The Pentagon: A History

by Steve Vogel

  Bergstrom agreed to make revisions, but made it clear he was determined to keep the pentagon. After the War Department architects left the meeting, Cret declared that the commission should appeal to the president. Roosevelt already had invited Clarke to the White House that afternoon to discuss the plans. Cret drew pencil sketches of a rectangular building to show the president in hopes of persuading him to change the shape.

  Somervell beat the commissioners to the punch. At 12:15, the general, nattily dressed in a bow tie and a seersucker suit, strolled into the Oval Office, accompanied by Bergstrom, who was carrying a large sheaf of blueprints. Roosevelt, just back from Hyde Park, reviewed the plans carefully, asking questions and directing a few changes, and approved the design. When he left the Oval Office, Somervell was “smiling affably and appearing in better humor than he has since the President directed him last week to re-study the building plans,” the Star reported. Everything was “coming along fine,” Somervell told reporters.

  At 2:15 P.M., it was the commissioners’ turn. Clarke, Cret, and Lamb were ushered in to see the president. The mustachioed, dignified old Frenchman presented the case against the pentagonal design, arguing a rectangle made more sense. Cret also appealed to Roosevelt’s sensibilities as commander in chief, suggesting that it would be even better to disperse the War Department in several buildings rather than in one single great mass. This pentagon-shaped War Department building, Cret said, would make the world’s largest bombing target.

  The president listened attentively until the commissioners finished. “You know, gentlemen, I like that pentagon-shaped building,” Roosevelt said. “You know why?”

  “No,” the commissioners replied resignedly.

  “I like it because nothing like it has ever been done that way before.”

  A veil of secrecy falls

  Late that afternoon, Roosevelt brought in the press and announced his verdicts about the building to the public. “I have been going over the preliminary plans, and it will be probably a pentagonal building—that means five-sided, if you don’t remember your Greek,” Roosevelt told reporters, who guffawed appreciatively. One wing would be built as a solid block “to test out this windowless proposition,” he added.

  The building, the president reiterated with finality, would be constructed on the former quartermaster depot site. “It does not interfere in any way, from any angle, with the view of Arlington,” Roosevelt said. As for the size, he said, “It will house not 40,000 people but about 20,000 people.”

  “Will this building require the full $35 million?” the president was asked.

  “I hope not,” he said.

  All parties in the dispute had signed off on the plans, according to Roosevelt. “I don’t know how happy they are—but at least they are together,” he said.

  Roosevelt insisted that the Arlington building would be only a temporary headquarters for the War Department and that the just-completed structure in Foggy Bottom would become the permanent home. “The War Department, after the emergency is over, can return to it, and the pentagonal building can be used for records,” Roosevelt said. The Washington Post, for one, was skeptical. “It doesn’t seem reasonable to suppose that future officials will agree to turn over the Government’s largest and most costly office building for the storage of miscellaneous records,” the paper noted in an editorial.

  Somervell was cheery, contentedly speaking to reporters after the president’s announcement. He radiated confidence and competence, with his gray hair neatly parted, mustache close-clipped, and gray eyes shining, and wearing a gray seersucker suit—“a symphony in gray,” as the Star described him. “Everybody is going to be as happy about the new War Department building as they are about the Washington National Airport at Gravelly Point,” the general said.

  The press did not fully appreciate why Somervell was so happy. The Star, like other newspapers, reported that the president had approved “a structure half as big as that originally proposed by the Army.” Somervell knew better, though he said nothing to reporters. Reducing the occupancy to twenty thousand was a temporary measure and did not mean the building had to be constructed at half the size. By Somervell’s reckoning, the agreement authorized him to construct a four-million-square-foot building, or four-fifths the size of what he originally proposed.

  Somervell told the press the night of September 2 that construction would start within the next two weeks—an astonishing declaration given that the location, design, and size had only been settled in the previous few days. Somervell did not even have a contract anymore: It would have to be renegotiated with McShain because of the changes to the site and design. Plans still were being furiously revised to accommodate the president’s wishes. And Roosevelt was not even finished fiddling. Somervell returned with Bergstrom to the White House the following day, and Roosevelt requested changes to the façade.

  Somervell did make one concession to reality: Instead of finishing the building in one year, as he had previously promised, the general told reporters construction would take an additional two months because of the poor ground conditions at the new site. The afternoon of September 4, at a meeting with Groves, Renshaw, Bergstrom, and McShain at his headquarters in the Railroad Retirement Building, Somervell ordered “the mobilization of equipment, materials and personnel necessary for the immediate prosecution of work.”

  Groves wanted to know which section of the building should be completed first. Even this basic question could not yet be answered. They would have to wait until they knew more about foundation conditions, Somervell said. In keeping with Roosevelt’s dream of one day converting the building into a records depot, the general approved a design load of 150 pounds per square foot—a high capacity that would allow the storage of heavy file cabinets throughout the building.

  There was one more thing: Somervell’s charm offensive with reporters would be short-lived. The general directed that “no further detailed information on the building” be issued to the press “in view of the president’s personal interest” in the project. Somervell followed up the next day with a more explicit memo to Brigadier General Alexander D. Surles, chief of the Bureau of Public Relations:

  1. In view of the discussion concerning the War Department building, it is considered desirable to limit publicity on our actions to the minimum, and in no event should information as to the amount of the contract be given to the press.

  2. This information will be seized on by the press as indicative of the amount of work which we are going to do, and will probably start further unfavorable publicity, which we wish to avoid.

  3. I am sure my request is in line with what the President would want in the matter.

  It was typical Somervell. The money he was requesting—$33.3 million—certainly would have highlighted the fact that the building he intended to construct was not much smaller than the $35-million structure originally planned, so the general simply ordered a cap on the information. The unsubtle reference to the White House made it clear he had Roosevelt’s backing.

  A veil of secrecy fell over the project.

  Architects’ rendering of building, October 1941.

  An army is marshaled

  Word was getting around fast at the union hall for the International Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners Union, Local 40, in Washington in early September 1941. Hiring was starting for a new project across the river in Arlington. It was no ordinary job—it would be the biggest building in the world.

  Stanley “Joe” Nance Allan, an energetic and slender nineteen-year-old carpenter, was interested. His job building an annex at the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue had wrapped up in August. Smart and ambitious, Allan had graduated from Western High School in Washington in 1939 but wanted to earn money before going to college. Despite the excitement about the new building, Allan was interested in one thing: the pay. “I knew what the building was and what it was for, but it didn’t dawn on me the crisis we were in,” he recalled.

  Allan
promptly drove to the job site and walked into a makeshift office. There was no need for an interview—all he had to do was show his union card. A foreman for John McShain, Inc., hired him on the spot at the standard union wage for carpenters—$1.621/2 an hour, or $65 a week. Allan was given badge number six, one of the first of 4,600 carpenters who would eventually be put to work on the project. “There were very few when I started, then the numbers started increasing very, very fast,” Allan said. “The word went around that they’re hiring, and people just started arriving immediately.”

  The Great Depression was not yet over in many communities. The pay was good—all union wages. Hundreds, soon thousands, of workers were needed: surveyors, laborers, excavator operators, truck drivers, drilling-rig operators, water boys, cement finishers, and, as time went on, steam fitters, plasterers, electricians, painters, plumbers, and special technicians of all kinds.

  Allan had been trained as a carpenter by his father, a builder by trade; the boy had grown up on construction sites and had been working jobs since before high school. But he had never seen anything like the army of construction workers who poured in from all over the region—a mix of men from the rural communities of Virginia and Maryland, hills and valleys of West Virginia, small towns and big cities in southern Pennsylvania, farms of North Carolina, and neighborhoods, black and white, all over Washington. One carpenter from the Eastern Shore of Maryland showed up carrying his tools in a lobster basket.

  The man marshaling the growing army of workers was Paul Hauck, McShain’s job superintendent. Allan recognized his short and stout figure at the job site. Allan’s father was an acquaintance of Hauck’s, and the young worker knew his reputation: a veteran construction man, very able and highly respected, and a thoroughly warm and decent man. Hauck had a face as open as a prairie with bright blue eyes behind his wire glasses; he had a tendency to wear fat ties that went halfway down his shirt. He was forty-two but looked older, with thinning gray hair; yet his tremendous will for work remained undiminished.

  McShain had developed a stable of first-rate superintendents, men he relied on and kept on the payroll even in slow times. None was better than J. Paul Hauck. As head of McShain’s Washington operations, Hauck had overseen many of McShain’s most important jobs—the Jefferson Memorial, the Bethesda Naval hospital, and National Airport. When McShain got the contract to build the FDR Library in Hyde Park, Hauck was the man he entrusted with the project.

  Hauck was a Pennsylvania-born engineer who moved to Washington in the mid-1930s to join the city’s booming construction business. He met John McShain atop a pile of bricks at the builder’s first project in Washington, the Internal Revenue Service building. Hauck was soon McShain’s indispensable man. He and his wife, Beulah, lived in a modest home in Silver Spring, Maryland, just north of the District border. They had no children, and Hauck was devoted to two things: Beulah and John McShain.

  Hauck was different from the effervescent and dynamic McShain. “Paul Hauck was just the opposite,” McShain’s daughter Polly recalled. “He was quiet, gentle. He was always very sweet in every way. In some ways, he must have suffered more under the pressure than my father, because he was a driver also, but he didn’t have the outlets my father had through his personality.”

  McShain’s treatment of Hauck was often rough; he would administer public tongue-lashings at job sites and chide the homey superintendent for looking like a hick. “Why don’t you buy a new hat?” McShain once told him. “Certainly I’m paying you enough.” Yet McShain could not abide anyone else criticizing Hauck; a new superintendent who followed McShain’s lead and was disrespectful to Hauck was nearly fired. Perhaps the fullest measure of the regard McShain held for him is that Hauck was apparently the only employee the builder ever tried to convert to Catholicism. McShain took him to a retreat, but Hauck politely stuck to his Episcopalian faith.

  Hauck was a proud man, yet he would absorb McShain’s wrath uncomplainingly, even bending down with rags to clean the boss’s shoes at job sites. Hauck’s respect for McShain boiled down to trust. In all the years he worked for him, Hauck once said, McShain never asked him to do anything dishonest.

  The biggest white elephant in creation

  Roosevelt, after three weeks of almost daily involvement with the War Department project since his return from the summit at sea with Churchill, was suddenly if temporarily out of the picture, unconcerned with the details of the building or almost anything else. On Friday, September 5, three days after approving the pentagonal shape, Roosevelt traveled to Hyde Park to visit his ailing mother. Sara Roosevelt, eighty-six, a woman of great patrician bearing, brightened at the appearance of Franklin. He spent all Saturday at her side, but that night she fell into a coma. To the great sorrow of the president, she died the next day, in the same bed in which she had given birth to her only child fifty-nine years earlier. “The President, deeply affected by the passing of his mother at noon on Sunday, withdrew at his family home on the Hudson into the deepest seclusion which the demands and responsibilities of his high office would allow, and shut himself off from the world more completely than at any time since he assumed his present post,” The New York Times reported.

  Back in Washington, the first ten days of September passed in a headlong rush. Somervell had ordered work to start the moment the new construction contract was signed and the War Department issued its authorization, which Hauck knew could come any day. The plans and designs were not ready, but that did not matter. They would go with what they had.

  In ordinary times, by one estimate made during the war, a year and a half should have been allowed for designing a building the size of the Pentagon. The draftsmen and engineers under Bergstrom’s direction—now numbering over a hundred—had had a total of thirty-four days since full-scale work on the design of concentric pentagons had begun on August 8. Drafting at a furious speed in a warehouse basement at nearby Fort Myer, they had produced only a fraction of the necessary plans.

  The key to building efficiently, Hauck believed, was timing. It meant getting workers, materials, and plans to the same place at the same time, so not even a minute was wasted. “To build economically and to build fast, you have to know where you’re going—just like the quarterback on a football team,” Hauck once said. If plans were not ready, Hauck would be quarterbacking the team blindfolded.

  As the drafting work continued, McShain and Hauck made a critical decision about how they would organize the labor and construction. It was a way to start the building even in the absence of most of the plans, and it gave them the best—maybe the only—chance of constructing the building in fourteen months, as the contract required, with at least 500,000 square feet ready for occupancy no later than May 1, 1942, less than eight months away.

  The pentagonal design of the building lent itself to a division of the construction. On paper, McShain and Hauck split the building into five trapezoid-shaped sections, as if cutting a pentagonal pie. The five sections were labeled A through E. Work would start on the south face of the building, Section A, proceed to Section B to the west, and continue clockwise to the other sections. Construction would soon be under way concurrently in all five sections, but each section would be one stage ahead of the next. This would allow the sequencing of material delivery and scheduling of work crews with specialized skills. The draftsmen could focus their efforts on producing detailed drawings of Section A, and design subsequent sections later.

  The assembly-line strategy was simple yet brilliant. “It was broken into five equal pieces, whose main elements were repeatable,” one of the Pentagon architects said a half-century later. In effect, McShain would construct five separate buildings. Each would be “erected as though it was a separate and distinct structure independent of any one of the other four,” McShain later said. Each section would be occupied as it was completed.

  Hauck would have overall charge, but each of the five sections would be built by its own team, each with its own superintendent, assistant super
intendents, foremen, labor and carpenter crews, material checkers, clerks, bookkeepers, and so on down the line. It might mean duplication of jobs and higher administrative costs, but McShain knew something else: The five superintendents and their teams would compete, and that could speed the work and ultimately save money.

  One danger of such a scheme was that the five buildings might not set together correctly. Mistakes of even inches could have serious consequences. A force of a hundred civil engineers, overseen by Hauck, would be responsible for the overall dimensions of the building and ensure that the different sections were aligned and elevated correctly.

  At the site, Hauck oversaw last-minute preparations of the ground. Work had stopped on the quartermaster depot just before the foundation had been poured, but forms laid for the concrete and the beginnings of a long brick wall had to be yanked out. The grading work that had been done was helpful, though, giving them a head start on leveling the ground.

  With groundbreaking looming, McShain called a meeting of the contractors’ top supervisors. Representatives from all the major subcontractors attended, including those from Potts & Callahan, the Baltimore company that would handle the excavation and grading. McShain addressed the group: There was no time for turf battles or petty disagreements on this job site, either among themselves or with the Army. The watchword for this project, McShain declared, was to be “above and beyond all personalities.”

  On the eve of construction, the skepticism about the project was palpable. Somervell was an officer “whose judgment is usually right,” the Architectural Forum wrote in September 1941. “But, there are plenty of planners who think he is wrong this time, that the War Department is about to beget the biggest white elephant in creation.”