Pentagon 'biography' personal, poignant

Pete Warzel, Special to the News

Published May 26, 2006 at midnight

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The Pentagon is the largest building in the United States, ironically regaining that status after the destruction of the World Trade Center. James Carroll, 1996 National Book Award recipient, has taken that symbolic image of the building through a meticulous examination of fact and anecdote to develop a history that can serve us well as a teaching tool for the future.

House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power begins with observations from Carroll's childhood, when his father worked within the mile circumference of concrete and he ran up and down the ramps (no elevators) flirting with the danger of being caught deep within the new locus of power.

Joe Carroll would thrive and become a lieutenant general in the Air Force and director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. James Carroll, the son, would have a crisis of conscience and protest the Pentagon's power, and so his father's work, during the Vietnam conflict.

That is the genesis of his work in this book, as he says, "The lifetime of the Pentagon is my lifetime." And his purpose is to understand what both lives mean.

The contrast of boy playing soldier in the halls of the Pentagon and his later intellectual probing of the decisions made there make for a superb book. The juxtaposition of personal remembrance and national strategy is an innovative reading of history.

"Always, the Pentagon remains the nation's sacred temple," Carroll writes. The devil, or god, of that temple is in the detail, and the author works his way masterfully through 704 pages of well-researched, well-constructed detail. Do not be daunted by the heft of this book. It is a gripping excursion into history with its many interrelated stories and signs.

The building was constructed on Franklin Roosevelt's command and dedicated in January 1943. Until that point, war was managed from 17 locations around the capital, and the president wanted a consolidated effort. The first building to that end was quickly outgrown as WWII escalated, and that structure in Foggy Bottom is now the State Department headquarters, another irony in this history of diplomacy and might.

The Pentagon construction was an extraordinary feat with its 17 1/2 miles of corridors decorated with battle flags completed in less than two years. The architect had previously designed the Hollywood Bowl.

The first dramatic decisionmade here was the use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the waning hours of the war. Carroll details all of the arguments surrounding the decision and damns the short-term memory of the American people.

"The bombing of Tokyo occupies a small back room in the house of the American memory," he writes. Nuclear weapons aside, we have fairly forgotten the fire-bombings of Hamburg and Dresden, followed by the complete eradication of four square miles of Tokyo toward the end of WWII that killed 100,000 people by fire delivered as napalm, a weapon ubiquitously used later in Vietnam.

The decisions made about the conflagration of Japan were done in this building across the Potomac from the White House and Capitol, removed from the scene of battle and, thus, immune to a firsthand vision of the atrocities of war.

This was something new and, as the years progressed, seemed to result in a paranoic escalation of weapons, the intramural rivalry among services for nuclear weapons control, and eventually, the power of defense, now translated as "unending war," becoming firmly rooted in the Pentagon and not in the White House and with its resident commander in chief. That distanced decision-making is the state of war in our time.

From this baseline, Carroll outlines the main events that have shaped the life of the Pentagon:

• Escalation of weapons as deterrence in the Cold War era;

• the incessant delivery of American soldiers and bombs to the killing fields of Vietnam;

• Nixon's order to put the Strategic Air Command in the air loaded with triggered nuclear bombs and set on course for Soviet destinations;

• The eerie constellation of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in President Ford's Defense Department;

• Clinton's refusal to see the horror in Bosnia, then aggressively bombing Belgrade in defense of Kosovo;

• The reaction to 9/11 and subsequent war in Iraq by the current administration and those same players who surfaced with Ford.

In its total, this book is a history of decision-making and the physical space of their making. "It can also be said of each of these fateful choices that the Building made them." In this anthropomorphic identity, the book is biography, not history.

For better or worse, that is the story of our nation since 1943, one in which politics, economics and even academia, through the use of universities for defense-related scientific research, house in unity within the Pentagon. That identity leads Carroll to term Vietnam as "a showcase of the intellectual exercise," and the results were less than stellar.

Carroll's interviews with the significant players on this stage of history are at times startling. (Robert McNamara requests access to the joint generals' nuclear strategic plan and is denied it. "No, there is only one copy of that . . ." to which the secretary of defense replies, "Well, get it. I'm going to read it.") His work is an exceptional piece of history made poignant by the personal.

In coming to grips with his own dark fears of the building where his father made a living, he sometimes preaches his own politics rather than simply reporting history. Yet polemic is a natural outcome of the writing, for it is both the Pentagon's and the author's own biography at work here.

Carroll ends his book with a warning about power left to its own devices, the device since 1945 being nuclear; decisions made in bunkered secrecy; and, currently, world politics as religious exercise of righteous action. "Beware the House of War when understood as the House of God," Carroll writes.

That is what we must all take notice of, and respond.

Pete Warzel is a freelance writer living in Denver whose reviews have appeared in Southwest Book Views, Inside/ Outside Magazine and the American Book Review.

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