The Pentagon: A History

by Steve Vogel

  Inspecting his new headquarters, Marshall found his dark mahogany desk with carved lion heads and brass ring drawer pulls in place. Unlike Stimson, Marshall dispensed with the elaborate map alcove, contenting himself with a large globe and a few simple relief maps. Behind his desk was a tall grandfather clock and an oil painting of Pershing, whom Marshall revered. But the chief of staff raised Cain when he discovered his telephones were not working correctly.

  Marshall already had a crisis to manage. Washington was in an uproar over the deal that General Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied commander in North Africa, had struck with the reptilian Admiral Jean-François Darlan, commander of Vichy French military forces, allowing Darlan to retain power in exchange for the surrender of all French forces.

  Stimson arrived the next day from Long Island, coming straight from National Airport with his wife. “Mabel and I drove to the Pentagon Building where I found my new office all beautifully prepared and ready for me and Mabel inspected it,” he wrote in his diary. Stimson—probably oblivious to all the blood, sweat, and toil that had gone into making his office just so—seemed pleased with his new surroundings in Room 3E-884.

  Stimson sat behind the massive carved mahogany desk used by every secretary of war since Robert Todd Lincoln in 1883. At his right was a telephone with a direct, secure line to the White House. An electronic squawk box—which Stimson would never learn to operate properly—could be used to summon McCloy or other key aides. To his left was a small oval table used by Jefferson Davis when he was secretary of war under Franklin Pierce. Hanging on the wall behind his desk, flanked by the flags of the United States and the secretary of war, was a portrait of former secretary of war Elihu Root, Stimson’s hero. The windows, framed with Venetian blinds and drapes, overlooked the river; most of the construction debris was out of his immediate sight. It was a spacious office, more than twice the size of his office in the Munitions Building. Overstuffed leather chairs in green-and-tan tones were positioned about the suite. Across the hall was the private dining room, walls paneled with solid light oak and four mahogany dining tables covered with white linen. The serving pantry was equipped with Army cooks, a refrigerator, and an electric steam table. Stimson was most pleased with the map alcove in his office, upon which Army cartographers had prepared maps with positions of American troops in all theaters around the world, including the latest updates from North Africa.

  As soon as his wife left, Stimson called in Marshall and Hap Arnold to discuss his thoughts on how to defend the North African landing force against the attack he feared the Germans might launch from Gibraltar. Then McCloy came in to update Stimson on the uproar over the Darlan affair, which was only intensifying. There was moral outrage in what Stimson called “starry-eyed circles” about dealing with the Nazi collaborator in North Africa. It was all mystifying to Stimson, who considered the arrangement a necessary evil that had saved American lives, but he went to work trying to calm the furor.

  The high command settled quickly into the Pentagon. Two days after Marshall’s arrival, Colonel William T. Sexton, an aide to the chief of staff, heard a commotion in the hallway and instinctively reached for his pistol. Hap Arnold had commandeered a bicycle, and, accompanied by an aide on roller skates, rolled into Marshall’s office, where the chief of staff was in the midst of a conference. Marshall looked up to see his tall, white-haired air forces chief perched on a bicycle. Arnold saluted. “New carrier service, sir,” he announced, and then pedaled out. Marshall “roared with laughter,” Sexton recalled.

  The chief of staff was satisfied with the Pentagon, once his phone was fixed. He and Stimson found it an effective command post, particularly as the rest of the high command moved in. It would be even more effective once the Navy arrived.

  These damned admirals

  Stimson was hoping to make an early escape from work on the afternoon of November 19 and get some rest. He was still fatigued from overseeing North Africa operations and had been unable to sleep for several nights, lying awake with worry. But Somervell caught the secretary as he was heading home with some bad news: The admirals were agitating for more space in the Pentagon and threatening to sabotage the whole deal.

  The Army had already increased the amount of office space offered to the Navy from 800,000 to one million square feet, roughly 40 percent of the building. Stimson had reluctantly agreed to kick the chief of ordnance office out of the Pentagon to give the Navy extra room. If the Army lost any further space, half the intelligence section would have to go elsewhere. But Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ralph A. Bard, who was “violently against” the deal agreed to by his chief, insisted the Navy needed more space. All eight Navy bureau chiefs were objecting to the move. “Incidentally these admirals are trying to use their power over Knox to extort a good deal of further space from us,” Stimson fumed in his diary. “We have already given them 200,000 feet more than we originally offered and I shall set my face against any further concession.”

  Stimson telephoned Knox and complained “pretty freely” about the Navy’s behavior. Knox told Stimson he was trying to work it out with the admirals, but he wanted to do so “without a row.”

  Stimson knew what that meant—the genial secretary of the Navy lacked the steel to break the admirals’ blockade. Knox was no Elihu Root. “The Bureau admirals are holding Knox up and he is as helpless as a child in their hands,” Stimson wrote. “As a result, it seems as if this really important improvement of having the Navy come into our building and share it with us in such a way as to assist united command will break down simply from the crusty selfishness of some Bureau officers which their chief has not force enough to command.”

  The press was starting to wonder what was going on. The Navy was supposed to be in the Pentagon by December 1, and on November 20 Knox was forced to publicly admit the move would be delayed until at least Christmas. At the White House later that day, Knox gingerly approached Stimson at the end of the Cabinet meeting and asked for another 200,000 square feet of space.

  Stimson responded icily. Conferring afterward with McCloy and Marshall, Stimson found them equally adamant that the Army make no further concession. The Army now had 63,000 workers in Washington, and the Navy 27,000. As it stood now, each service would be able to fit about one-third of its Washington workforce into the Pentagon. If the Army conceded another 200,000 feet, the Navy would have 40 percent of its Washington force in the Pentagon, and the Army less than 30 percent—and this in a building the Army had moved heaven and earth to build.

  The beleaguered Renshaw—his dreams of soon completing the command section dashed by the decision to move in the Navy—had been working since November 3 to prepare the suites for Knox, King, and other top Navy officials. Renshaw warned Groves that the construction crews were in dark moods about ripping out much of their finished work to accommodate the Navy. It was going to be expensive—Renshaw estimated it would cost $8.3 million. Navy representatives insisted that the offices of every Navy officer with the rank of captain or above be fitted with private bathrooms, leather chairs, and wainscoted walls. Marshall turned visibly angry when he heard the demand. “They’ll get exactly what the Army gets—nothing more, and nothing less,” he ordered. Meanwhile, while the Navy dithered for more space, large sections of the Army’s Ordnance, Signal, Intelligence, and Air Forces that were supposed to move into the Pentagon were in limbo.

  Marshall told Stimson he was so disgusted with the Navy’s actions he would rather withdraw the whole offer. At a tense meeting on Tuesday, November 24, Stimson told Knox that one million square feet was his final offer; otherwise, the Army would occupy the entire building.

  Knox promised to get back to Stimson within an hour. The day passed, and two more, with no word from the secretary of the Navy. After a thoroughly unrelaxing Thanksgiving Day—much of it spent in the Pentagon working with Marshall on the Darlan affair—Stimson called Knox on Friday, November 27, and found the secretary of the Navy “still in the same helpless condition.” Knox e
xplained that Rear Admiral Samuel Robinson, chief of the Bureau of Ships, insisted he needed more space.

  That was it, Stimson decided. “I told him then that I was afraid that we would have to withdraw the offer and call the thing off,” Stimson wrote. “He said he was afraid that was so.”

  The whole matter left Stimson depressed. “It seems to me a frightful condemnation of the ability of men that we can’t settle a matter which had so much good in it because of such a trivial objection by one bureau head,” he wrote in his diary.

  Stimson set to writing a letter to Roosevelt informing him that the plan had collapsed—“a rather difficult letter to write because I did not wish to have it sound provocative and yet I wished the President to know the justifying facts,” he noted. After conferring with Somervell on the wording and reading a draft to Marshall, Stimson sent it by courier to Roosevelt at Hyde Park on Saturday, November 28.

  Stimson’s word’s to the president were restrained but left no doubt that he and Marshall blamed the Navy for making unreasonable demands. “We believe that the harmonious cooperation which we have sought to obtain by this union of the two services might be entirely frustrated by such an unequal division,” Stimson wrote. He asked Roosevelt’s permission to start moving War Department units into the space reserved for the Navy. They had lost nearly four weeks waiting, noted Stimson, adding, “we must begin at once with the work of getting our people moved in the building.”

  Roosevelt sent his regrets to Stimson and approved of the Army taking the space. The president did not seem particularly surprised at the breakdown; indeed, he probably had been well aware of the admirals’ protests against the move. Knox announced to the press November 30 that the Navy had abandoned plans to move into the Pentagon, explaining that “careful investigation” had revealed the building was not big enough for both the Army and Navy.

  The Navy had legitimate concerns about moving into the Pentagon. Without more space, some bureaus would have to be split up. The Navy’s sophisticated communications system needed considerable space, and the time needed to get it up and running in the Pentagon might upset ongoing military operations. But the benefits—the sharing of resources and intelligence, consolidating work, the close working proximity of the high command, not only of Marshall and King but also of their staffs, creating greater cooperation—would have outweighed the inconveniences. Less than a year into the war, a great opportunity had been lost. Unity of command would have to wait.

  Lost perpendicularly and horizontally

  Few tears were shed among Navy workers over the news they would not move across the Potomac. It seemed particularly fortuitous on the afternoon of December 1, the day Knox’s announcement hit the newspapers, when dozens of Army officers and civilian personnel at the Pentagon began collapsing shortly after eating at one of the cafeterias. More than seventy Army workers were felled, victims of food poisoning. Ambulances descended on the building. “The halls of the Pentagon Building resembled a base hospital as workers who had collapsed were carried to the emergency infirmary on stretchers,” the Star reported. Employees blamed the corned beef hash, but an investigation supervised by the ubiquitous McCloy quickly pinpointed the salad dressing. No one died, but the incident certainly confirmed the suspicions of relieved Navy workers that the Pentagon was a hellhole.

  Accounts from war workers—some twenty thousand were in the building now—further cemented the image. Dorothy Potter Benedict, an author of children’s books who worked as a translator for the Army Air Forces, sent a letter to The Washington Post in November describing her experiences in the building:

  We are in the Pentagon now, that maze across the river, surrounded by noise, dust, the debris of hastened construction and overcrowded, precipitant buses. But these minor hazards are as nothing as compared to the obstacles to be overcome between the entrance and the office to which one may be assigned.

  Since the Army’s Dream Building is made in a series of pentagonal rings, like misshapen doughnuts placed one inside the other, one loses one’s sense of direction the moment one leaves the outer ring. In answer to the question, “Where am I?” The guard will answer cheerily: “Can’t say, Madam. This is my first day,” or, “Couldn’t tell you. I’ve just been transferred from the other side of the building.”

  This is discouraging news for a worker due in the outer ring at a certain hour and vaguely aware that she is somewhere in the inner ring—lost. But not alone. Far from it. Weary colonels, bleak-faced majors, haggard captains and lieutenants pass and repass trying to find their respective destinations. They get lost perpendicularly as well as horizontally.

  Newspapers reported that a hundred people a day were getting lost. New arrivals to the Pentagon were described by Life magazine as being “as confused as a fresh rat in a psychologist’s maze.” Even Under Secretary of War Patterson admitted to getting lost “every time I get three doors away from my own office.”

  Psychologists debated whether Pentagon employees were suffering from a fear of being shut in or a fear of being in the midst of open spaces. “I suspect that an overpowering delusion that the building is dangerously different is the basic cause of complaint—but time will cure that in the case of permanent employees,” a doctor told Newsweek. “They will get to love the Pentagon.”

  One letter-writer saw a bright side to the Pentagon’s working conditions. “The generals are right—there is not yet enough hate in this war,” G. Dorrance of Washington wrote the Post. War workers, he said, “may feel a growing dislike for the Fuehrer when they arise each morning an hour or two before daylight, swallow breakfast without chewing, join the battle of transportation outside, and work in the Pentagon all day without benefit of sunlight or fresh air….”

  The press made much of Stimson’s luxurious accommodations in comparison with the rest of the building. Life followed this theme with particular zest, running a two-page photo spread showing Stimson’s spacious suite: “Looming across the Potomac like a Cecil B. DeMille backdrop, the War Department’s new $85,000,000 Pentagon Building is just a colossal pain-in-the-neck to thousands of bewildered Washington visitors and harassed employees. They resent the…miles of barren corridors, the jammed ramps, the pile-up at entrances and exits, the parking and transportation problems, the six overcrowded cafeterias, the staggered working hours. The only really happy person in the War Department’s whopping new reinforced-concrete ‘home’ is the Army’s civilian chief, Henry L. Stimson.”

  Somervell was impervious to the constant stream of complaints and jabs directed his way—indeed, he was quite proud of the Pentagon. “The building is very dear to my heart,” he wrote Ides van der Gracht in September. The general assured the press in November that all the problems would soon be ironed out. “I think it’s a magnificent building,” Somervell said.

  Those least impressed with life in the Pentagon included the black Americans assigned to the building and given continued treatment as second-class citizens in it. The cafeterias had been integrated; now much of the trouble centered on the buses. At the end of a wearisome day at work in the Aircraft Radio Branch of the Signal Corps, Masie Ashby and Florence Cole boarded a bus in front of the Pentagon at 5:15 on the evening of October 27 to begin their journey home to Washington. They sat together in the third seat from the front. Several military policemen were standing near the bus and one of them, a Sergeant Clark, tapped the window next to the women with his baton and motioned for them to move to the back of the bus. The women ignored him. Clark boarded the bus and when the women refused to go to the rear, he ordered them off.

  It was not an isolated incident. Judge William Hastie, Stimson’s civilian aide, pressed each time for an investigation. Every time, Army officials would respond that they could not confirm the details, or that the bus company was at fault and the Army was not responsible, or that the black employee had somehow provoked the incident, or that the problem had been corrected and would not happen again. But it would happen again, and it was not just the b
uses. The Pentagon cafeteria manager advertised for “competent white female help” in the dining rooms; black employees were targets of racial epithets. Hastie was frustrated. In January, he would resign from the War Department in protest of the Army’s plans to establish a separate Officer Candidate School for blacks. The betrayal black employees felt was reflected in a letter that Dorothy J. Williams, an Ordnance employee, wrote to her superior after she was forced to the back of her bus: “It is ironic that our Nation will wage war to guarantee an end to human persecution of individuals, based solely on race, color, or creed, and remain impervious to a similar plight of approximately one-tenth of its citizens.”

  The glorious chords of free men singing

  By Christmas Eve, there were 22,000 war workers in the Pentagon, and all were invited to gather in the interior courtyard late that afternoon for a holiday celebration. Stimson spent quite a bit of time during the day “fussing over the speech” he was to deliver at the ceremony. Initially the secretary of war had given the matter little thought and intended to simply read remarks drafted by the Public Relations Bureau. “I had not taken it very much to heart at first…,” he wrote on his diary, “but the closer I got to it the more important I felt it was to make the thing more in my own language and personal to myself.” At 4 P.M. Stimson, accompanied by his wife, took his place at a pavilion set by the north face of the courtyard wall, where he was joined by Somervell and several other top Army commanders. The stage was brightened by a large Christmas tree decorated with bells and evergreen garlands wrapped around the railings.