by Steve Vogel
Powell tried to explain. “Look, I’m Major General Powell,” he said. “I’m Secretary Weinberger’s military assistant.”
“Please come with me sir,” the officer insisted. Powell was in the Pentagon basement waiting to be processed for arrest when Cooke got wind of what was happening and ordered him released. Cooke, as Powell later wrote, was “the chief fixer” for the Pentagon: “Want a private bathroom worthy of your rank as assistant secretary? Doc can install it. Can’t get a parking place in the prestigious River Entrance lot? Try Doc. Need to spring a major general who is about to get busted? Doc’s your man. His power was formidable, this Godfather of the Pentagon.”
Defense secretaries and their staffs came and went like summer help, but Cooke stayed on as the building’s chief administrator and trusted confidante to the powerful. Cheney was his twelfth secretary, and he had sworn in every one since Melvin Laird in 1969. Each secretary learned to depend on him. When they asked for something inappropriate, Cooke would turn them down, but he usually did it so gently they did not even realize they had been rejected.
Generations of Pentagon employees viewed Doc as a father figure, and he was always looking out for them. Steve Carter would often see him ambling around the hallways, talking to one and all, so approachable that many junior workers called him Doc. It was one reason why, unlike many powerful Defense officials, Cooke knew the situation on the ground, or in this case, the Pentagon basement.
The Pentagon did not meet any fire, safety, or health codes, nor had it for decades. There were no sprinklers, except in some computer rooms. The fire alarms were outdated and inadequate; it often took twenty minutes to locate a sounding alarm. There were no dampers in air, pipe, and cable shafts to stop the flow of smoke through the building, meaning corridors would draw smoke and turn into deathtraps in a fire.
The building had not met National Electrical Code standards since 1953. Electrical panel boards were overloaded and the building suffered twenty to thirty power outages a day, almost every time somebody plugged in a laser printer. Offices were poorly lit and gloomy. Disabled employees were relegated to using the building’s twelve freight elevators, which had doors that closed from ceiling to floor, causing more than forty head injuries in one three-year period.
The asbestos used to save steel during World II threatened the health of Pentagon employees; research had established that airborne asbestos was a dangerous carcinogen. Constant leaks in the plumbing and roof had deteriorated the asbestos-laden ceiling plaster. Tests showed harmful fibers were being released into the air from ceilings, pipe insulation, and asbestos-lined air ducts throughout the building. Thousands of lighting fixtures contained highly toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), windows had lead paint, and there was mercury in the ground.
Throughout the building, a sense of decay prevailed. The Pentagon was home to an estimated two million cockroaches, and the ones in the basement were said to have reached fearsome proportions, big enough to “put saddles on.” Rats were enjoying a population boom, with an average of four a week caught in the food-service areas. The rats had no respect for rank, showing up in E-Ring offices as well as inner corridors with equal alacrity.
The General Services Administration had never replaced the boilers, though they were of a design dating back to the construction of the Panama Canal; only one of the five was still operating and the Pentagon was renting temporary boilers parked on flatbed trucks at a cost of $1.2 million a year.
With GSA showing little interest in renovating the Pentagon, Cooke decided in 1987 that the Defense Department should wrest control of the building from the agency. It was a risk, because the GSA made a convenient scapegoat. If the Defense Department took over, “you could no longer point a finger and say GSA is responsible,” recalled Paul Haselbush, a Cooke deputy. But Cooke was convinced that the deteriorating conditions in the building left him no choice, and he went about staging a coup. The GSA was only too happy to rid itself of responsibility for the Pentagon and delegated day-to-day maintenance to the Defense Department. But GSA retained ownership, collecting hundreds of millions of dollars in rent from the Defense Department each year, but balking at renovation.
That had to change, and the basement flood was proof. An investigation by the General Accounting Office would soon report that among the 1,600 federally owned buildings nationwide, the Pentagon represented one of the two worst cases of neglect. The Pentagon had been left “seriously deteriorated and functionally obsolete” because of the GSA’s repeated failures to repair and upgrade the building, the report concluded.
Cooke requested that Congress give the Defense Department ownership of the Pentagon in 1989 and was narrowly turned down, out of fear that every federal agency would then want a divorce from GSA. But in November 1990, largely based on the authority and respect Cooke had earned in all corners of Washington over the years, Congress passed legislation transferring ownership of the Pentagon from the GSA to the Department of Defense. The legislation allowed the Defense Department to deposit money that would have been paid in rent to the GSA into a fund that would not only operate and maintain the Pentagon but also pay for the renovation. Cooke moved forward on a ten-year, $1 billion renovation plan.
The timing turned out to be exceedingly poor. As the plans were finalized, the Cold War suddenly and inconveniently ended, and with it much of the raison d’être for an enormous American military establishment. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, just two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the threat that the Warsaw Pact posed to Western Europe evaporated. Iraq had been forcibly ejected from Kuwait in February 1991, and the Gulf War was now seen as an aberration, perhaps the last American conventional war. A painful drawdown of the military began, with dozens of bases to close and the size of the force to shrink 25 percent by 1995. The question was soon being asked in Congress and the press: Why was the Defense Department spending $1 billion to renovate the Pentagon at a time the fighting forces were being gutted? Politically, it did not look good, members of Congress told Cooke. The Pentagon, military affairs columnist David Hackworth wrote, “shouldn’t be rebuilt. It should be blown up.”
Several months before the renovation was set to begin in the summer of 1992, Congress put the plan on hold. Cooke did not give up. The horror board was updated with new exhibits, and for another year Cooke hauled it around town for all to see. “These hazards, if not corrected, could threaten the lives and health of the 25,000 employees in the Pentagon,” Cooke told a Senate subcommittee in May 1993. Cooke was able to convince enough people on Capitol Hill of the urgent need for renovation. He soon had approval to start, although one congressman made him promise that he would never again bring the horror board to Capitol Hill.
A certain respectability
It would have been cheaper—not to mention quicker and easier—to build a new Pentagon. The planned renovation would not only cost more than a billion dollars, it would be “one of the most complex construction projects ever undertaken,” a consultant hired by the program predicted.
The plan began with an ambitious scheme to double the size of the basement. The ground slab would be jackhammered out, and in some parts the ground below excavated another three feet. Dropping the floor would leave room for both a basement and a mezzanine in a much larger area than previously existed. The plan called for adding some 1.1 million square feet of usable space, including room for a sophisticated new National Military Command Center and operations centers for all the services.
The rest of the Pentagon would be divided into five equal chevron-shaped wedges to be renovated in sequence. Renovation crews would follow the original path of construction, starting in the southwest wedge—the first section to be built and occupied—and working their way clockwise. The five thousand workers in the first wedge would be evicted, most of them going to rented office space in Northern Virginia; the rented offices would have to be upgraded and made secure for military use. Once vacated, the wedge would be entirely gutted, st
ripped down to concrete columns and slabs. Thousands of tons of hazardous materials would be removed. Then the wedge would be rebuilt from scratch, with state-of-the-art technology and new infrastructure. When it was finished, the employees in the second wedge would be moved into the newly renovated wedge, and the whole process repeated in the next wedge. The renovation was to take ten years. All the while, the work of the Pentagon would have to continue uninterrupted, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Later, when it was all going poorly, renovation program officials would study building a new defense headquarters at Fort Belvoir, the large Army post sixteen miles down the Potomac River in Fairfax County, Virginia. A five-story low-rise building—in the shape of a rectangle, but similar in size, with 6.5 million square feet and big enough for thirty thousand people—could be built for less than the $1 billion-plus estimated for renovating the Pentagon.
But there would be extra costs, perhaps including hundreds of millions of dollars to extend a subway line and expand the road network to Fort Belvoir. Moreover, the government could not simply lock up the Pentagon and leave, tempting as it might be. Demolishing the building would be a mammoth and expensive undertaking. If it were left open in some new capacity, all the asbestos, lead paint, mercury, and PCBs in the building would still have to be removed. It all added up to being at least as expensive as renovating the building.
More fundamentally, the idea of the military abandoning the Pentagon had become unthinkable, not unlike Congress moving out of the Capitol or the president leaving the White House. The Pentagon had none of the grace or beauty of those buildings, but it was every bit the American institution.
Though the building was reaching the depths physically, age had bestowed a certain respectability on the Pentagon. The fiftieth anniversary of its completion was marked on May 12, 1993—the date chosen to avoid winter weather—and, for the first time, the Pentagon itself was celebrated. On the warm spring morning, hundreds of dignitaries, old-timers, and Pentagon employees gathered for a grand ceremony on the River terrace lawn. Four howitzers fired in salute, an honor guard presented the colors, the Army band played, and an enormous American flag suspended from a crane waved over the lawn. General Colin Powell, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, paid affectionate tribute to the Pentagon:
The Eiffel Tower may be more impressive, the Taj Mahal more exotic, the pyramids more mysterious, and St. Peter and St. Paul’s basilicas more sublime. But the Pentagon has stood…for half a century as a powerful and renowned symbol of America’s convictions, America’s power, and of America’s willingly accepted obligation to the world. In its somber and unpretentious way, it has weathered time, it has weathered wars, it has weathered innumerable crises, and it has weathered the storm of politics.
The building so reviled by so many had been deemed a national treasure. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt presented a bronze plaque declaring the Pentagon to be a National Historic Landmark. The Pentagon was now considered an integral part of the grand vision that the defenders of L’Enfant had battled to protect five decades earlier. “Its configuration, role, and location have combined to make the Pentagon an essential and important physical and symbolic element of the Monumental Core of the Nation’s Capital,” the National Park Service nomination proclaimed.
Even the much-mocked design was found worthy of preservation; the building was saluted as an important example of stripped classical style. “Architecturally, the Pentagon is a remarkable example of complex, yet highly efficient, design,” the nomination said. “It is virtually a small urban center under one roof, containing all the functions normally associated with a municipality.” The building’s unparalleled size and the “monumental effort in design and construction” made it further unique. Five elements of the building were given historic status: the five outer façades; the center courtyard and surrounding façades; the Mall terrace; the River terrace; and the distinctive five-sided shape.
Finally, the figures who had strode along its corridors—from Marshall and Stimson, to Forrestal, Eisenhower, McNamara, Powell, and many others—and the decisions they made, for better or worse, in its command centers and executive suites—about the atomic bomb, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, and beyond—pointed irrefutably to the extraordinary role the building had played in American history since World War II. The Pentagon, the nomination concluded, “is of an exceptional level of historic significance.”
The Pentagon was now officially a landmark. There was no choice but to fix it.
They wanted the noise to stop
It was shades of 1942. The “rata-tat-tat” of jackhammers always seemed to be followed by the “whomp-whomp” of impact drills. Pentagon employees soon were complaining of incessant noise, clouds of dust, black sootlike residue that coated desks, and various unpleasant odors emanating from the basement.
Construction of a new heating and refrigeration plant had begun the previous year, but the beginning of the basement work on October 17, 1994, marked the real start of the Pentagon renovation. Cooke had been eager to begin before Congress again changed its mind. His office—Washington Headquarters Service—had overall management of the renovation, but as was the case a half-century earlier, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was in charge of design and construction, overseeing the work done by the prime contractor—the Clark Construction Group, headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland.
The first work involved one-third of the basement, a 200,000-square-foot segment beneath the corner of the Mall and River sides. Workers in protective clothing removed all asbestos-bearing material in the ceiling plaster, floor tiles, insulation, and elsewhere. Next, demolition crews gutted the interior down to the columns. Then workers jackhammered the basement slab, and Mini Diggers excavated the first of 45,000 cubic yards of soil that would be hauled from the basement. It was chaotic work. Crews jackhammered one slab unaware that they were atop a top-secret Air Force communications room. Shocked Air Force workers below watched helplessly as concrete fell from the ceiling.
It was not long before other problems were uncovered. The renovators learned to their surprise that some of the fifty-year-old drawings—the ones Ides van der Gracht and his army of draftsmen had churned out in the old Eastern Airlines hangar—often had little connection with reality. “What we thought was in the foundation and what was there were actually quite different,” said Ken Catlow, a Corps of Engineers supervisor. Moreover, conditions were much worse than anyone had imagined. Spectral analysis indicated the soil would continue to sink for another fifty years, depending on the height of the water table. Much of it was contaminated with fuel and other pollutants. “We even found a few buried cars,” said Catlow. “Lots of debris and trash. Nobody knew what was down under there.”
The real trouble began when the basement work snaked its way under Secretary of Defense William Perry’s office during the first months of 1995. Perry, a gentle professorial type who spoke in a quiet voice, found the noise upsetting. Steve Carter soon got a call from the secretary of defense’s office. “They wanted the noise to stop,” Carter recalled. “I went down there and told [Corps on-site project engineer Ed] Mullins that the Secretary of Defense wanted the noise to stop. He told me to take the message back that there was a renovation project going on, and people were going to have to get used to some of this. I took the message up.”
The message was not well received. At a press conference on March 16, 1995, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon announced that much of the renovation work was being frozen, and that work in the first wedge, due to start later that year, was being put on hold for at least one year. The whole plan was being reviewed by a steering committee overseen by Deputy Secretary of Defense John Deutch. Perry and his staff were hardly aware of the Pentagon renovation until they were disturbed by the noise. “In a sense, that was the genesis of it,” Bacon said. “People began complaining about the noise. A group of people sat down one day and said, ‘What’s going on here? What is this plan?’ When w
e looked at the plan, we saw that it was a huge plan, and it seemed prudent to review the plan and decide whether that’s the way we want to go.”
The work already under contract in the basement and center courtyard was allowed to continue, but with tight restrictions limiting the noisiest work to nights and weekends. Perry’s daily schedule was sent to the renovation office, with various times marked “quiet, quiet, quiet.” Likewise, the jackhammers and pile drivers came to a stop whenever the Joint Chiefs met in the Tank. Crews still had to be paid, and the delays were adding $30,000 a day to the cost of the basement construction. Even an insistent bandmaster, upset to find his musicians competing against construction noise, forced work in the courtyard to cease during a summertime lunch concert in 1995 at a cost of $16,000.
Doc Cooke had a new generation of Defense Department leaders to educate about the horrors of the Pentagon. He arranged for Steve Carter to take Deutch on what was dubbed “the Armpit Tour,” a voyage to the bowels of the building. Carter met Deutch and his entourage in the deputy secretary’s office. Before they started out, Deutch took Carter by the elbow and gestured to his well-appointed office. “You’ve got exactly thirty seconds to show me why we need to renovate,” Deutch told him. Carter walked him sixty feet from the front door of his suite to a small utility closet, opening the door to expose a chilled water riser. The large pipe was rusted, scarred with welds from top to bottom, and covered with a jelly from years of condensation. “That’s behind every wall of the Pentagon,” Carter said.
