The Pentagon: A History

by Steve Vogel

  Boredom and hunger did not seem to be much of a problem either. Teams of protesters were dispatched to get food and drink from stores. “Beer came in, sandwiches, it was Saturday night—Saturnalia came in: couples began to neck on the grass, some awed by their audacity, some stimulated by the proximity of the Pentagon,” Mailer wrote. The sweet smell of marijuana was everywhere.

  Ayers celebrated on the Mall plaza with his girlfriend, Diana Oughton. “We sang and chanted, feeling jubilant to have gotten this close,” he later wrote. “I peed on the Pentagon. I burned my draft card a foot from the line of troops, threw the ash on the ground and spit on it.” A rumor—false, an investigation later established—swept the crowd that several soldiers had thrown down their weapons and defected, prompting wild cheers.

  A three-quarters harvest moon rose over the Washington Monument. Around one fire in the middle of a road where the Mall and River sides meet, a group of young demonstrators sang “Down by the Riverside.” Soldiers standing nearby removed their sheathed bayonets from their rifles and fastened them to their waists.

  McNamara, Resor, and McGiffert silently surveyed the scene from the secretary of the Army’s office overlooking the Mall. Colonel Graves stood behind them. The landscape around the Pentagon was lit by bonfires, illuminating the faces of the congregated demonstrators.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” McGiffert remarked.

  Graves struggled to contain himself. “I had to bite my tongue,” he recalled. “I didn’t think it was very beautiful.”

  Swept away

  Whatever beauty there had been was quickly swept away. As the night wore on, Army commanders remained uneasy about the demonstrators still in the Mall plaza. McNamara, however, insisted “it would be a mistake to use force” unless the demonstrators were threatening the safety of others or damaging the building. Shortly before leaving the operations center around 11 P.M., McNamara reiterated that the demonstrators should be left where they were.

  Trouble flared shortly before midnight when the marshals moved to evict demonstrators from a press trailer they had occupied on the plaza. Protesters around the trailer threw empty liquor bottles and kicked at soldiers and marshals. Chief U.S. Marshal James J. P. McShane—a burly former New York City policeman and onetime bodyguard for JFK—decided it was time to crack down. Soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Regiment at Fort Myer, in battle-dress uniforms, moved forward in a wedge, using rifle butts and boots to clear a path through the protesters, hitting them more indiscriminately than had the MPs who previously manned the line. Behind the wedge came the marshals, who clubbed dozens of demonstrators, even some lying passively, and dragged them off to be arrested. The restraint the government forces had shown most of the day disappeared. About three hundred were arrested during the sweep, more than had been during the day.

  The absurdity was inescapable. In the critical first hours at the Pentagon, when a show of strength might have discouraged violence, the commanders’ hands were tied. Then, late at night, at a time when the situation was largely under control and the top command had gone home or was paying little attention, heads were bashed. The coveted image of restraint sought by McNamara and McGiffert—bought at the cost of the soldiers left without barricades and reinforcement when they were needed—was washed away.

  By dawn, only about two hundred demonstrators remained on the cold pavement, Bill Ayers among them. Hundreds more returned during the day, and there were flurries of arrests when protesters tried to push through the lines. At midnight Sunday, when the Mobe’s forty-eight-hour demonstration permit expired, 150 remaining protesters sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as they were arrested, put in vans, and hauled away.

  Within minutes, crews began cleaning up the grounds. Workers carted away truckloads of debris, including beer cans, milk bottles, shoes, shirts, sweaters, and an unusual number of bras and panties. The last of the obscenities and slogans painted on the Pentagon walls were being cleaned off as employees arrived to work Monday morning. Official figures showed forty-five persons injured, seventeen of them seriously enough to be hospitalized. Injuries suffered by protesters included ten head wounds, a broken arm, and assorted hand, leg, and rib injuries; soldiers and marshals received eye and chest injuries. In all, 683 protesters were arrested, resulting in fifty-one jail terms of up to thirty-five days and $8,000 in fines.

  O’Malley was seething, telling General Johnson and other senior Army commanders that his line at the Mall had been left too thin with no backup, and that his troops had taken “extreme physical and oral abuse” from the crowd. The delay caused by the need to get authority to use reserve troops “gravely hampered” the reaction to the violence, he said.

  Nobody could argue with that. “Light military presence was directed in order to avoid bad press and to avoid inciting demonstrators,” Colonel George M. Bush, McGiffert’s military aide, told the under secretary. “I think that was fuzzy thinking…. I think we encouraged them to violation by not showing sufficient force.” McGiffert agreed the restrictions had been a mistake, and two subsequent after-action reports, by the Military District of Washington and the chief of staff’s office, reached the same conclusion.

  Yet for all the missteps and miscalculations, the Army’s defense of the Pentagon could not be called a failure. No one had been killed, and not a shot had been fired, something McNamara remained proud of nearly four decades later. There had been no race riot; a black nationalist rally in Washington had been peaceful. Some three thousand Pentagon employees had been at work during the demonstration—not much less than on a normal Saturday—and all critical operations were manned. The Pentagon had not been shut down.

  The antiwar movement itself won few hearts and minds that weekend, as the acts of a violent and abusive minority of protesters dominated press coverage and overshadowed the respectful message of peace that most demonstrators sought to convey. The 1967 march on the Pentagon would prove a defining moment of division in the country, one that hardened attitudes on both sides.

  A full load

  Robert McNamara was waiting when the limousine carrying President Lyndon B. Johnson pulled into the Pentagon garage beneath the River entrance. It was shortly before noon on February 29, 1968, McNamara’s last day at the Pentagon. Johnson, increasingly at odds with McNamara over how to handle the war, had nominated him several weeks after the Pentagon march to be president of the World Bank. McNamara would later say that he did not know whether he had been fired. (“The answer was that he had been,” David Halberstam wrote in The Best and the Brightest.)

  Out on the River terrace parade ground, a military honor guard and an audience of a thousand dignitaries and Pentagon workers waited under a leaden sky for the farewell ceremony to “the man known as the most efficient secretary in history,” as the Star called him. A hard, cold rain began to fall.

  Johnson and McNamara, accompanied by a retinue of aides, climbed into the elevator to ride up to the second floor, where they would descend the steps leading from the River entrance to join the ceremony. Master Sergeant Clifford Potter, the elevator operator, worked the controls. The elevator, packed with thirteen passengers, lurched and began rising, and then came to a quiet stop. At first no one suspected there was a problem, and then the reality set in: The president of the United States, the secretary of defense, and a host of aides were stuck on an elevator inside the Pentagon. Presidential aide Lawrence Levinson, one of those crammed into the elevator, wondered if a coup were underway.

  McNamara, as always, tried to seize control of the situation. “Let me see if I can’t get this to work,” he said, reaching past the sergeant and pushing buttons on the panel. Nothing happened. McNamara directed Potter to turn the switch from manual to automatic. The elevator did not budge.

  “You better use the telephone,” McNamara said.

  Potter opened the elevator’s telephone box and got a maintenance man on the line. He told him the elevator was stuck.

  “Do you have a full load?” the mainten
ance man asked.

  “We sure do,” the sergeant replied.

  Johnson kept calm, even as a Secret Service agent wedged next to him made frantic radio calls. LBJ jokingly told McNamara he was going to take a line out of his speech saluting the efficiency the secretary had brought to the Pentagon.

  Waiting outside in the rain—it was starting to sleet—Clark Clifford wondered where everybody was. Clifford had been on hand the dramatic day more than twenty years earlier when Jim Forrestal had been sworn in as the nation’s first secretary of defense, and in two days it would be his turn. Since his days as a young naval aide to Truman, Clifford—tall, elegant, perpetually unruffled—had established himself as the premier Wise Man of Washington, and he was Johnson’s choice to succeed McNamara.

  Watching McNamara’s last months in office, Clifford could not help but draw comparisons to Forrestal. He was not the only one. “We mustn’t have another Forrestal,” LBJ said privately in the summer of 1967. McNamara would later deny that he had been on the verge of an emotional collapse, but, he acknowledged, “I was tense as hell.” Late one afternoon during his last year, pacing back and forth in his office as he considered a request to ship more ammunition to Vietnam, McNamara suddenly stopped and stared at the Forrestal portrait. As an aide looked on, McNamara’s body shuddered with silent sobs. At the White House the day before the Pentagon retirement ceremony, McNamara had choked up and been unable to speak when the president awarded him the Medal of Freedom. Johnson had put his arm around him and led the secretary out of the room. To Clifford, silently watching, “it was an eerie echo of what Jim Forrestal had gone through nineteen years earlier.”

  Inside the Pentagon elevator, the air was getting stuffy. They had been stuck for ten minutes. Johnson told aide Will Sparks to wedge a notebook between the outer doors to get more air. Sparks managed to pry the doors open an inch, and, through the crack, they could see a landing, but no one knew which floor. Clint Hill, the exasperated head of the Secret Service detail, radioed his agents to go to every floor and “open the damn doors.” Within two minutes they could see several people on the landing, including a maintenance man who promptly pried the doors open.

  The elevator was still three feet below the landing, so someone grabbed a leather chair and put it inside the elevator, allowing LBJ and the others to climb out. The party found itself on the fourth floor, in the outer office of the under secretary of the Army. With McNamara in the lead, they raced down two flights of steps and came bursting out the River entrance. “At least this one didn’t happen on your watch,” someone quipped to Clifford.

  The ordeal was not over. McNamara, wearing a blue suit with no hat or coat, stood in the driving rain as four 105 mm howitzers fired a nineteen-gun salute. A young aide held an umbrella over Johnson, but all it did was channel water onto McNamara’s glasses, leaving the secretary “standing at attention going blind,” as Johnson later recounted. The president took the podium: “I have heard this building referred to as the puzzle palace,” he said. “Bob McNamara may be the only man who ever found the solution to the puzzle, and he is taking it with him.” It was a nice tribute, but nobody could hear it: The rain short-circuited the public-address system. The climax of the ceremony, a scheduled flyover featuring the new Air Force F-111 all-weather fighter—a controversial McNamara initiative—was canceled due to the rain. Thoroughly soaked and chilled, McNamara saw Johnson off, went inside, and cleared his belongings out of the Pershing desk.

  McNamara had served longer, and with more consequence, than any other secretary of defense. In the view of Clifford, one of the authors of unification, no one had done more to move the Pentagon “toward what we had intended it to be during the battle for military reform.” Applying systems analysis—breaking complex issues down into their component parts for better understanding—to every problem he faced at the Pentagon, McNamara brought order to budget planning, curtailed duplication in weapons development, and contained the rivalry among the services. (Even the Pentagon march came in for the McNamara treatment: The protest leaders had not properly organized the demonstrators, McNamara later said; had he been in charge, “I absolutely guarantee you I could have shut down the whole goddamn place.”) He applied the same techniques to Vietnam, Clifford wrote, failing to recognize that “Vietnam was not a management problem, it was a war, and war is about life and death, filled with intangibles that defy analysis.”

  McNamara had come to the building believing no problem could withstand rational analysis, and, at the end, he found himself imprisoned in a Pentagon elevator. Even McNamara appreciated the irony, though he could not quite put his finger on it. “God, it was symbolic of something,” he later told writer Paul Hendrickson.

  The bastards were going to get it

  Much had happened in the more than four years since Bill Ayers jubilantly danced on the Pentagon Mall plaza during the 1967 march. Ayers followed an increasingly radical course, taking to the streets of Chicago for violent protest during the 1968 Democratic convention and the “Days of Rage” the following year. In 1969, he was among those who broke off from Students for a Democratic Society to form a more radical group, the Weathermen, taking their name from a Bob Dylan line: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

  The Weathermen wanted to use bombs to bring the Vietnam War home to what they called “Amerikan” soil, but their efforts did not begin well. In May 1970, Ayers’s girlfriend, Diana Oughton, who had celebrated with him at the Pentagon, was among three Weathermen blown to bits when a homemade bomb meant for an Army dance at Fort Dix instead accidentally detonated in their Greenwich Village townhouse. Devastated by the loss, Ayers and other Weathermen went underground. A photograph of Ayers, head tilted and smirking, was on FBI wanted posters hanging on every post office wall in the country. Also featured on the posters was his new girlfriend and fellow Weatherman, Bernardine Dohrn, a black-leather and mini-skirt-wearing firebrand whom FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover labeled “the most dangerous woman in America.”

  The Weathermen retreated from bombing people after the Greenwich Village disaster and instead targeted government buildings. The group bombed the New York City police headquarters building in 1970 and a marble-lined bathroom in the U.S. Capitol building in 1971, both times with no casualties. By early 1972, the Weathermen—now variously also known as the Weather Underground or Weather People, after objections from female members—focused on a familiar target. “The Pentagon was ground zero for war and conquest, organizing headquarters of a gang of murdering thieves, a colossal stain on the planet, a hated symbol everywhere around the world,” Ayers later wrote. In April 1972, when President Richard Nixon launched Operation Linebacker—a major bombing campaign against North Vietnam in response to a Communist offensive—the Weather Underground decided it was time to strike.

  A team of three Weathermen—Ayers identified them only as “Anna and Aaron and Zeke”—was sent to the Washington area, where they rented a cheap apartment and scouted the Pentagon. The team learned what Pawel Monat and his fellow spies had discovered nearly two decades earlier: Despite the climate of the times, the Pentagon remained a remarkably open building. Anna, wearing office clothes, a dark wig, and thick glasses, her fingertips covered with clear nail polish to hide her fingerprints, entered the Pentagon every morning with hundreds of workers, walked the corridors, and ate breakfast in the cafeteria. No one ever challenged her. “Their reconnaissance led them deep into the bowels of the Leviathan, and they soon knew every hall and stairway, every cul-de-sac and office and bathroom,” Ayers wrote.

  In an Air Force section of the building, on the fourth floor, Corridor 10, Anna found a women’s restroom that seemed isolated and had a floor drain in a toilet stall. On a subsequent visit, she measured the drain. Back in the apartment, Aaron fashioned a twelve-by-three-inch sausage-shaped bomb, tailored for the drain, with a timing device at one end. On the morning of May 18, Anna entered the Pentagon carrying a briefcase with the two-pound bomb
hidden underneath papers and personal effects. She went to the selected restroom—4-E10W—and locked herself in the toilet stall. Anna took the screws out of the drain, popped off the cover, placed the bomb inside, and replaced the cover. She immediately left the building and linked up with Zeke at a prearranged meeting place. They were soon on a train out of town while Aaron closed down the operation, cleaning out their apartment. The bomb was set to go off at 1 A.M. the next morning, Friday, May 19, 1972—the date had been picked to honor Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader who had died in 1969, on what would have been his eighty-second birthday.

  Ayers awaited word on the operation from a safe house in another city where he lived with Dohrn. “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,” he later wrote. “The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.”

  The bastards, in this case, were Rita Campbell and her cleaning ladies who scrubbed floors and toilets, picked up the trash, and dusted the offices on the Pentagon’s fourth floor. The crack Weathermen reconnaissance had somehow missed the fact that custodians cleaned the Pentagon bathrooms at night. It was not a state secret, nor was it even surprising. Moreover, the Weathermen had chosen one of the busier locations in the building at that hour; just down Corridor 10 was a bustling mailroom filled all night with workers, many of them women.

  At 12:42 A.M. on the morning of May 19, Washington Post operator Bernadine Gibson answered a telephone call from a man who identified himself as a “weatherman” and warned that a bomb would explode on the Pentagon’s “eighth floor.” Gibson immediately telephoned police in Washington to report the threat. The police department informed a night-duty officer at the Pentagon at 12:53, and the Pentagon officer quickly called the Post for more information. According to Ayers, Aaron also called the Pentagon from a telephone booth in Washington to warn that a bomb would explode in twenty-five minutes in the Air Force section of the building. No evacuation was ordered, probably because the information was too sketchy and there was little time to respond; the Pentagon often received bomb threats that turned out to be hoaxes.