Book Review:

The Pentagon: A History
The Untold Story of the Wartime Race to Build the Pentagon – and Restore it Sixty Years Later

By Steve Vogel

SAME received an advanced copy of this book for review, but staffing and scheduling opportunities never cleared enough for anyone to read the book until fairly recently.  A paperback is now available, or you can still purchase the hardcover edition at amazon.com.

The book is nothing short of amazing.  It takes a potentially boring, classroom-type of task (telling the tale of a building’s construction) and makes it pop with a life that offers instead a real page-turner for anyone remotely interested in what it takes to move things through the bureaucratic ring of fire and move past chains of command to get things done.

Click through below to read the rest of my review of “The Pentagon: A History.”

The first part of the book deals with the history of Washington, D.C., and its surrounding neighborhoods.  Tales of old-school shanty-busting and the bashing of illegal gin mills that inspired an entire generation of crime drama from Batman to The Untouchables are sprinkled through to let the reader know that the neighborhood that eventually became home to the most famous five-sided building in the world was not a place for nice people to live.  To be fair, though, equal time is given to the nicer neighborhoods where decent people did live and the impact that the Pentagon’s construction had on them.

You also see the side that the power brokers in D.C. enjoyed.  For them, decisions on where to build were abstract concepts with no real impact when they went home.  FDR’s directive as to where the Pentagon would eventually rise was an order given to a general bordered on insubordinate in trying to get his way.

The Pentagon’s story is inextricably mixed with the life of its biggest proponent and the leader of the project, Gen. Brehon B. Somervell.  If ever there were a tale of a man who had a vision and would not relinquish it, this is it.

More than anything, though, the tale of the Pentagon’s construction is a tale of how bureaucracy works.  Construction overruns, hidden costs and scandals are all overlaid with the tales of the personalities behind them and how each caused the other in what could at best be called a vicious cycle.

The way that Vogel tells the story is the biggest hook.  He imbues a youthful energy in the prose that makes you want to keep reading, even when you dislike how they are behaving.  You can tell that his passion for this tale only built as he continued as he built it, much like the builders of the Pentagon themselves.

Interesting notes pay off later, too.  The Pentagon was, in FDR’s view, supposed to convert to an archival storage facility when the war was over.  For this reason, they built the floors twice as strong as they needed for an office building, and used as little steel as possible.  This is one of the reasons that when the plane hit on 9/11/01, it withstood the hit so well; had the building been built to lesser load-bearing standards, more people would likely have died.

The tale then moves into the history of the people who made the Pentagon the center of American power in the Cold War era.  There are fascinating notes there as well, such as a former Soviet spy who says he lobbied for more in-depth activities but the powers at the Kremlin could not believe that the building’s security was so lax, so they denied it.  But on the main concourse, all spies had to do was go to the shopping area and listen in on conversations.  America apparently lost more than a few secrets that way.

The book also tells about the early moves toward desegregation and the difficulties there.  It covers the violent Vietnam War protests that occurred and how the handling of them made them what they were.  Things could have been better, but they could have been worse, and Vogel is always careful to remain neutral.

The chilling portion of the book is when it recounts the horrors of 9/11/01.  Being a resident of Arlington, VA, within a stone’s throw of the Pentagon myself now,   Vogel brings the horror of that day home with a vivid description of the flight path, right over a local diner frequented (and loved) by virtually anyone who lives in Arlington for just a few years.  His tale comes from a police officer who was at that diner that morning, and it’s difficult even to travel that road the same way anymore.

A tale such as this may not be for everyone, but the members of SAME and the A/E/C community as a whole will undoubtedly be stunned, and a little amused, at how little has really changed in the process of getting things done. The best lesson of politics, and Gen. Somervell, seems to be that if you want something done, just start doing it and get approval later.  Sometimes the results are wonderful.

I congratulate Mr. Vogel for taking such a potentially dry topic and making it live.  He did his research, and he presents it well.  I am glad to have had the opportunity to read the book, and highly recommend it to anyone.