The Pentagon: A History

by Steve Vogel

  So many thousands of cars followed the caisson procession from the Capitol to Arlington that traffic on the bridges leading to Virginia came to a complete standstill. Many abandoned their automobiles to walk across the bridges, and others took canoes. President Warren G. Harding arrived at Arlington only minutes before he was supposed to open the noon ceremony, and his mood was grim. “It is understood that the President more than once during the journey expressed himself very forcibly regarding the confusion,” the Washington Star reported.

  The capital was so traumatized by the monumental jam that Congress was finally persuaded to approve funding for a new Potomac crossing, the Memorial Bridge, fulfilling the McMillan Commission’s recommendation two decades earlier, and by extension L’Enfant’s plan. As the commission had suggested, the bridge was sited on a perfect line between the Lee Mansion and the recently completed Lincoln Memorial across the Potomac, thus extending monumental Washington to the Arlington Heights. When it was completed in 1932, the Memorial Bridge, with its covering of North Carolina granite and its sculpted eagles from Italy, was instantly celebrated as one of the treasures of the capital. Most breathtaking of all was the graceful linear vista created: The river separating Lincoln and Lee, twin pillars of North and South, had been bridged. From his perch of restored glory in front of the Lee mansion, L’Enfant was presumably well satisfied with the view.

  L’Enfant rolls in his grave

  In July 1941, L’Enfant, or what was left of him, was surely rolling over in his second grave. Gilmore D. Clarke, chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts, was certain of that. It suddenly seemed L’Enfant’s view would be destroyed by the enormous new War Department headquarters Somervell was planning for just a few hundred yards below the major’s tomb. Clarke was dumbfounded by the proposal for a building large enough to hold forty thousand people—“a population as large as Poughkeepsie, New York, or Shreveport, Louisiana,” Clarke wrote soon after learning of the plan. “It is proposed to place this ‘city’ at the very portals of the Arlington National Cemetery, thus resulting in the introduction of 35 acres of ugly, flat roofs into the very foreground of the most majestic view of the National Capital that obtains…from a point near the Tomb of Major L’Enfant, the architect of Washington.”

  The Commission of Fine Arts was the keeper of L’Enfant’s flame. Created by Congress in 1910 to permanently carry on the work of the McMillan Commission, the Commission of Fine Arts had established itself as the “arbiter of public taste in the capital,” guiding the architectural development of the city and passing judgment on the location, arrangement, and treatment of buildings, monuments, and sculptures. It carried no legal authority to block projects, but Congress generally followed the judgments passed down by the distinguished architects, sculptors, and landscape architects who made up the commission.

  Clarke, a New York City native, had a reputation as one of the nation’s finest landscape architects and had helped design some of the country’s first parkways. He was not a building architect, but that did not stop him from passing judgment on those who were. “I’ve been around architecture so long that I’m arrogant enough to think that I know something about it,” he once said. Clarke had a “gift for forceful expression,” in the view of the Star. He employed it vigorously during the fierce debate over the design of the Jefferson Memorial. Clarke derided architect John Russell Pope’s pantheon dome as “indefensibly pedantic” and “slavishly classical,” and he led the commission’s unsuccessful campaign to persuade Congress and Roosevelt to change the design. Clarke would never guard his opinions for political expediency, no matter the political clout of the applicant.

  Clarke was accustomed to getting respect. But Somervell had not bothered to notify the commission about the massive new War Department building, much less consult with it. When Clarke, working from his office in New York City, finally got word of what was afoot, the project had already been approved by the House of Representatives.

  Clarke declared war. “It is inconceivable that this outrage could be perpetrated in this period of the history of the development of this City, a city held in the highest esteem by every citizen who visits it,” he wrote in a letter to the Senate.

  Clarke saw himself as the guardian of good taste in the nation’s capital, and that meant he had to stop Somervell.

  If Hitler would postpone his war

  Somervell had also ignored the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, charged with preparing and maintaining “a comprehensive, consistent and coordinated plan for the National Capital and its environs.” Somervell had assured Congress that there was no need to consult the commission about constructing the world’s largest office building inside those environs.

  Not everyone agreed, including the planning commission chairman. His name was Frederic A. Delano, or, as President Roosevelt called him, “Uncle Fred.”

  Delano, younger brother of Roosevelt’s mother, Sara, was a pioneer in the field of city planning, for which he had no professional training but endless passion. City planning had been rare in America until after the turn of the century, when it was spurred on by civic activists like Delano; he was a leading force in resurrecting L’Enfant’s plan and clearing out the Mall. Delano pushed Congress to bring order to the capital’s development by creating the National Capital Park and Planning Commission; he had served without pay as chairman since its inception in 1924.

  Somervell’s assurances aside, the law creating the commission clearly gave it oversight over the proposed building in Arlington. On short notice, Delano called a special meeting of the planning commission with Somervell for July 29, the day after the House approved funding for the building.

  Uncle Fred had the sardonic wit and boundless energy of his nephew, though at age seventy-seven he was slowing down a tad. Delano had many concerns about the building, particularly potential transportation problems for a site across the river in Virginia. But he appeared to be in no mood for a fight against a project already endorsed by his nephew, nor was he inclined to challenge the War Department on an issue painted as being of the utmost importance for national defense. When the meeting began at 2 P.M. in Room 7118 of the Department of Interior Building in Washington, the chairman threw in the towel during his opening statement. “General Somervell, I want it made clear that I do not want to be made a party to any obstructions to a project that is very much needed at this time,” Delano said. That set the tone for the whole hearing.

  Commissioners raised a few questions about the size of the building and the lack of roads, but Somervell brushed them aside with the simple message that the building was an urgent necessity and that there was no time to waste on nitpicking questions. “I ask that nothing be done to kill this,” the general told the commissioners. “This seems to be an opportunity to get it when we need it most.”

  No one challenged Somervell. Delano absolved Somervell of his plan’s imperfections. “I don’t want to play the role of a troublemaker when it looks as though it is pretty evident that the arguments for this are so strong that you won’t be listened to,” Delano said after Somervell departed. “You will only give them the satisfaction of saying I told you so.”

  Commissioner Charles W. Kutz made a wistful suggestion: “If Hitler would postpone his war a year or two…”

  My God, what will that boy do next?

  Yet Delano had not been one in the past to shy away from arguments about architecture, planning, and buildings, even with his nephew.

  In 1938, the Navy pushed plans to replace its hospital in downtown Washington with a new one in nearby Bethesda, Maryland, featuring a sixteen-story, 215-foot high tower. Delano was appalled—the tower far exceeded the 130-foot limit established by law in the District, and even if it was in Maryland, it was a bad precedent. At a joint hearing before the planning and fine arts commissions, Delano and Gilmore Clarke resolved to oppose the tower, which stuck up “like a sore thumb,” in Clarke’s words. There was one problem. Rear Admiral Ben Moreell, who p
resented the plans for the hospital to the commissions, pulled out a crude sketch showing the tower flanked by two-story wings. The sketch was drawn on White House stationery and bore the initials “FDR.”

  Delano turned to Clarke. “My God,” Delano whispered, “what will that boy do next?”

  “That boy,” Franklin Roosevelt, had long fancied himself a respectable amateur architect, drawing on a childhood interest that continued through his schooling, into his early public life as assistant secretary of the Navy, and on through his presidency. He was particularly active in and around Hyde Park, poking his nose into the design of several local post offices and collaborating with architect Henry Toombs on a Dutch colonial cottage on his estate in 1938. Life magazine published the plans for the cottage with the legend “Franklin D. Roosevelt, Architect.” Professional architects were aghast. “After seeing the title Architect after F.D. Roosevelt in your magazine, I give up,” John Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright, wrote to Life. “Put me in a concentration camp.”

  Roosevelt was not apologetic, suggesting to his private secretary, Missy LeHand, that the following response be given to critics: “By the way, did Thomas Jefferson have a license when he drew the sketches for Monticello, the University of Virginia and a number of other rather satisfactory architectural productions?”

  In architecture, as in other pursuits, Jefferson was Roosevelt’s role model. Next to the Virginian, Roosevelt was the American president most engaged with architecture, though, as art historian William B. Rhoads has written, “his taste was Jeffersonian without Jefferson’s inventiveness.” For federal buildings in Washington, Roosevelt favored a conservative and conventional look and was especially fond of neoclassicism, an affinity he shared with the leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler, himself an amateur architect.

  Whatever his talent and taste, Roosevelt had an aesthetic sensibility and understood the power of architecture to convey meaning. He believed the buildings his administration left behind would outlive his policies and that “the ongoing presence of buildings could serve as a bond between generations and even centuries,” Rhoads wrote. Roosevelt thus had a deep interest in the look and placement of buildings in Washington, leaving his stamp on the Jefferson Memorial, National Airport, and the Pentagon. However, no federal building was more purely a Roosevelt production than the Naval Hospital in Bethesda.

  Roosevelt had been itching to build a government tower ever since a 1936 campaign stop in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he had been deeply impressed by the new twenty-two-story art deco state capitol, the first in the country to feature a tower. Roosevelt decided the new Navy hospital would be the perfect opportunity to build his own tower. He drew his sketch in December 1937, basing it on the Nebraska capitol, and turned it over to the Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks, which prepared drawings for the sixteen-story tower under the direction of architect Paul Cret. The following summer, Roosevelt inspected several sites before settling on a farm along Rockville Pike in Bethesda, about three miles from the District border. To passersby it appeared to be a rundown cabbage patch, but the president, spotting a spring-fed pond on the grounds, was reminded of the Pool of Bethesda, the Biblical place of healing and renewal. He decided it would be the perfect spot for a towering hospital.

  After Delano’s planning commission and Clarke’s fine arts commission raised objections, the Navy came back with new plans in the fall, this time for a twenty-three-story tower rising 250 feet. “They exceed in monstrosity the original plans,” an exasperated Delano wrote the president.

  “Dear Uncle Fred,” Roosevelt wrote on December 1, 1938, from Warm Springs, Georgia, where he would often visit to bathe his crippled legs in the healing waters.

  I have very carefully studied hospital design and, frankly, I am fed up with the type the Government has been building during these past twenty years. Therefore, I personally designed a new Naval Hospital with a large central tower of sufficient square footage and height to make it an integral and interesting part of the hospital itself, and at the same time present something new—getting away from colonial brick or ultramodernistic limestone. All of the doctors who have seen the design are tremendously keen about it as a practical and useful building for the needs it will serve.

  The president went on to paint a pastoral image of the hospital he envisioned, likening the effect of his Navy tower to church spires in “the English countryside.”

  That reference was too much for Delano. “Oh Sire!” he wrote his nephew on December 14. “…Since the beginning of time the formula has been that ‘the King can do no wrong.’ However, from the time of Solomon and even further back, the King found it necessary to surround himself with soothsayers, astrologers, and other wise men to warn him of the pitfalls and dangers lying ahead of him.”

  It was no use. Roosevelt braved a driving rainstorm on Armistice Day, 1940, to lay the tower’s cornerstone. The president stood beside the contractor—John McShain, of course. Grasping a silver trowel, Roosevelt dabbed at the wet cement. “I’ve done it before and I can do it better than John McShain,” he assured his audience. To complete the English countryside effect, Roosevelt ordered the grounds of the tower enclosed by a sheep fence.

  Despite his failure to stop the tower, Delano had occasionally managed to rein in his nephew’s grander architectural impulses. Delano had objected, for example, to the size of the Jefferson Memorial—“an effort to outdo the Lincoln Memorial,” he called it—and Roosevelt had agreed to scale it back.

  Delano decided it was time to rein in his nephew again. Sometime between the end of the planning commission meeting at 5 P.M. July 29 and the following afternoon, Uncle Fred changed his mind about the new War Department building in Arlington. He would be a troublemaker after all.

  Uncle Fred goes to bat

  At 3 P.M. on Wednesday, July 30, Frederic Delano walked into the Oval Office for a meeting with his nephew about the proposed War Department building. Accompanying Delano was Harold Smith, director of the president’s budget office. Smith had the look and sensibilities of a Midwestern justice of the peace. In his off-the-rack suit and department-store shoes, with calm gray eyes behind his rimless spectacles, he presented the very image of frugality. His opinions, delivered in slow, judicial tones, were held in high regard by Roosevelt.

  The visitors had a very direct message: “It was a great pity to construct this building,” the president was told.

  Roosevelt had returned the previous day from a five-day visit to Hyde Park, where he had decamped after approving the new building at the Cabinet meeting July 24. Now, faced with his uncle’s protests, the president admitted that perhaps he had been a bit hasty. “After he got to thinking it over he was a good deal disturbed,” Delano related two days later. “Of course I asked how a matter of such tremendous import as that could be passed through without giving it any real consideration.” Roosevelt noted in his defense that most of the Cabinet had raised no objection to the building.

  Smith’s concerns about the building were not aesthetic. He just did not think it made any sense. The proposal had been hurriedly and incompletely considered. He could not understand why a huge, permanent building was needed when the growth of the War Department was supposed to be a temporary response to the emergency.

  Delano and Smith told the president that moving forty thousand people back and forth across the Potomac River between Washington and Virginia every day would create “terrific” traffic problems and overwhelm the capacity of the bridges and scant road network in Arlington. By the end of the meeting, the president had come to an agreement with his visitors. Somervell’s building would be cut back considerably in size.

  Reporters were waiting outside the White House after the meeting, and an unnamed federal official—more than likely Smith—said that the president had agreed to pare down the building. “The problem of getting 40,000 persons to and from the proposed 35 million dollar War Department Building in Arlington County, Va., has so concerned President Roosevelt that, wit
h his blessing, Federal officials have taken steps to modify drastically original plans for the structure,” The Washington Post reported on the front page the following morning.

  Delano was fortified by Smith’s support. “I am glad to know that the Director of the Budget is fighting as hard as he can on it,” Delano told his commission colleagues.

  Delano sent the Senate Appropriations Committee a letter on July 31 outlining the commission’s view on the project. Gone was the bonhomie of the planning commission meeting two days earlier at which Delano had vowed not to interfere with the building. The project “will have a very serious retarding effect on the National Capital,” Delano warned the senators. It would cause traffic chaos, disrupt Washington’s rental-office market, upend long-considered plans for the federal city, and place financial burdens on Arlington County. He questioned the entire rationale for the building: “Is it wise to put the entire general and official staff of the Army in one place where many of them might be subject to being put out of action?”

  Delano urged the size of the building be halved, at least temporarily. “We are strongly of the opinion that while the War Department is justified in planning an office building for a maximum of 40,000 employees, it would be unwise to build more than for say 20,000 employees, until some experience shall have been acquired in concentrating this number in an outlying suburban location,” his letter concluded.

  No one was more delighted with the turn of events than Gilmore Clarke, chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts. At the Interior building later that morning, Clarke’s commission held a joint session with Delano’s National Capital Park and Planning Commission to coordinate the assault. Clarke played the role of firebrand, passionately urging that the two commissions marshal public opinion and form a united front to defeat the proposal, appealing to the commissioners’ sense of duty to posterity.