Apart from any other consideration, taking a giant ‘peace dividend’ all in one mouthful had inevitably forced an involuntary massive — seismic probably better described it — re-alignment in the balance of the whole American military-industrial complex; for which the Administration had made little or no provision to counteract by aggressively deploying any of the structural levers — for example like adjusting Central Bank interest rates, or printing more or less money — at its disposal.
Unfortunately, the Secretary of Defence had been outvoted in Cabinet and now America was where it was!
Basically, the Pentagon was up a creek without a proverbial paddle.
McNamara ought to have resigned in the spring.
He would have resigned, as would others in the Administration, but for the dark cloud of guilt which hung over them all. He almost envied McGeorge Bundy, the United States National Security Advisor. Mac had been struck down by illness, and sidelined shortly after the war. Mac had been with the President in the Oval Office on the night of the war, and lived and breathed every moment of the catastrophe.
McNamara had been in the situation room at the Pentagon that night.
Ground Zero = Pentagon.
He too had thought it would all end in a brilliant flash of light and a bolt of searing heat. Conventional wisdom before the October War had been that the great building would be the first target on the Soviets’ ‘hit list’. If it had been that would have been better in so many ways.
The Secretary of Defence had written his resignation that morning.
Enough was enough!
The ‘peace dividend’ had to be halted. Too much damage had already been done and somebody had to stop the bleeding before it was too late. The country had blundered into the cataclysm, now it was cutting off its arms to spite its face. In any other country on the planet the military would probably have mounted a coup d’état; and he and his Cabinet colleagues would have been lined up against a wall and shot!
As if the wanton, piecemeal degradation of the nation’s military might was not bad enough; the sickening stench of corruption now seemed to infect the whole body politic. None of the billions of dollars from the spurious ‘dividend’ was getting anywhere near men, women and children on American streets; and rightly, there was near mutiny in the middle ranks of Pentagon staffers. The military had been pushed too far and Robert McNamara was ashamed of his part in the farrago. The very men who had done their President’s bidding and won the most terrible war in human history had been obliged to watch the callous dismantling of their careers’ work, and the betrayal of their men — and women — in uniform. And for what? The notional savings of the headlong cuts had already been spent several times over by an unholy alliance of legislators, industrialists, bankers, farmers and every kind of DC shyster imaginable in an orgy of acquisition, stockpiling, and financial gerrymandering the likes of which would have shamed a prohibition bootlegging mogul. Since the summer there had been so much funny money in circulation that the New York Stock Exchange had boomed at exactly the same moment the national economy had lurched towards a slump. Sitting in his cloistered sanctuary at the heart of the Pentagon, McNamara was daily put in mind of those people who allegedly moved the deck chairs on the deck of the sinking Titanic, or of a certain deranged Emperor who had fiddled while Rome burned.
No, it was time to go!
Once upon a time he might have drawn comfort from the immutable, concrete permanence of the Pentagon. To cheer his spirits he used to recollect the day in 1961 that his military subordinates had ‘inducted’ him into his new castle keep. On that day everything had seemed possible, Camelot was being built in the District of Columbia upon the rock-like fortress of the Pentagon and he had lapped up the proudly restated litany of facts about the Department of Defence building with the cheerful, businesslike sobriety that his new post demanded.
There was very little about the biggest building in the World that was not impressive.
‘The Pentagon had been designed by George Edwin Bergstrom, a native of Neenah, Wisconsin,’ but that was only the tip of the iceberg of the epic story of the construction of the giant war palace of the United States of America. Experience in the Great War — of 1914 to 1918 — had conclusively exposed the shortcomings of the nineteenth century ways of organising and directing overseas wars in the industrial age. Prior to the Pentagon the Department of War operated out of the Greggory — yes, it really did have two ‘g’s’ — Building, hastily erected on Constitution Avenue. The Greggory Building was never big enough for the job and the Department of Defence had ended up dispersed in buildings all over Washington DC and in neighbouring Maryland and Virginia. Moreover, the subsequent construction of a new War Department Building at the intersection of 21st and C Streets in Foggy Bottom had hardly scratched the problem. It was only after Hitler invaded Poland that one man, the Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had finally grasped the nettle.
Once Stimson had persuaded President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in May 1941 of his case, things had moved at breakneck speed. Well, breakneck by DC standards. By July, the project was in the capable hands of the head of the Construction Division of the Quartermaster Corps, Arkansan Brigadier General Brehon B. Somervell. It was Somervell who got things moving. George Bergstrom, working as chief architect with David J. Witmer had designed the building in just five days and nights between 17th and the 22nd July 1941. The main contractor, John McShain of Philadelphia, had broken ground less than two months later on 11th September. It was Somervell who was responsible for appointing the then forty-five year old Lieutenant-Colonel Leslie Richard Groves to the project; and it was Grove’s herculean achievement in overseeing the construction of the Pentagon for the US Army that later made him the automatic choice to head the Manhattan project.
The original plan was to build an irregular pentagon-shaped building on the site of the Department of Agriculture’s Arlington Experimental Farm. This idea was quashed when President Roosevelt decreed that the new building should in no way obscure the view of Washington DC from the Arlington National Cemetery. Subsequently, Hoover Field, an old airfield across the Potomac River near the Arlington Farms site was adopted. Although the topography and drainage of the new location caused difficulties and necessitated the clearance of the Hell’s Bottom slum neighbourhood, the new site’s shape and dimensions permitted the construction of a building with a regular-sided pentagonal footprint.
The final plan incorporated a seven-floor building — five above and two below ground — with over six-and-a-half million square feet of floor space and seventeen-and-a-half miles of corridors. Each level had five broad ring corridors, and within the building was a five acre open air plaza that Pentagon insiders dryly came to refer to as ‘ground zero’ in the late 1950s, given that it was the likely aiming point for any Soviet missile or bomber strike on Washington. Constructed at breakneck speed employing between twenty and thirty thousand men and women at any one time, even two decades after its completion the building’s statistics were still astounding. Erected under the exigencies of war its design had used the absolute minimum quantities of steel; meaning that the main fabric of the Pentagon was reinforced concrete, mixed employing nearly seven hundred thousand tons of sand dredged from the Potomac, an exercise which had created a large lagoon at the mouth of the river. Construction had been completed in just sixteen months at a cost in 1943 dollars of $83 million.