The Pentagon: A History

by Steve Vogel

  The chief of staff was the most trusted American military man since George Washington, Time magazine wrote. Command of the invasion of Europe—and the glory that fell on Eisenhower’s shoulders—could have been his for the asking, but Marshall was of too superb and self-sacrificing character to put his wishes above the country’s needs. “I didn’t feel I could sleep at ease if you were out of Washington,” Roosevelt told Marshall. Churchill called him “the true organizer of victory.” To Stimson, Marshall was simply “the finest soldier I have ever known.”

  Somervell’s departure was delayed until December while he recovered from surgery on his hernia. Back on duty, he testified before Congress one last time to support a War Department proposal for unification of the armed services.

  Marshall was disappointed by Somervell’s decision to retire, believing that, at fifty-three, Somervell could still do much for the Army. Demobilization was itself going to be an enormous job. Yet Marshall did not try to change Somervell’s mind, or, if he did, he did not succeed. His faith in the man who had put a roof over his Army and then supplied it around the globe was undiminished by Canol or anything else. Somervell “shook the cobwebs out of their pants,” Marshall later said. “What he did was a miracle,” he added. “I depended on him very, very heavily.”

  From Highhold, still recuperating from his heart attack, Stimson wrote Somervell a personal letter in November. “I send to you not only my warmest thanks but my congratulations on your magnificent accomplishments during the war,” Stimson wrote. “You know without my trying to put it now in words how much I depended on you in every big problem which has come up.”

  Patterson, who had succeeded Stimson as secretary of war, presented Somervell with a second Oak Leaf Cluster, following the Distinguished Service Medal he had been awarded in World War I and the first Oak Leaf Cluster he had received in 1942 for his performance directing Army construction. “In organizing and directing the world-wide supply lines on which our troops depended for their offensive power, General Somervell performed a service without parallel in military history,” Patterson said.

  There were rumors that he would seek political office, perhaps even run for president, but Somervell quashed them. “I have ambitions, but none is political,” he told reporters. Private industry beckoned, but that could wait.

  “I’m going to rest,” Somervell told a friend. “For six weeks, I’m going to just sit on the porch. After that, I’m going to start rocking—slowly.”

  After they were all gone, Katherine King, Somervell’s longtime secretary, still at the Pentagon, wrote him a letter. “[N]ow that the play is over and all of the actors have left the stage and the curtain is about to fall on the most gigantic performance in the history of the world, we can only leave with the greatest feeling of pride….”

  Hell in a handbasket

  It was well into October before Major Bob Furman returned from overseas. After Germany’s surrender, Furman, now thirty, had been sent by Groves to escort uranium components of “Little Boy”—the first atomic bomb to be dropped on Japan—from Los Alamos to the B-29 base at Tinian, a speck of land in the northern Marianas. Furman had taken grim satisfaction in watching the Enola Gay take off from Tinian and disappear from view, destination Hiroshima. “I was pretty much fed up with the war,” he said. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he had been sent to Japan to tour universities and corporations with a Manhattan Project scientist, trying to discover what progress the Japanese had made toward building an atomic bomb. Back in Washington, he found no one cared where he had been or what he had been doing. “Everybody had quit and gone home,” he said.

  Furman was eager to do the same—he wanted to start his own construction business—and he put in his papers to get out of the Army. “The war was just an interruption for most of us,” Furman recalled nearly sixty years later. “We all went to war. We all went back to our dreams and ambitions. We lived through the war to get life going again.”

  The Pentagon was put on what was called a “partial peacetime basis” in September. The number of guards was cut in half, and visitors no longer needed escorts. “Instructions will be given visitors on how to find offices with the hope they do not get lost,” the Star reported. Soon even the requirement for building passes was dropped.

  Before long, Lieutenant General Thomas T. Handy, Eisenhower’s deputy chief of staff, was complaining of the “slovenly appearance” of military personnel in the building. “During the war days, stenographers clicked along the corridors bearing trays of coffee and sandwiches for officers who had neither the time nor the inclination to walk the distance of several city blocks,” the Star reported. “Now it is rather a common sight to see a colonel in shirtsleeves marching down the corridor bearing his own tray, and even an occasional coatless general has been seen outside his office.” Handy ordered inspectors to patrol Pentagon corridors, beverage bars, and cafeterias to look for dress-code violators.

  The population of the building was about 25,000, considerably less than its wartime peaks. The Pentagon had never been able to accommodate forty thousand people, as planned, a projection based on allowing about eighty square feet per worker. The big offices given to senior War Department officials and the many general officers in the Pentagon far exceeded that average; even many junior officers grabbed extra space. Areas meant for workers were used as storage or meeting rooms; in some offices, partitions divided the big bays into smaller fiefdoms, further decreasing the amount of usable space. Still, the number of workers in the building had been generally well over 30,000 and may at times have reached 35,000, including building maintenance workers, guards, and janitors.

  Navigating the Pentagon remained a puzzle; a favored nickname now was “the concrete cobweb.” Even Eisenhower was disoriented the first time he tried to return to his office by himself from the general officers’ mess. “So, hands in pockets and trying to look as if I were out for a carefree stroll around the building, I walked,” Eisenhower later wrote. “I walked and walked, encountering neither landmarks nor people who looked familiar. One had to give the building his grudging admiration; it had apparently been designed to confuse any enemy who might infiltrate it.”

  Eisenhower finally approached a group of female stenographers and quietly asked one, “Can you tell me where the office of the Chief of Staff is?”

  “You just passed it about a hundred feet back, General Eisenhower,” she replied.

  As Eisenhower noted with chagrin, “By grapevine, the Army’s astoundingly efficient bush telegraph, the word got around the Pentagon quickly.”

  What to do with the Pentagon

  The question now was what to do with the Pentagon. The belief was still common in many quarters that, once the war ended, the War Department would have no possible need for a building so large. There had been no shortage of suggestions, most of them sardonic, of what to do with the place. The Pentagon could shelter a second bonus army; the government could rent out the space to all the generals who wanted to write their wartime memoirs; six-day bicycle races could be staged in the building’s outer ring. Life magazine reported, tongue in cheek, that the Pentagon might host peace talks after the war because it was “the only building in the world large enough to hold all the factions that will have a say-so on the treaty.”

  Other suggestions were more serious. A Maryland congressman proposed that the Pentagon be converted into the world’s largest hospital—with a projected capacity of fifteen thousand beds—serving both disabled veterans and the general population. The ramps connecting the different floors made the building well-suited to be a hospital, proponents argued. Truman considered a proposal to move the Veterans Administration into the Pentagon. Others envisioned the Pentagon as an enormous university. A congressman from Massachusetts introduced a bill to convert the Pentagon into a national college for war veterans, arguing that the building was a white elephant and that the cost to the government “will assume fantastic proportions unless we find some good use
for it.”

  As far as the Army was concerned, it was keeping the Pentagon. Postwar plans were being made on this assumption. Whatever the price had been—the $63.6 million the War Department insisted was a fair figure for the whole project, including roads; the $86 million Albert Engel claimed was the true cost; or the $75.2 million that the War Department actually spent on construction and is probably the best estimate—the value of the building was obvious, at least to the Army.

  “It is probable that when the history of the present war is written and the full value of the Pentagon in the prosecution of the war is disclosed, those who had even the smallest responsibility for its construction will be prouder than ever of their part in this work,” the Office of the Chief of Engineers wrote in an internal forty-one-page rebuttal to Engel, refuting the congressman’s accusations line by line.

  However, notes compiled in preparing the report admitted that the Army had not been above board in revealing the Pentagon’s cost. The notes, written by an unknown War Department official, listed a series of “Problems Related to Pentagon Project,” among them:

  Failure to tell Congress true extent of exceeding original appropriation in summer of 1942.

  Original plan of building was conceived too hurriedly (July 17–22, 1941); hence original estimate of $35 million was too low even for the first site….

  The juggling of figures around to show a desired cost figure instead of listing true cost of each main item separately and giving true total…

  No such admission was made publicly, of course. The War Department produced several confidential reports in the later years of the war justifying the Pentagon—including one ordered by Somervell when Senator Truman had been sniffing around the project. Together the reports made a strong case for the building’s effectiveness, and they argued the cost overruns were unavoidable due to changes to the site and size of the building. Ironically, Somervell and Groves were so defensive about the Pentagon that these reports were never released to the public, out of fear that they would merely stir up more controversy.

  “Imagine what the War Department’s situation would have been—today in the midst of grueling war—if the Pentagon had not been built,” read a draft of one of the reports presented by Renshaw to Somervell in January 1944. “It is the nerve center of the military effort…. The Army does not have to imagine the handicaps resulting from being scattered in many different buildings in different locations. It remembers the days before the Pentagon was built. The speed and efficiency it has helped to produce has saved and will save the lives of many of our soldiers.”

  It was a claim impossible to prove, yet entirely justifiable. The top echelons of the War Department’s command, control, and communications were concentrated at the Pentagon in a manner that previously had been impossible. It is hard to imagine that the days, hours, and even minutes shaved off decisions—from putting new weapons into the hands of soldiers to the formulation of broad strategy—did not make a difference and did not save American lives.

  Still, the Pentagon had failed miserably in one goal: putting the Army headquarters under one roof. While the high command and the administrative and staff activities requiring the most interaction and centralization were housed in the Pentagon, the War Department had grown even beyond the scope of Somervell’s ample imagination. The Pentagon was able to provide only about half the seven million square feet of office space the War Department needed in Washington in 1945. At war’s end, the Army was scattered in more than thirty buildings around town.

  The eighth wonder of the world

  Little more than two weeks after Japan’s surrender, a new suggestion for what to do with the Pentagon was unveiled by the building’s commandant, Colonel Henry W. Isbell. On August 31, 1945, War Times, the Pentagon’s weekly newspaper, published the commandant’s proposal to make the building “the eighth wonder of the world.”

  An enormous five-sided, twenty-four-story office tower would be built in the Pentagon courtyard. It would add as much as two million square feet of space, room for another ten to twelve thousand workers. The tower would “solve the government’s space problems for the next 50 years,” boasted Isbell, who included a familiar pitch: With the tower, the Pentagon could house the War Department “under one roof.”

  Washington newspapers picked up the story, publishing preliminary sketches prepared by a War Department architect that showed the massive tower rising improbably to the sky from the Pentagon’s courtyard. A dome would sit atop the building, holding an eternal light that would burn as a memorial to Americans killed in the war. “What Washington’s skyline needs is something that sticks up,” Isbell told reporters. “Why, the Washington Monument is nothing but a needle and a towering skyline is practically an American symbol.”

  The town was aghast. For one thing, the proposal carried the implicit suggestion that the War Department would remain so large after the war that the Pentagon needed to be expanded rather than shut down. Then there was the tower itself. “The Pentagon as it stands is pretty bad and a tower wouldn’t make it any better,” Louis Justement, a prominent Washington architect, told the Star. Frederic Delano had retired three years earlier, but his old board, the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, went on record as being horrified by the idea. After a few weeks of public ridicule, the tower idea faded away. The proposals to convert the Pentagon into a hospital or university fared no better.

  It was George Marshall who had the best sense of what direction the Pentagon might take after the war. Marshall had never given up his belief that the Army and Navy should be together under one roof. In May 1944, two weeks before D-Day, he and Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, who shared Marshall’s conviction of the need to bring the services together, decided to give it another go.

  “Following up on our conversation of Tuesday last—and apropos of our endeavors—which came to naught—to get together in the Pentagon Building in the autumn of 1942, I wish to confirm that I am agreeable to make another try at it,” King wrote Marshall on May 26, 1944. “I still think—as I did then—that it is worth while to consider whether one service cannot, in some lines, do everything that the other service requires.”

  Marshall’s staff, still bitter about the 1942 episode, was not as magnanimous as their chief. Some thought they were being set up. “I believe the Navy is bluffing and has no intention of moving,” Major General Otto L. Nelson told Marshall’s deputy, Lieutenant General Joseph McNarney. Even Stimson, so enthusiastic a proponent at the time, bowed out, declining comment when Marshall showed him King’s letter. The 1944 effort died because of staff inertia.

  Now, with the war over, the time seemed ripe to try yet again. In November 1945, during his last days at the Pentagon, Marshall once more pushed the idea. “I think it would be a tragic mistake if we do not make every positive effort to put the Army [and] Navy under one roof,” he wrote. Patterson, now secretary of war, picked up the effort and took it a step further, inviting both the Navy and the State Department to move into the Pentagon.

  Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who had taken office after Frank Knox died in April 1944, was cool to the idea, telling Patterson it made little sense for the Navy to move people into the Pentagon at a time both services were cutting jobs. The State Department likewise declined the offer. For now, the Pentagon remained the exclusive province of the Army.

  If we get a decent peace

  Franklin D. Roosevelt had also left behind his wishes for the Pentagon. One month before he traveled to Yalta—where, ill and exhausted, he met with Churchill and Stalin for a final conference on the fate of Europe—and three months before his death at Warm Springs, the president reiterated his vision for the building. “It has been my thought that after the war is ended all the personnel records of the Armed Forces should be placed in the Pentagon Building,” Roosevelt instructed Harold Smith, his budget director, in a memorandum written on January 8, 1945.

  Roosevelt had never given u
p his pet scheme to convert the Pentagon into an archives after the war. The War Department, as he had insisted in the past, would then move into the New War Department Building in Foggy Bottom, which would be expanded. The Navy Department would move into a similar building to be constructed next door. “The plans are ready to go ahead with,” the president told Smith.

  “The War Department will doubtless object to giving up the Pentagon Building, but it is much too large for them,” Roosevelt added, “if we get a decent peace.”

  An officer shows Brazilian visitors a model of the Pentagon in the concourse during a post-war tour of the building in 1946.

  I want to take the oath

  At 9:45 A.M. on the morning of September 17, 1947, James V. Forrestal decided he could wait no longer. “Get the Chief Justice down here at noon,” the secretary of Navy directed his staff. “I want to take the oath.” Aides rushed to round up senior military commanders, senators, and the press. An assistant scrambled to find a Bible. Forrestal, a lapsed Catholic, did not have one in his office at the Navy Building on Constitution Avenue.

  President Harry Truman had hoped to officiate at the historic occasion, and an elaborate White House ceremony marking the swearing-in of the nation’s first secretary of defense was set for the following week, upon the president’s return from an inter-American conference in Brazil. But as the battleship USS Missouri steamed back from Rio de Janerio on September 15, carrying the president, Truman received a cable from his trusted aide, Clark Clifford. Sent at the behest of Forrestal, it warned of a burgeoning international crisis at a time of deep tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. The communist government of Yugoslavia, locked in a territorial dispute with Italy, was threatening to seize the Adriatic city of Trieste, which was occupied by a small force of American and British troops. Forrestal was concerned that his ambiguous status—confirmed by the Senate but not sworn in—“might signal indecision to Moscow,” Clifford reported.