Steve Vogel

The Pentagon — A History

thepentagonhistory.com

The Untold Story of the Wartime Race to Build the Pentagon –

and to Restore it Sixty Years Later

The Reviews (continued)

¶         “Students, writers and historians will use ‘‘The Pentagon” as a reference book for years to come. Vogel has created an admirable, timely and immensely readable book. It is a must read for anyone who has ever worked in the building.”

           -- The Pentagram, June 17, 2007

 

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¶         “The Pentagon is not generally considered a significant work of architecture, but perhaps it should be. In a period when every new art museum and luxury condo tower is touted as “iconic,” the Pentagon is the real thing: a globally recognized symbol. This concrete behemoth — the largest office building in the world — is also the product of considerable human ingenuity and resourcefulness, as Steve Vogel amply demonstrates in his interesting account. The Library of Congress categorizes “The Pentagon” as history and architecture, but it is really biography — the biography of a building.

The decision to build the Pentagon was made in 1941. The country was not yet at war, but with a huge mobilization under way, which would increase the size of the Army from 174,000 to 1.4 million, it was felt that the entire War Department — up to 40,000 workers — should be housed in one building. Since there was no site large enough for such a massive structure in Washington, the Army chose a prominent location in Virginia, at the foot of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, directly across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial.

After a confrontation with Congress and the Commission of Fine Arts, which was dead set against the site, President Franklin Roosevelt intervened and the building was moved to a less prominent location, about three-quarters of a mile south, in what was then called Hell’s Bottom. Two important vestiges of the original site remained, however: the unusual five-sided plan (conceived over a weekend), which was a result of the shape of the plot of land; and the low height of the building, which had been set, Vogel says, “to keep the building in harmony with the low Washington skyline.”

Construction was overseen by the head of the Army’s construction division, a Corps of Engineers officer named Brehon Burke Somervell who, in Vogel’s story, is the driving force behind this remarkable undertaking. A World War I Distinguished Service Cross winner and a can-do individual, Somervell ended the war a four-star general in charge of all Army supply, and might have been chief of staff had he not had a previous run-in with President Truman. Somervell is not as well-known as Marshall or Eisenhower, although logistics proved as crucial to winning the war as strategy and tactics.

The famous motto of Somervell’s supply department was “We Do the Impossible Immediately. The Miraculous Takes a Little Longer.” And building the Pentagon was a kind of miracle. As large as two Empire State Buildings, the huge structure consumed almost half a million cubic yards of concrete — sand and gravel were dredged from the Potomac. According to Vogel, construction proceeded so quickly that certain portions of the building were completed without the benefit of architects’ or engineers’ drawings.

The author, a military reporter for The Washington Post, writes knowledgeably about the Army culture that is a crucial ingredient of this story. Politics is inevitably a big part of any federal building project, and Vogel is also very good at steering the reader through the thickets of Washington’s wartime bureaucracy. Some of the key players included Frederic A. Delano, chairman of the influential National Capital Park and Planning Commission, and Roosevelt’s uncle; and Roosevelt himself, the most architecturally inclined president since Thomas Jefferson.

Vogel emphasizes the human factor — a critical ingredient in any building construction project. Col. Leslie R. Groves, who would later direct the Manhattan Project, was Somervell’s pugnacious assistant. The architect was G. Edwin Bergstrom, a leading practitioner in Los Angeles who gave the building its severe, stripped-classical appearance. The chief contractor was John McShain, a Philadelphian who was also responsible for constructing the Jefferson Memorial and National Airport.

Thanks to these men, and several thousand workers, the Pentagon was completed in only 17 months (slightly longer than Somervell intended, although part of the building was occupied less than a year after construction began, just as he promised). Vogel does not end his book there. He describes the Pentagon’s subsequent life, in particular two dramatic incidents: the anti-Vietnam War peace march of 1967 and the 9/11 attack. This is not, of course, the first account of the attack, but with its Clancyesque action and firsthand detail (Vogel seems to have interviewed everyone involved) it is surely the most vivid. Of the subsequent reconstruction, which was completed in a mere 12 months, Vogel writes: “The damaged building had been restored in a manner that echoed its creation.”

It is easy to forget that the Pentagon was originally intended to be a temporary military headquarters. Roosevelt, for one, hoped that it could serve as a national archive after the war. “The War Department will doubtless object to giving up the Pentagon building,” he wrote in a memo, “but it is much too large for them, if we get a decent peace.” Instead of a decent peace we got an extended cold war, and the building proved not too large but too small. In any case, by then the (renamed) Defense Department had grown attached to its five-sided home.”

            -- Witold Rybczynski, The New York Times book review, June            10, 2007

 

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¶         “Conspiracy theorists may be disappointed to learn the shape of the

Pentagon has neither a Masonic nor diabolical origin. Rather, the odd

shape was chosen largely because it fit the building's site -- not its

actual site, mind you, but the initial site considered by planners several

miles away. It may also be surprising that the Pentagon's creation was

hardly the meticulous, planned-out, highly scrutinized effort one might

expect from a project of its magnitude; it was a rush job, for better or

worse. Such thought-provoking observations fill "The Pentagon: A History," an absorbing book by Washington Post reporter Steve Vogel of the building's origins, construction and eventful life.

 

In many ways, the Pentagon was the brainchild of Brig. Gen. Brehon B. Somervell of the Army Corps of Engineers. In mid-1941, with a growing sense that war with Germany and Japan was inevitable, Somervell concluded that the War Department (now the Defense Department) required new, significantly larger headquarters -- amazingly, despite the fact that earlier in the same year the department had opened a new, significantly larger headquarters. The building would be four times the size of the British, German and Japanese military headquarters combined.

 

Within a week, Somervell created high-level plans and secured the support of the War Department, key members of Congress and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Yet as word of the project spread -- in particular, its enormous size and cost -- the skeptics and opportunists emerged, threatening to slow, if not entirely derail, the implementation of Somervell's vision.

 

Various members of Congress attempted to curry favor with voters by

persuading Somervell to construct the building using materials -- granite, slate, brick -- from their home districts. The Commission of Fine Arts hoped to turn the courtyard in the center of the Pentagon into a "training ground for aspiring muralists and sculptors," a proposition that today seems quaint and quixotic. It was Washington bureaucracy at its finest, and Vogel's account shines by presenting its knotty machinations. Such requests and concerns were largely set aside after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Overnight, those criticizing and otherwise attempting to divert the project from Somervell's intentions were silenced. As a result, Vogel points out, "[t]he national outcry that accompanied the Japanese attack provided an excellent opportunity to build an even larger headquarters without bothersome consultations with the planning and fine arts commissions, or even Congress." Indeed, in many ways the creation of the Pentagon is a study in cutting red tape.

 

With these obstacles removed, the Pentagon's builders proceeded with the task of constructing a building of unprecedented size with unprecedented speed. As the building's chief of production, Ides van Waterschoot van der Gracht later said, "[w]e were designing just one step ahead of the pile drivers." Vogel recounts this process in detail, and rightfully so, yet he provides not just the type of overwhelming statistics fed to any Pentagon visitor but also the type of detail that creates an engrossing and revealing account.

 

Despite Somervell and his team's ability to complete the building in time

for it to serve as the military's headquarters during most of America's

involvement in World War II, the speed and relatively low scrutiny with

which the Pentagon was built were not without consequences. As Vogel

writes, "[m]ore than a half-century later, architects and engineers

renovating the Pentagon were astonished to find large sections of the

building constructed for a while after Pearl Harbor for which drawings

either do not exist or bear little relation to reality." Throughout its

life, the building has undergone multiple costly renovations, partly

because of the haste with which it was originally completed. The

Pentagon's costs far exceeded the original estimates, shocking certain

members of Congress and the public when the final price tag was revealed. Vogel writes that Somervell's team attempted to hide the true cost of the building by hiding certain spending in an ostensibly separate project to build roads and parking. At one point, the designers even spent additional money to remove marble from the building so as to give it an appearance of frugality.

 

Such problems are unlikely to surprise a contemporary reader familiar

with more recent, large, public construction projects, such as Boston's Big

Dig. Yet other episodes in the Pentagon's history are more remarkable.

Such as the fact that, in its early days, the Pentagon was largely open to

the public, allowing spies to eavesdrop freely while pretending to visit

the building cafeterias and libraries. Also poignant is Vogel's chronicle

of the early revolt by the Pentagon's African American employees leading

to the desegregation of the building's cafeterias, a harbinger of the

civil rights movement. By setting out these dramas and personalizing their

details, Vogel provides a first-rate account of the transformation of a

dilapidated Arlington neighborhood into what Norman Mailer called "the

true and high church of the military industrial complex."

           — Reviewed by Yonatan Lupu, The San Francisco Chronicle, June            10, 2007

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¶         “Vogel's writing coupled with the dynamic, conflict-strewn history of the Pentagon provides for a fascinating and comfortable read while giving new insight into an old Washington landmark."A Wall Street Journal selection for its 2007 summer reading list.”

           --  Roll Call, June 5, 2007

 

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¶ A GQ essential reading selection

“A thrilling biography of a building”

           --  GQ, June 2007

 

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¶         “THE PLOT: How the Pentagon, the world's most famous defense building, was erected just as the U.S was pulled into World War II, and its subsequent history, including the rebuilding after the Sept. 11 attack.
THE BACKSTORY: Mr. Vogel spent two years writing and researching the book. "The Pentagon" has drawn rave prepublication reviews, and within Random House there is hope that it will fill the usual summer slot for a big history title. It's printing 30,000 copies to start.
WHAT GRABBED US: Anecdotes about the Pentagon's early days. The cafeteria couldn't keep up with the flood of workers; security was so lax in 1972 that the Weathermen walked in and planted a bomb, which exploded in a bathroom.”

       -- The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2007

 

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¶         “A Washington Post military reporter brilliantly charts the conception, creation and history of the Pentagon, an architectural “monstrosity.”

Throughout his seamless narrative, Vogel weaves many fascinating tales, about the Potomac riverside site eventually chosen for the Pentagon; the aesthetic and political battles that accompanied construction; the building’s 1941 racial integration and the still incomplete project to fully unify the armed forces; the grinding down of Secretaries of Defense from Forrestal to McNamara to Rumsfeld; the 1967 anti-war march that resulted in “The Battle of the Pentagon”; the bombing by the Weather Underground in 1972; and the catastrophic 2001 terrorist attack. Principally, however, he features the heroic project of constructing, then reconstructing, the mammoth building conceived as only temporary headquarters for the War Department. With Hitler unleashed in Europe, the Pentagon, planned for efficiency, not beauty, went up with astonishing speed thanks to the hard-driving General Brehon Somervell, whose indispensability during World War II now seems largely forgotten; his virtual clone as a taskmaster, General Leslie Groves, whose relentlessness later made him the perfect head of the Manhattan Project; and contractor John McShain, whose thirst for glory had already induced him to build most of 1930’s official Washington, including the Jefferson Memorial. Working under Chief of Staff George Marshall, who would occasionally inspect the project from horseback, and enduring the meddling of FDR, who fancied himself an amateur architect, these men accomplished an engineering marvel and left a legacy almost perfectly matched decades later by the quietly efficient Lee Evey and the brilliantly profane structural engineer, Allyn Kilsheimer, who ran the Phoenix Project, the swift resurrection of the Pentagon following 9/11.
 
Among books dealing with seemingly impossible engineering feats, this easily ranks with David McCullough’s The Great Bridge and The Path Between the Seas , as well as Ross King’s Brunelleschi’s Dome.”

           —Kirkus Reviews  (starred review), 5/1 issue

 

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¶         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.

           Starred review in Apr. 30, 2007, Publisher's Weekly:

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