—with the private elevator, dining room, and dressing room—to his ostensible Army subordinates.
It was a gracious gesture. Yet there was no mistaking that a new era had begun. After five years as the domain of the War Department and the Army, the Pentagon was now home to the secretary of defense and the new American military establishment.
The biggest cemetery for dead cats in the world
There had been no decent peace. Just two years after his death, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vision of converting the Pentagon into an archives seemed hopelessly quaint in the burgeoning Cold War atmosphere. The New War Department Building on Virginia Avenue in Foggy Bottom, long envisioned by FDR as the Army’s future home, was turned over to the State Department in 1947.
Accidental and ad hoc though its construction was, the Pentagon had come to represent the new global role the United States had assumed. The Pentagon’s very size hinted that the nation would no longer be bound by the Founding Fathers’ warnings against a large standing army. Even the iconic pentagonal shape—the five concentric rings—seemed a deliberate statement meant to convey unity and strength, rather than a design born of chance.
The Pentagon’s postwar role as the command center for the Department of Defense and the military services, which it keeps to this day, was born amid an atmosphere of Cold War tensions and new security commitments. The tenuous wartime alliance with the Soviet Union quickly disintegrated after the defeat of Germany and Japan, replaced by a tense rivalry that had raised fears of a third world war. The flare-up over Trieste in September 1947 settled back to a simmer, but tensions remained across Eastern Europe. Ignoring agreements made at Yalta promising self-determination, Stalin had installed pro-Soviet regimes in Warsaw, Budapest, and Bucharest. Looming over the continent was the threatening presence of the Red Army, larger than any in the West. In May 1947, at the request of Truman, Congress approved military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey, filling a breach left by Britain’s near-bankruptcy. The president coupled this aid with a declaration, soon known as the Truman Doctrine, to assist free people against totalitarian aggression.
It was a sweeping commitment, made all the more remarkable by the sorry state of the American armed forces. Enormous cuts since the end of the war had left the services a shell of the fighting force that had rolled through western Europe and island-hopped across the Pacific. When Forrestal took office, fewer than 1.6 million of the more than 12 million American troops in the service at the end of World War II were still under arms. Only ten of the Army’s ninety-one combat-ready divisions on V-J Day remained, just two of them ready to fight. Truman’s cabled instructions for Forrestal to reinforce Trieste had proven moot, but the order “left behind it an obvious and embarrassing question,” noted Walter Millis, editor of Forrestal’s diaries. “What reinforcements, in fact, did the United States possess against menaces which were now apparent in nearly every quarter of the globe?”
The atmosphere lent urgency to a renewed drive to reorganize the armed services for better efficiency and command. Marshall and Stimson’s wartime push for unification—including their fruitless effort to bring the Navy into the Pentagon in 1942—had finally gained traction as the fighting came to an end. It would be unconscionable to fight another such war with the same divided military organization, they believed; the nation might not survive. Based on his experiences in Europe, Eisenhower felt the same way. They found a ready ally in Truman, who had been appalled at the waste and duplication he found while leading his Senate investigative committee. “I have the feeling that if the Army and the Navy had fought our enemies as hard as they fought each other, the war would have ended much earlier,” Truman told Clifford. In a message to Congress on December 20, 1945, Truman had proposed the most fundamental reorganization of the military in American history, building on the proposals of Marshall and Stimson and calling for a single department of national defense unified under a civilian secretary.
Again, it was the Navy that refused to go along, viewing unification as a threat to its independence. The Army—and the towering figure of Eisenhower—would dominate a single military department, and the Navy would find itself relegated to secondary tasks, Navy partisans feared. The Marine Corps was even more strident in its opposition, seeing its entire existence in question—a not-unfounded fear. Truman regarded the Marines as a naval police force and, were it not for the political backing the Marines enjoyed, would have been happy to see the Corps disbanded. (“They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s,” Truman complained.)
The most formidable opponent to unification was James Forrestal, an irony that would not be lost on anyone when he was named secretary of defense. The son of an immigrant from County Cork in Ireland, Forrestal possessed enormous vigor and drive within his 150-pound frame. Dropping out of Princeton six weeks before graduation, he took a job selling cigarettes before drifting into the investment business. He made his fortune and name on Wall Street, eventually coming to the attention of Roosevelt, who brought him to Washington in 1940.
After seven years with the Navy, Forrestal had adopted Navy mystique and tradition as his own and felt a keen sense of duty to protect it against Truman’s proposal. “We are fighting for the very life of the Navy,” he told Clifford. Forrestal pushed an alternative plan that called for broader coordination of foreign and military policy but preserved the independence of the Navy and Marine Corps. Forrestal’s campaign against the president’s unification plan was bold—some said it bordered on insubordination—and he half-expected the White House to fire him. Meeting with Truman on June 19, 1946, a tight-lipped Forrestal accused the Army of “steamroller tactics” and threatened to resign rather than accept unification.
Truman may have been tempted to take him up on the offer, but he recognized that Forrestal’s resignation would turn him into a naval martyr and doom any hope of unification. Truman ordered Forrestal and Patterson, Stimson’s successor as secretary of war, to negotiate a compromise. They did, though Patterson did most of the compromising, preferring that to seeing the whole effort fall apart. The resulting agreement—creating a weak confederacy of the military departments with little power given to the secretary of defense—was much along the lines of what the Navy had proposed. “They fought a bitter, intelligent, artful and skillful battle, and they won,” Clifford recalled.
Forrestal was not Truman’s first choice to be secretary of defense. The president tried to persuade Patterson to take the job, but the judge’s wife insisted that he earn some money in the private sector. Despite his fight against unification, Forrestal, as a well-respected veteran of Roosevelt’s war cabinet with enormous public stature, was an obvious second choice. It had been Forrestal who had raised early warnings about Soviet intentions and had urged a get-tough policy at a time when many in Washington—including Truman—had taken a more benevolent view. Forrestal was a key architect of the containment strategy then evolving as a way to counter Soviet hegemony. He was a leading advocate of rebuilding military strength as a way of preserving peace.
Beyond that, Truman realized that Forrestal, with his keen sense of duty, would do his best to make the new entity work. It brought Forrestal into the tent. “I believe the President thought the way to get this job done is to put Forrestal in, because if anybody else takes that job, Forrestal is going to sit back and carve him to ribbons,” Clifford later said.
Forrestal, for his part, was not eager for the job. Years of helping build and oversee the largest naval force ever assembled—tackled in his characteristic frenetic manner—had left him exhausted and, though no one realized it, on the brink of a mental breakdown. Forrestal took the post, feeling an obligation both to the country and to the Navy, which he believed he could safeguard as secretary of defense. The job, after all, “was fashioned in his own image,” as
New York Times
military correspondent Hanson Baldwin, a friend of Forrestal’s, wrote. This was to prove a problem. “The man who had done the most to weaken the unification law was charged with making it function,” writer Carl Borklund observed.
