The Colossus on the Potomac: The Story of the Pentagon
Written: Jul 04 '07 (Updated Jul 04 '07)
Product Rating:
Pros: Interesting, entertaining, and very well written
Cons: None
The Bottom Line: I recommend this book to anyone interested in history or the military, or who just wants an entertaining book about Washington, D.C. an its politics.
AdaDavis's Full Review: Steve Vogel - The Pentagon: A History
Everyone likes to quote the statistics. At 6.5 million square feet, it's the world's largest office building. It has 17.5 miles of corridors, 284 restrooms, and 7754 windows. The complex sits on 582 acres of Arlington, Virginia land, mostly in the area once known as Hell's Bottom. The building itself covers 34 acres of land - a 5 acre center courtyard with a 29 acre building resting on 41,492 giant concrete pilings that go down to bedrock. It is made of concrete with an outer facing of Indiana sandstone, surrounded by 67 acres of parking lot. And it was all built - groundbreaking to final inspection - in seventeen months. (Yes, you read that right - 17 months.)
In 1941, politicians liked to call it the "New New War Department Building" to distinguish it from the "Old New War Department Building" which had just been finished in Foggy Bottom. The New York Times called it "The Monstrosity." To the workers on site, and the Post Office trying to deliver their mail, it was "The Pentagon Building" because of its unusual shape.
We Need More Room
The War Department was preparing for the war everyone knew was coming. By the summer of 1941, there were 24,000 War Department workers spread across Washington, D.C. in 23 separate buildings. That 24,000 was going to reach 30,000 by the end of the year, with no place to put them. The New War Department Building at Foggy Bottom would only hold 4,000. The problem was not trivial to the people coordinating the war effort. Lost time and lost paperwork would result in lost American lives.
The "New New War Department Building" was the brainchild of an Army Engineer : Brigadier General Brehon B. Somervell. Never one to think small, General Somervell envisioned a building with enough office space to house 40,000 workers: the War Department plus the Navy headquarters. A tall building would take lots of structural steel that was desperately needed for warships, so it had to be wide, but not tall. There was no place in the District large enough for the building, so Somervell proposed building it just across the Potomac River near the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery.
On Friday, July 18, 1941, General Somervell laid out his requirements for his staff, and asked that initial building plans be on his desk by Monday, 21 July. They were, and the breakneck pace never let up. Construction began on 11 September, 1941 while construction plans were still being drawn. Seven months later, the first War Department workers moved into the one completed section. With construction continuing in the other sections, the workers had to deal with dust and the constant sound and vibration of the pile drivers at work. With the country already at war, there was pressure to get the building operational.
"We were designing just one step ahead of the pile drivers, as it were," van der Gracht recalled. "Construction was always on the heels of design," was the way Renshaw put it. Indeed, construction sometimes got ahead of design, often enough that Luther Leisingring, the architect in charge of the specifications group, took to referring to the building specs as "historical records"; by the time they were written, there was often something else already in the building.
"How big should I make that beam across the third floor?" architect Allen Dickey was asked by a colleague.
"I don't know," Dickey replied. "They installed it yesterday."
But, what do we do with it when the War is over?
Congress, while willing to swallow the $80 million cost of construction without much complaint, had furious debates over the small stuff. There were major battles over the cost of planting trees on the site, for example. They were also holding tight to the idea that when the War ended, the War Department would go back to its "Old New War Department Building" in the District and its office space for 4000. General Somervell, who knew that the War Department would never give up the Pentagon, simply replied that it could be used for storage of War Department records. (That part, I admit, made my brain cells freeze up. A 6.5 million square foot .. file cabinet? Egad!) Congress bought that explanation.
In truth, the War Department shrank some, but not all that much. When WWII was followed by the Korean War and Vietnam, it wasn't likely to do so. When the War Department and the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard were consolidated as the Department of Defense, the Pentagon became its permanent home.
With the proliferation of nuclear weapons, some planners began to see the Pentagon as a giant target - literally. With its concentric rings and open center court, it bears an uncanny resemblance, from the air, to a bull's-eye target. With typical grim humor, the workers at the Pentagon dubbed the snack stand at center court the "Ground Zero Hotdog Stand." Ironically, the only bomb that ever got inside the Pentagon was a pipe bomb delivered by a member of the Weather Underground. It destroyed a bathroom.
Not a normal day at the office.
By 2001, renovations to the Pentagon were well under way. Only one "wedge" of the building had been completed - the West (or Heliport) side. The new residents were still moving in and testing the systems in September. Many of the offices were still empty when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the West Entrance, killing 119 resident workers plus the 64 passengers on the plane. If anything about that day can be said to be "lucky", it was the courage of the passengers on United Flight 93, and Hani Honjour's decision to take his plane into the West Entrance of the Pentagon. Had the plane approached from any other direction, the fatalities would likely have been in the thousands.
Rising from the ashes: The Phoenix Project
In addition to the human cost, the plane destroyed the entire main stretches of C, D, and E Rings on the west side - over 400,000 square feet of office space. Reconstruction began in October of 2001 with the goal of having the E Ring functional by September 11, 2002. If the original crews could build the whole Pentagon in seventeen months, the Phoenix crew could darn well rebuild the E Ring in eleven. And they did.
Steve Vogel and his book about the Pentagon
You might think that a book about a building would be a good substitute for sleeping pills, but you would be wrong, at least in this case. I sat down to read the first couple of chapters about 5 PM, then looked up to find that it was after 1 AM. "Hey, that can't be right!" I got absorbed in the recounting of Washington politics in the 1940s, which the author tells in a very entertaining way. Some of it was just laughing-out-loud funny. So were some of the later parts, like the Hippie marches on the Pentagon in the 1970s, and all of the Myths and Legends - like the oft-told story of workers falling into the concrete being poured for the foundation, and being left there. (Um, see .. because they were on a deadline to finish the building, so they couldn't afford the time …)
Mr. Vogel is a reporter for The Washington Post who has covered more than his fair share of war zones. He did exhaustive research for this book, which includes first- hand accounts by people on the scene, historical documents, plans and photos, and newspaper reports from the files of local newspapers. His writing style is naturally that of a reporter, not a historian. It's a story about a building, but more importantly, it is the story of the people around the building. He paints a very lively and interesting picture of the people: General Somervell, the Engineer; Colonel Leslie Groves, who left the Pentagon project to head up another war program - the Manhattan Project; John McShain, the chief contractor with 10,000 workers; James Forrestal, the ill-fated first Secretary of Defense; and President Franklin Roosevelt, who considered himself a pat hand at building design and couldn't resist making last-minute changes to "improve the esthetic quality" of buildings already under construction.
His chapters on the events of September 11, 2001 are both riveting and graphic, taken from first-hand accounts of people who were there - the workers in the Pentagon, the firefighters and rescue workers, and the mortuary crew. Frank Probst had just left the building when he stopped at a construction trailer outside the West Entrance:
Probst did not notice the jet until he looked up and saw it heading right at him. The aircraft had just come over the hill at the south end of the Navy Annex overlooking the Pentagon. Probst had not heard a thing until he saw the plane, and then all he could hear were the engines cranking, as if the pilot were flying full bore. The nose was dropped, no lights were on, and the wheels were up. The plane seemed impossibly low--its wings clipped off several light poles and the antenna of a Jeep Grand Cherokee as the jet crossed over Washington Boulevard, flying toward the Pentagon. Probst did not even notice that--his eyes were focused on the engine on the plane's right wing, heading straight at his face. "I'm dead," he thought.
Well organized, well researched, and well written. I love this book.
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