by Steve Vogel
Marshall went to work rebuilding the U.S. armed forces. Three months shy of his seventieth birthday when he took office, Marshall did not have the same vigor as in his younger years, and he left much of the detail to his deputy, Bob Lovett. Yet his commanding presence restored order and had an electrifying effect on morale in the building.
Inside the Pentagon, the population of workers in the building soared. By December 1950, six months after the war began, it had jumped 6,000 to 31,000, and would later reach 33,000. Security posters, unseen since World War II, reappeared on corridor walls. In their secure war room, the Joint Chiefs held regular 2 A.M. “telecon” conferences with MacArthur in Japan. From outside, long rows of lights could be seen burning from windows until late in the night. The wartime Pentagon was back.
He served America magnificently
Marshall was not the only giant of World War II to whom Truman turned. The war in Korea took a desperate turn in November 1950, when more than 300,000 Chinese soldiers launched a massive offensive across the Yalu River, striking a devastating blow at advancing American troops. In the spring of 1951, with the war settling into a long and brutal fight, Truman, through an intermediary, asked Brehon Burke Somervell to take over leadership of the Defense Production Administration, an agency set up to marshal U.S. industry behind military production.
Somervell was astonished. “In view of my experience with the gentleman, this came, to put it mildly, as a complete surprise,” Somervell later wrote to Marshall. Just in January, he had given a speech criticizing Truman’s foreign policy as “vacillating” and “nebulous.” The years had done little to erase the bitterness he felt at Truman’s criticism of Army construction and the Canol oil project. Still, Somervell gave the request serious thought before turning it down, saying he would reconsider if full-scale war broke out between the world powers.
To Somervell’s further amazement, Truman then wrote him a gracious personal letter saying he was “greatly disappointed” by the decision and asking him to reconsider. “[I]t is an assignment for which your previous experience and magnificent contributions have proved you are so eminently fitted,” Truman wrote Somervell on April 23, 1951. “You said you would accept the assignment in the event of all out war. The emergency conditions facing us today are as serious as they would be in that eventuality. The Korean difficulty is enlarging in scope and is obviously very serious.”
Somervell agonized over the decision and came close to accepting before writing Truman a polite note declining the post. His sense of duty—though great—was not as unconditional as Marshall’s. Somervell was entirely a creature of total war, and he doubted that Truman—who had termed Korea a “police action”—was willing to follow through with the commitment Somervell would want. Further, skeptical of Truman’s motives, Somervell thought that the president might be setting him up to take the fall if the mobilization failed.
“He wished to make me ‘Czar of the Pacific’ to clean up the mess left in the wake of the war and otherwise take a terrific beating on all fronts,” Somervell wrote Marshall. “…Though it was very embarrassing at the time, I managed to talk myself out of it and now it seems very funny.”
After his retirement from the Army, Somervell had been recruited by Richard K. Mellon in March 1946 to take over Koppers Company, a Pittsburgh manufacturing conglomerate owned by the Mellon family. Koppers was considered “the dog” of the family’s vast holdings, but Mellon knew from wartime experience that Somervell was just the “scorcher” he needed. In short order Somervell streamlined the company’s management, diversified its operations, and more than tripled its profits.
Somervell, belying his reputation as a publicity hound, had made no effort to stay in the public eye since retiring from the Army. He told a friend that he had “made up my mind that I am going to be the only commander [from World War II] who does not write a book.” Somervell had largely stayed out of the great postwar debates on military organization and strategy.
Somervell did take satisfaction in a growing if grudging public acknowledgment that the Pentagon had been worth building. “Gen. Somervell’s ‘Folly’ Proves Itself Despite Jeers of Critics,” a headline in the Washington Post declared in 1954. The accompanying article noted “mounting evidence that the general might even have known what he was doing when he poured something like 83 million dollars into one man’s conviction that the military minds of this nation could best plot for its defense under a single roof—no matter how big the roof had to be.” The Star noted that the Pentagon had “become in the short span of less than 10 years as familiar a world institution as the centuries-old Tower of London.”
After a friend sent him a magazine article entitled “The Pentagon Makes Sense,” Somervell replied that “…it would have satisfied my soul to see an article such as the one you forwarded signed by our buddy Al Engle (sic) or one H.S.T. [Harry S. Truman.]”
To an artist who painted his portrait and suggested that it hang in the Pentagon, Somervell in August 1954 happily acknowledged that “the Pentagon is my brain-child,” and he agreed that “the river entrance of the Pentagon would be a fine place indeed” for the portrait to hang. That never happened.
Several weeks later, Somervell suffered a severe heart attack and went to Florida with his wife, Louise, to recuperate. Fat Styer, visiting him in Ocala that fall, found that while his old boss had slowed physically, “the same old time sparkle shot from his flashing eyes, the humor and gaiety of spirit were undiminished.” By January, Somervell was complaining bitterly to his longtime friend William Delano of the boredom caused by enforced rest. After breakfast on the morning of February 13, 1955, Somervell handed his wife a cartoon he had torn from the morning newspaper and then slumped over in his living room chair. A doctor was summoned from next door but it was too late. Somervell was dead of a heart attack at age sixty-two.
Newspapers were filled with tributes. “Gen. Brehon B. Somervell was one of the ablest officers the United States Army has produced,” The Washington Post said. “Atomic bombs and Alcan Highway—Pentagon Building and Red Ball Express—name any of the great achievements of World War II and somewhere the hand of Somervell was in it,” wrote the Memphis Commercial Appeal. “Thrift is admirable, and so are tactfulness and gentleness,” said the Baltimore Sun. “But when the guns are roaring, certain other qualities are needed. Somervell knew what they were, and he had them to a superlative degree. He served America magnificently.”
Somervell would soon fade from memory, the fate of most logisticians. Yet he was a towering figure among American military leaders in World War II, one who deserved to be remembered in the front rank of Allied architects of victory. George Marshall later described what he would do if he were placed in charge of another global war: “I would start out looking for another General Somervell the very first thing I did, and so would anybody else who went through that struggle on this side.”
On February 17, 1955, Somervell was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Marshall—who kept his word and retired in September 1951 after one year as secretary of defense—was there to salute the man who had housed and supplied his great army. A caparisoned horse with reversed boots in the stirrups followed the horse-drawn caisson bearing Somervell’s casket from the Fort Myer Chapel to the gravesite. The general was buried next to his first wife, Anna, at the spot he had chosen thirteen years earlier, below Pierre L’Enfant’s tomb. From there, noted the Post, Somervell was “overlooking the ponderous Pentagon which stands as a memorial to him.”
Water flowed like money
Somervell’s folly had by then become a tourist attraction. Visitors would sometimes wander into the Pentagon, gawking in the concourse, strolling in the corridors, and enjoying the now-lovely courtyard. The building had entered the realm of legend, its statistics cited like rote: It had three times the office space of the Empire State Building. The U.S. Capitol could slide into any one of its five wedges. Covering thirty-four acres, the Pentagon had the largest ground area of a
ny office building in the world; a walk around its exterior walls was a journey of almost a mile. There were seventeen and one-half miles of corridors and seven acres of windows.
There were no organized tours of the Pentagon, and no passes were required to enter the building. The light security was odd; the Korean War had ended with an armistice in 1953 that left that country divided in two, but Cold War tensions were higher than ever. Among the most appreciative of the easy access was Pawel Monat. “Anyone, from a four-star general to a fifteen-year-old boy, can get into the Pentagon,” Monat later wrote.
Monat was no ordinary tourist, though. From 1955 to 1958, he was the military attaché to the Polish Embassy in Washington and a Communist spy. “One of our best sources of loose talk about military subjects was—of all places—the Pentagon,” Monat wrote after he defected to the United States.
Monat and his aides, as well as military attachés of other countries, would visit the Pentagon frequently. They would browse in the concourse shops, buy stamps at the post office, roam contentedly among stacks of books in the Army library, and line up for food at the snack bars. All the while they would eavesdrop. Monat wrote:
Two officers meeting in a hall confirmed a rumor we had heard that an infantry regiment was undergoing special nuclear training. A colonel told a friend that he had just been ordered to evaluate a new weapon that we had never heard of. We got our first real hint about the reorganization of the Army into new, streamlined ‘pentomic’ divisions in the Pentagon concourse. And one of my assistants first heard about the new B-70 airplane from an Air Force colonel who mentioned it to a colleague of his as the two of them stood waiting for hamburgers at a Pentagon snack bar.
The information “gave Warsaw—and Moscow—an incredibly intimate insight into the daily workings of the American high command,” he added. It was so easy to work at the Pentagon that Monat wanted to set up a secret drop in the building where classified material could be left for the spies. He found an ideal spot in a crack in the wall near the bus tunnel. But his superiors in Warsaw refused to approve the operation, finding it inconceivable that the Pentagon would be so lax. “Warsaw was wrong, of course,” Monat wrote. “It would have been a snap.”
It was not just spies who found the Pentagon a convenient place to do business. In the early 1950s, an insurance salesman found an unlocked room in the Pentagon that was used at night by the cleaning crews but was empty during the daytime. He set up an office inside and operated for two years before being detected by the authorities. There was a desk, telephone, and a ready supply of stationery. “That was all he needed to organize a very prosperous little business, convenient to his Pentagon clients,” Charles B. Overman, Carl Muvehill’s successor as Pentagon superintendent, later said. Overman got wind of the scam and ordered the room locked.
Building supervisors had more serious concerns than rogue insurance salesmen. They discovered in the 1950s that the Pentagon was sinking. More precisely, the wet fill that McShain’s crews had used to raise the low ground on the east side of the building was settling below the concrete slab, causing occasional breaks in the sewer lines, water mains, and electrical cables running through the basement. Crews reinforced the pilings along a seventy-five-foot strip under the River entrance in 1958, but it did not seem to help. A burst water pipe in April 1959 flooded the basement and first floor with up to three inches of water, routing two thousand Pentagonians from the building. “Water flowed like money at the big building,” wrote a wag at United Press International.
Three months later, the Pentagon was struck by its most serious calamity since opening. On July 2, 1959, beneath the concourse in a first floor storage room in the D Ring, a lightbulb ignited a stack of acetate magnetic tapes. Some seven thousand computer tapes—many containing classified Air Force information—went up in flames, creating a dense, acrid smoke. A five-alarm fire was soon raging, and more than seventy fire trucks and some three hundred firefighters from Virginia, Washington, and Maryland descended on the Pentagon.
Just getting to the fire was a tremendous problem. Firefighters dragged hoses down long corridors against “smoke so thick it was hard to walk against,” Arlington Fire Chief Joseph H. Clements told reporters. It took so long to get to the fire that they had little oxygen left to fight the blaze. Choking firefighters were driven back time and again; some were overcome and had to be carried out. Security guards had been unable to tell the firefighters how to even get to the blaze.
When the Pentagon had been completed sixteen years earlier, its enormous bays and concrete slab construction made it “about as fireproof as a building can be made,” Clements said. Since then, at the insistence of defense officials and military officers who wanted private offices, the building had been honeycombed with wood partitions, and floors and ceiling covered with combustible material. Corridors that had been sealed off to limit access or increase office space acted as dead-end chimneys, confining smoke and gasses. False ceilings screened the blaze from firemen, forcing them to jackhammer manhole-sized holes in the concourse floor so they could snake hoses down to douse the heart of the fire. With firemen desperate for more pressure in their hose lines, Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy ordered the building’s entire water supply put at their disposal.
After four hours, the fire was brought under control. Some thirty thousand workers had been evacuated, although the most essential—including those operating the command centers—stayed on duty. The damaged area, equivalent to four city blocks, looked like a collapsed mine shaft, with blackened beams, twisted steel, and wet, hip-deep debris. Some $6 million worth of brand-new IBM computing machines—some of the first computers installed in the Pentagon—were destroyed or buried under charred partitions. Smoke, heat exhaustion, and poisonous fumes sent thirty-two firefighters to the hospital, and dozens more were treated at the scene.
The fire of 1959 had given a chilling first taste of what it would be like to fight a major inferno in the Pentagon.
I don’t give a damn what John Paul Jones would have done
By October 24, 1962, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, red-eyed and hoarse, was grabbing catnaps on a cot in his office dressing room. It had been nine days since the United States had learned from U-2 surveillance photographs that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, ninety miles from the American mainland. U.S. forces were on maximum alert, with ballistic missiles and bombers targeting the Soviet Union and Cuba. Squadrons of destroyers, aircraft carriers, antisubmarine ships, and picket planes had placed a naval quarantine around Cuba. McNamara felt the weight of history on his shoulders as he sat at the giant Pershing desk in Room 3E-880. Directly behind his chair hung a portrait of Jim Forrestal, tight-lipped and intense, seemingly watching his every move.
A private elevator took McNamara down to the National Military Command Center, which had opened only three weeks earlier; it was an initiative he and his team of analytical “whiz kids” had taken to establish worldwide command and control at the Pentagon. The Joint War Room had been rebuilt and combined with reconnaissance, intelligence, and communications facilities. The timing had proven fortuitous.
A fanciful version of the Pentagon war room, depicted two years later in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, would cement a crazed image of the place in the minds of millions around the world. The reality was strange enough. Sitting at a large oval-shaped brown table in the green-carpeted main conference room, McNamara and the joint chiefs could routinely speak by secure telephone with major field commanders. Intelligence photographs, maps, and status reports were projected onto a large screen covering one wall. Screens in the corner showed updated information from the Strategic Air Command, or the latest images from missile-warning radar systems in Alaska, Greenland, and Scotland.
Yet the National Military Command Center did not have the answers McNamara wanted on the evening of October 24. He was infuriated that the Navy had not immediately alerted him ab
out National Security Agency reports that some of the cargo ships in a Soviet flotilla sailing toward Cuba had mysteriously altered course. Moreover, McNamara was worried the Navy was acting too aggressively. In an address to the nation two days earlier, President John F. Kennedy had called the operation a quarantine, aimed at only stopping ships suspected of carrying military cargo, rather than a full-scale blockade. The difference was more than semantics. “It was a means of telling [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev we had to get the missiles out of there without going to war,” McNamara later said. The secretary thought the chief of naval operations, Admiral George Anderson, did not fully appreciate the difference.
At 9:45 that evening, McNamara and the deputy defense secretary, Roswell Gilpatric, went up to the fourth floor and marched down the corridor to the Navy’s command center, known as Flag Plot, which was crowded with senior Navy officers monitoring the quarantine. One wall was covered with a large chart that plotted the positions of Navy ships along the quarantine line. Studying the chart, McNamara spotted a marker showing one ship off by itself, far from the line. “What’s it doing there?” he asked. McNamara was stunned when Anderson told him the ship was trailing a Soviet F-class submarine and holding it down at that location. To the secretary, this was exactly the kind of action that could start an incident that might spin out of control. Anderson insisted the submarines represented a potential threat to Navy warships and had to be trailed. Struggling to control his temper, McNamara quizzed Anderson on the exact details of how the ships would respond to different scenarios.
