The Pentagon: A History

by Steve Vogel

  A Herculean enterprise

  By late spring 1943, it was time to close down the job and disband Renshaw’s office. Groves approached the matter with his usual sentimentality: “[Y]ou should be liquidated,” he informed Renshaw.

  Various odds and ends needed to be wrapped up, but they were increasingly picayune. The Army would create the position of building engineer to replace Renshaw; the building engineer would supervise all further work, which would be treated as additions, alterations, and improvements rather than as part of the cost of the original construction. The handover was set for June 30.

  As the project wound down, there was a growing realization that something remarkable had been accomplished. Already the previous fall, some of the leading project architects and engineers had created the Society of the Pentagon, an organization of 129 members celebrating the “foresightedness…and boundless energy” of the building’s creators—to wit, themselves.

  The whole thing smacked of self-celebration, but it was understandable: There had been few public kudos for their work. “In the years to come, the mere mention of the word Pentagon will connote just one thing: the Pentagon Building of the War Department, across the Potomac in Arlington,” the society’s secretary, landscape architect B. Ashburton Tripp, told the Star in May. “A Herculean enterprise, done in the manner of Hercules himself.”

  Roosevelt and Stimson were given honorary memberships, as well as most of the key Army officers involved, Marshall, Somervell, Groves, and Renshaw among them. Curiously, McShain and Hauck were left off the list, a sign of lingering enmity between the architects and builders.

  The society founders did not forget to include a now-absent figure: Edwin Bergstrom, the disgraced former chief architect. Ides van der Gracht, the design team production chief, sent Bergstrom’s certificate of membership to California, where the latter was working on War Department projects. “He was being kicked around quite a lot,” recalled van der Gracht, who included a letter to Bergstrom saluting the “marvelous job” he had done. Bergstrom sent back a note saying he was “exceedingly” grateful for the kind words. “He apparently didn’t get very many of those,” van der Gracht said.

  Van der Gracht, who had played such a crucial role organizing the drafting force in the Eastern Airlines hangar, had already left the job, and so had many others. The war was only beginning for many of them, from the lowest workers to the top project leaders.

  Van der Gracht had been commissioned as a captain in the Army Air Forces in September 1942, after most of the drafting work was completed. “You are due a large part of the credit which we may receive,” Renshaw told him upon his departure. Van der Gracht was sent to the Libyan desert, serving as intelligence officer for a squadron of Liberator bombers. When the squadron was wiped out attacking the Ploiesti oil fields in Romania in 1943, van der Gracht had the “curious experience” of being assigned to the Pentagon he had helped design, this time to brief officers on lessons learned from the bombing raids. In September 1944, after being assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, he parachuted into Nazi-occupied Holland to gather intelligence on German forces; when Allied forces swept into Roermond, van der Gracht rode with the troops and personally liberated his mother and sister.

  McShain’s performance directing men and machinery building the Pentagon had so impressed Somervell that the general tried to enlist the McShain organization into the Army. Soon after the Pentagon was completed, McShain recalled, Somervell called the builder into his office with a proposition: He would create an engineer construction regiment overseas with McShain in command as a brigadier general, and various key men in the McShain organization would be commissioned as officers. “General McShain” had a pleasing ring to the contractor; he accepted on the spot. His wife and daughter were appalled. More details soon emerged. Somervell did not actually have the power to commission McShain as a general; that would be subject to Senate confirmation. But Somervell assured McShain he could begin immediately as a full colonel. McShain began to suspect, not without cause, that Somervell was trying “to get the work of construction done at the minimum price rather than pay me as a general contractor.” Heeding his wife’s pleas, McShain passed on the offer.

  Renshaw, to his disappointment, was not sent overseas because he lacked experience as a combat engineer. He was promoted to colonel and served successively as District Engineer for Washington and Philadelphia, prestigious posts in the Corps of Engineers. The War Department would award Renshaw the Legion of Merit in 1945; the citation noted that “his leadership, technical ability and sound judgement made possible the early occupancy of the Pentagon.”

  Groves had his eye on a sharp officer in Renshaw’s office: Major Bob Furman. Playing tennis a few months after the Pentagon was completed, Groves ran into Furman at the Army Navy Country Club in Arlington, and he asked the twenty-eight-year-old major what he would work on next. “I told him I didn’t have anything,” Furman recalled. Groves directed that Furman report to his office the following Monday morning: He had some work of a highly classified nature for him.

  Furman consulted Renshaw, unsure what to do. Renshaw’s answer was simple: “If Groves wants you, you better go.” Furman was sworn into the Manhattan Project and given a heavy responsibility: Find out what the Germans were up to in terms of building an atomic bomb. Furman was soon traveling the world on missions as Groves’s chief aide for foreign intelligence. He worked in Italy and Germany with agents for the Office of Strategic Services to track the whereabouts of Axis scientists who might be working on an atomic bomb. He dodged sniper fire in Belgium to help recover uranium ore. He helped plan the capture of Werner Heisenberg, Germany’s leading physicist, in the Bavarian Alps, and later escorted Heisenberg and other German scientists to safe locations in France, Belgium, and England.

  For a while, Major Furman had the most convenient apartment around whenever he returned to Washington. The bedroom and shower in the Pentagon where Furman and the other officers would spend the night while keeping an eye on construction had never been dismantled. It was now in the middle of a large Ordnance Department office bay. “The bedroom was still there, and I had the keys,” Furman recalled. “And I was the only one left.”

  Furman would stay there whenever work brought him to Washington, inevitably getting odd looks when he emerged into the midst of “a clerical beehive” carrying a suitcase. “I’d walk out in the middle of the morning into the Ordnance Department,” he said. “They all wondered what was in that room.” Building administrators eventually wised up, confiscating Furman’s key and later demolishing the bedroom. He had to find new accommodations.

  We take ’em back

  The end of April 1943 brought the first anniversary of the occupation of the Pentagon, and the occasion was marked by another incident of food poisoning. More than a hundred Army officers and employees were left white-faced and weak-kneed on April 27; three dozen were rushed to hospitals. The culprit this time was found to be the butterscotch cream pie. The assessment of the cafeteria director was not reassuring: “The place seems to be jinxed.”

  Yet conditions in the Pentagon were a far cry from those that had greeted the plank walkers on April 30, 1942. The building was no longer a construction site; the mud and dust and noise that had accompanied everyday life had largely disappeared, replaced by an existence that was relatively clean and efficient—even comfortable, once the air-conditioning worked.

  Indeed, compared to most Washingtonians, Pentagon employees had it very good. By July, when a wicked heat wave struck the area, there was a distinct change of tone in some of the press coverage of the building. “Pentagon’s Lucky 30,814 Toil in Air Conditioned Beatitude,” read a Washington Post headline, and the article continued in the same vein:

  Dear War Department: We take ’em back—all of those barbed remarks about the Pentagon that Washington’s civilian populace made between late 1941 and early 1943. Those days, friends, are gone forever; today your happy lot has the rest of the Ca
pital green with envy…. Word has got about that life at the Pentagon isclosely akin to heaven, in comparison with the nonair-conditioned existence required of employes in less swank office buildings.

  Even the Pentagon’s six cafeterias—serving up to 55,000 meals a day—were getting swank. The Army would soon coax master chef Otto Gentsch, president of the Société Culinaire Philanthropique in New York and former chief chef at the Hotel Astor, out of retirement to become production manager for the Pentagon cafeteria system. At the Pentagon, Gentsch forsook dishes such as paté de foie gras and breast of guinea hen under glass for more standard fare, but he cooked with no less passion. “Within the labyrinth of the vast Pentagon culinary department he whisks about the experimental kitchens concocting corn fritters with the air of a great master preparing an epicurean delight,” the Post reported. “And when Gentsch makes corn fritters, they are no less than that.”

  The layers of dust that had coated the Pentagon had been replaced by a bit of luster, applied by a force of seven hundred janitors and charwomen who mopped the miles of corridors, cleaned the two hundred restrooms, and tidied up around the 21,000 desks and 140,000 chairs. Among those who now found themselves cleaning the Pentagon were former residents of Queen City, the neighborhood destroyed to make way for the building’s road network. Gertrude Jeffress, who had lost the home where she lived with her mother and sister and was now living in a trailer, was too glad to have a job—and too tired from the work—to reflect much on the irony. She worked from “the sub-basement, mezzanine all the way up to the fifth floor,” scrubbing, waxing, and buffing endless corridors, cleaning eight bathrooms a night, and emptying countless waste cans.

  Mockery of the labyrinth design was now leavened by a general recognition of the efficiency of the rings and corridors that run like spokes through the building. Despite the Pentagon’s size, it took no more than seven minutes to walk between any two points in the building—if one did not get lost on the way.

  The road network around the building was finished and traffic flowed reasonably well. Construction was also under way for a seventeen-mile “superhighway” running through northern Virginia and leading directly to the Pentagon. The road—the Shirley Memorial Highway—was the first limited-access highway to be built in Virginia and the beginning of what would become the commonwealth’s interstate system.

  Even the once-ugly courtyard was looking good, with grass growing on former mud patches and trees blooming. In the center of the courtyard, the Army erected a large tent purchased from a Coney Island resort. A lunch bar served sandwiches, and tables shaded by gaily colored beach umbrellas were scattered about. Secretaries spent their lunch breaks sunning their legs on the grass. Military bands and singing groups put on occasional concerts. The Star likened the scene to a Riviera resort.

  Movie stars came calling, promoting war bonds or other patriotic endeavors. Actor Clark Gable, then a captain in the Army Air Forces, nearly brought the Pentagon to a standstill. “His appearance upset the work of hundreds of War Department women workers who swarmed out of their offices, ignored the shouts of federal policemen to ‘keep moving,’ and sighed as the former actor hurried through the halls,” The New York Times reported. Famous faces—Bob Hope, Cary Grant, and Charles Lindbergh among them—were spotted coming through the River entrance. Eleanor Roosevelt had a special pass allowing her to enter without challenge, but Vienna-born Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, late for an appointment with Stimson, was given the treatment by a suspicious receptionist. “That man was born in Austria,” the receptionist remarked to the next visitor. “You can’t be too careful these days.”

  On the concourse, a large Walgreen’s drugstore opened in May, followed a few months later by a Brentano’s bookstore. Most astonishing of all, from the standpoint of the plank walkers, was the Pentagon Shopping Service, which opened in June, promising to purchase whatever employees needed in their lives, from lingerie to lawnmowers. War Department personnel officers, worried about absenteeism among Pentagon employees, teamed up with merchants to provide the shopping service, billed as the first of its kind in the country. A curtained window display, changed weekly, showed off the latest wares from Washington’s shops. A staff of five trained shoppers—all attractive, smartly dressed women, it seemed—were at the ready. Employees would describe what they needed or leaf through stacks of fashion magazines and newspaper ads kept at the counter; the women would telephone shops around town to find the item and have it delivered to the Pentagon. The item could be picked up the following day, with no service charge.

  Pentagon employees flocked to the center, gathering in groups to admire the dresses and hats on the display-window mannequins, and they placed hundreds of orders each day. Baby equipment topped the list, with underwear a close second. Almost anything could be requested, except gasoline, groceries, and other rationed items. The best customer was an Army major who visited every day to order classical music records. At least ten orders for black chiffon nightgowns were placed each month, always by men. One man asked the shoppers to find him an “economical” engagement ring; another asked for a marriage license.

  Tall and erect, General Henri Honoré Giraud, the French hero who had escaped Nazi captivity and replaced Admiral Darlan as high commissioner of French forces in North and West Africa, was taken on a tour of the Pentagon during his visit to Washington in July. An officer escorting him boasted that an office girl could buy both a wedding ring and a baby carriage within the Pentagon walls. “Which do they buy first?” the Frenchman asked.

  Somervell’s Folly

  In the spring of 1943, Albert Engel began poking around the Pentagon again. The crusading Michigan congressman had taken a hiatus after his initial attack on Somervell and the War Department in October 1942. But his interest was piqued by the news accounts of the Pentagon landscaping. When Engel demanded more information about expenses in April, Groves sounded the alarm, ordering Renshaw to compile data “for explanation and defense against any new charges which might be made by Congressman Engel.”

  Equally alarming, Somervell’s old foe, Senator Harry Truman, began investigating the Pentagon in June. The chief counsel of Truman’s special committee investigating national defense peppered the War Department with requests for information about construction costs and the disposition of surplus material from the job, but Truman’s inquiry petered out after several months. “I was watching you,” a smiling Truman later told McShain, adding his investigators found no grounds for criticism of the Pentagon job. Engel, however, kept up his investigation, and by early 1944 it was coming to a head.

  On Capitol Hill, representatives Clifton Woodrum of Virginia and Lane Powers of New Jersey, Somervell’s loyal allies, passed on intelligence about a pending attack by Engel. Groves recalled Renshaw to Washington from Philadelphia, where he was then stationed. At 3 P.M. on the afternoon of February 29, 1944, Engel took the floor of the House, condemning the Pentagon project during a thirty-minute speech in language even more strident than he had used in 1942. Government funds had been “juggled in a wholesale flouting of the will of Congress,” Engel said. “Anyone must be a wizard to follow the ouija board methods that the War Department must have followed.”

  Engel mocked the accounting machinations that kept the building cost at $49 million—a “charmed figure,” as the congressman put it. Yet Engel’s proclaimed cost of $86 million in the ten-thousand-word report he submitted to the House was as dubious as the War Department’s claims. In addition to the $6 million the War Department spent on access roads and parking on the Pentagon grounds, Engel included $16.9 million spent on highway construction for miles around the building by the Public Roads Administration.

  Somervell telephoned Renshaw from the Pentagon after the speech, asking about the reaction “our friend” Engel had received. “Did he get any attention or any hand or anything?” Somervell asked.

  “He got a little applause at the end,” Renshaw reported.

  “He did?” Som
ervell was disappointed. “I suppose the newspapers will be over here and they’ll goad the hell out of us and we will have to say something,” he sighed. Renshaw tactfully suggested that they not incite Engel, and Somervell held his fire.

  Engel nonetheless kept up his assault. A week later he gave a second speech with a new litany of outrages. The Pentagon was costing $3.8 million a year to maintain and operate. In 1943 alone, Engel reported, the War Department had spent $87,360 to replace 249,600 burned-out lightbulbs, $75,000 to mow the lawn, and $337,260 to heat and cool the building. The War Department did not challenge the numbers but complained in an internal report that the criticism was unfair. “The figures for operating costs are impressive only because the size of the building is impressive—there is none like it anywhere in the world,” the report said.

  Once again, Engel’s attacks generated headlines. Wire service stories reporting his charges of “outrageous waste” were carried in newspapers around the country. “The rotund (225 pounds) and ripsnorting Al Engel landed on the Pentagon Building like a financial blockbuster,” Newsweek reported.

  Even the German press took note. A Berlin newspaper labeled the Pentagon “Das Somervell-Narrenhaus”—the Somervell Madhouse—and identified the general as the “ruler” of the building. “The corridors are said to be so long that the messengers had to use bicycles,” the Berliner Börsenzeitung reported. “It has already cost the American taxpayers the tiny sum of 80 million dollars, and there is still no end in sight,” the paper happily added. “Appearances seem to indicate that another Army scandal may be imminent.”