Product Description

From the National Book Award–winning author of An American Requiem and Constantine's Sword comes a sweeping yet intimate look at the Pentagon and its vast — often hidden — impact on America.

This landmark, myth-shattering work chronicles the most powerful institution in America, the people who created it, and the pathologies it has spawned. James Carroll proves a controversial thesis: the Pentagon has, since its founding, operated beyond the control of any force in government or society. It is the biggest, loosest cannon in American history, and no institution has changed this country more. To argue his case, he marshals a trove of often chilling evidence. He recounts how "the Building" and its denizens achieved what Eisenhower called "a disastrous rise of misplaced power" — from the unprecedented aerial bombing of Germany and Japan during World War II to the "shock and awe" of Iraq. He charts the colossal U.S. nuclear buildup, which far outpaced that of the USSR, and has outlived it. He reveals how consistently the Building has found new enemies just as old threats — and funding — evaporate. He demonstrates how Pentagon policy brought about U.S. indifference to an epidemic of genocide during the 1990s. And he shows how the forces that attacked the Pentagon on 9/11 were set in motion exactly sixty years earlier, on September 11, 1941, when ground was broken for the house of war.

Carroll draws on rich personal experience (his father was a top Pentagon official for more than twenty years) as well as exhaustive research and dozens of extensive interviews with Washington insiders. The result is a grand yet intimate work of history, unashamedly polemical and personal but unerringly factual. With a breadth and focus that no other book could muster, it explains what America has become over the past sixty years.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1218125 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-04
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 672 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. If there were nothing more to Carroll's book than its chronicling of the U.S. military's amassing of power and influence from WWII to the present, it would still be valuable history. But the National Book Award winner (An American Requiem) makes the story something else altogether. "The lifetime of the Pentagon is my lifetime," he asserts, noting that the building had its dedication ceremony the week he was born; he also grew up playing in its maze-like corridors while his father worked as a high-ranking air force general. The nuclear dread that dominated the Cold War era thus plays out as personal and family drama, turning the book into "[my] long-delayed conversation with [my] father." It's strongest in its first half, where the development of atomic power and the turmoil of the Vietnam era hold the greatest personal significance for Carroll; later sections on the Reagan and Clinton eras are informative but less intimate. Carroll's approach can be poetic—he makes much, for example, of the coincidence that the Pentagon groundbreaking took place on September 11, 1941—but the emotional weight he brings to a Chomsky-like critique of American militarism results in an aggressively compelling history. Photos. (May 16)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Carroll was born the same week in January, 1943, that the Pentagon was dedicated, the Manhattan Project got under way, and Roosevelt declared that the goal of the war was the enemy's "unconditional surrender." In this "biography" of the Pentagon, he extends these moments into a fuguelike history of American military power from Hiroshima to Iraq. The dominant theme is personal: growing up, Carroll, whose father, a general, worked in the Pentagon, saw the building both as his "twin" and as "a kind of dark woods." On the practical side, he argues that "in the nuclear age, civilian oversight of American military policy had become largely mythical," that the Pentagon had "Congress in its thrall and presidents at its mercy." And yet his most fascinating stories involve moments—as in the Berlin crisis and the Vietnam War—when civilians successfully opposed the Pentagon's monolithic power.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

From The Washington Post
Has America become the new Sparta? Although the Soviet Union collapsed more than a decade and a half ago, the United States will spend roughly $561 billion this year on national defense -- in real terms, more than in any year of the Cold War except 1952, the height of the Korean War buildup. In the wake of 9/11, have we become a bomb-first, ask-questions-later superpower -- a threat to world peace, as a majority of Europeans polled in 2003 saw us? For James Carroll, the answer is an anguished yes. His weighty House of War aims to explain the mechanics of this spiritual decline and show how what he sees as a consuming paranoia and vengefulness became lodged in the national soul.

For Carroll, who won the National Book Award in 1996 for his memoir An American Requiem, the central dynamic is a familiar one: The wildfire growth of the military-industrial complex, the perpetual refocusing of foreign policy through a military lens and a mindless reliance on nuclear weapons have led to America's moral fall.

Carroll begins his story with the groundbreaking to construct the Pentagon building at a site called "Hell's Bottom," on the Virginia side of the Potomac, on Sept. 11, 1941 -- 60 years to the day before al-Qaeda terrorists slammed American Airlines Flight 77 into the building. Those two late-summer days bracket a downward arc that begins in earnest with Franklin D. Roosevelt's demand for unconditional surrender from America's foes in World War II -- a call that Carroll argues prolonged the war by leaving no way for the Axis powers to sue for peace.

From this starting point, the book's narrative follows a predictable itinerary: the firebombing of enemy cities in World War II, the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, the chronic overestimation of Soviet military capabilities, the Vietnam debacle and the renewal of superpower tensions during Ronald Reagan's presidency. Finally, there is 9/11; for Carroll, America's decision to respond to the assault by invading Afghanistan and Iraq -- instead of launching "an internationally coordinated law enforcement effort" -- was the fulfillment of the visions of revenge and destruction that possessed America during the Cold War and a way of "counterbalancing [the] trauma." Intertwined with this account of epic public events is a very personal story -- of Carroll's disillusionment with the Air Force (in which his father was a general), his coming of age in John F. Kennedy's Washington, and his work as an antiwar Catholic priest during the Vietnam era.

Although House of War aims to chronicle the rise of a vast impersonal force, Carroll tells much of his story through vignettes of key figures. Among the best are those of Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the officer who built the Pentagon and ran the Manhattan Project, and Gen. Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff who was scarily eager to use nuclear weapons. On the more heroic side are Henry L. Stimson, the World War II secretary of war who foresaw a ruinous arms race if atomic weapons were not brought under international control, and, interestingly, Robert S. McNamara, the much-vilified Vietnam-era secretary of defense who, in Carroll's telling, realized at the time that "the arms race had brought less security, not more, to both the United States and the Soviet Union."

Through such figures, Carroll captures the irrationality that ran through the Cold War as apocalyptic weapons were piled ever higher. He writes of a cascade of errors that swelled into a cultural "Niagara." During the superpower standoff, Carroll writes, "the Pentagon remains an engine room, generating a current that flows inexorably toward the edge of the abyss."

But if House of War is good at recounting the most fearful aspects of the Cold War, it fails to puts them in context. Moreover, many readers will question the essentially pacifist perspective that Carroll brings to his work. He focuses obsessively on nuclear weapons and clearly does not believe in nuclear deterrence. Implicitly, House of War takes the position that it is immoral to threaten an act -- a nuclear strike -- that itself would be profoundly evil. That paradox unnerved many serious strategists, especially in the 1980s. But many also came to see the threat as the tolerable cost of a tense but cold conflict. Despite close calls, deterrence worked -- buying Washington time to let Soviet communism implode. For Carroll, the success of this approach seems less important than the shadow of fear that fell over his own country.

This ambitious, often overreaching book becomes particularly scattershot in its second half, where Carroll's animus often gets the better of him. For example, he criticizes President George H.W. Bush for reacting inappropriately to the fall of the Berlin Wall and missing "the opportunity to sacralize such a pure triumph of the democratic spirit and of a human rejection of violence." He is blind to the masterful role Bush played in winding down the East-West conflict and the self-abnegation involved in not taking a victory lap that would have humiliated Moscow.

Ultimately, Carroll never makes good on his subtitle's promise to explain "the disastrous rise" of American power, words that are drawn from Eisenhower's farewell address, in which he warned of the growth of the "military-industrial complex." Whatever one thinks of that complex, has the rise of American power really been disastrous? Undoubtedly, for the "sideshow" countries of the Cold War -- Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador and Honduras, to name just a few -- it was. Carroll gives a death toll of 21 million in the proxy conflicts of the Cold War. Even a far smaller number would have been appalling; while the United States is not responsible for all those casualties, that awful statistic underscores the danger of subordinating everything to the single goal of defeating an enemy -- a lesson worth recalling amid current administration rhetoric about a "long war" against Islamist terror.

Still, after World War II, the globe suffered no conflicts of the kind that claimed at least 80 million lives between 1914 and 1945. Western Europe remained free and grew extraordinarily prosperous, and (tellingly) the states of Central and Eastern Europe emerged from their Soviet captivity strongly pro-American. Meanwhile, democracy took root in much of the Pacific Rim and other parts of the world. The Cold War was not always pretty, but it was certainly not a disaster.

"Are we beasts?" a shaken Winston Churchill asked after reviewing the devastation that the Allies visited upon German cities. It is a question that the republic should ask itself regularly. The last few years suggest that something has gone awry in the way America exercises its power, though it is unclear how much of this is a reaction to the trauma of 9/11 and how much of it is more deeply rooted, how much we are driven by the Pentagon's "Niagara" and how much by other elements in our culture. For a persuasive analysis of what has happened, we will have to await a better effort than House of War.

Reviewed by Daniel Benjamin
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Timely, Gripping and Tremendous Important
This is a huge book in many ways. The history of the Pentagon is dense and often mystifying, but Carroll manages to show how it is a very human institution with his now patent insight and precision. He manages this by telling its history as a scholar, a journalist of the highest order, and sometimes as a son. Carroll's father was an Air Force general during the Cold War, whose office was located in the Pentagon where the jet struck on 9/11. This book could not have been published at a better time. There is no better way to understand what is at work behind today's headlines than by reading this book. It is at times shocking and frightening, but always illuminating and extremely intriguing. I wouldn't say it reads like a spy novel, even if it is the stuff spy novels are made of, but Carroll's style flows and carries you along effortlessly. There are few politcal heroes here, Democratic or Republican. Carroll is careful to tell this story with unwavering truthfulness, but it would be a mistake to think of this as an attack on the Pentagon or the U.S. military. Carroll has an obvious affection for the place and for the military as an institution, perhaps in spite of himself. Carroll might be the only person in America who could tell this story of immense import with such integrity and thoroughness at this time when we seem so desperately need it.

First Class Personal Reflections, Solid and Thoughtful
The author is the son of General Carroll, the first Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a former FBI special agent who entered the military with the rank of brigadier general with the mandate to create the Office of Special Investigations for the U.S. Air Force. The author is also a former Catholic priest, sympathetic to the Berrigans and those of the Catholic left who opposed the war in Viet-Nam. The book is in consequence not only an extraordinary reference work, but also a labor of love and a labor of conscience. I read it and appreciated it in that vein.

I was surprised to not see in the otherwise excellent bibliography any reference to Lewis Mumford's Pentagon Of Power: The Myth Of The Machine, Vol. II and this confirms my impression that each generation reinvents the wheel, and discovers persistent truths for itself. The author does quote Dwight Eisenhower to good effect--apart from the normal quote warning us of the military-industrial complex, General and President Eisenhower is quoted on page 206 "National Security over the long term requires fiscal restraint," and on page 387, "People want peace so much, that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it." I point to General Smedley Butler's book, War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It and to Jonathan Schell's book, which the author acknowledges, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People as excellent complements to this book.

The core concept throughout the book, very ably discussed, is that smart people can be trapped in stupid paranoid bureaucracies. The author takes great care to single out the chain of paranoia from Forrestal to Nitze to Schlesinger to Rumsfeld, Carlucci, and Cheney, with Wolfowift and Perle playing key roles as the apostles of the Cold War and the expansion of Pentagon power and money.

There is substantive morality in this book, as the author reviews the implications of the U.S. unilaterally over-ruling Churchill and Stalin and demanding unconditional surrender of Germany in WWII. The author reviews the manner in which the U.S. took what he calls "terror bombing" and fire bombing of Germany to new immoral heights, causing Churchill himself to ask if we had gone too far. Napalm was developed for that war, and in one compelling vignette the author discusses how in the final days of the war the U.S. sent over 1,000 aircraft to drop napalm on a hapless village because that is how much napalm they had to use up.

The Tokyo fires, killing 900,000 and leaving 20 million homeless are discussed, as is the use of the atomic bomb as a "signal" to Russia. The author is poignant in quoting McNamara as accepting responsibility for two great war crimes--the fire bombings in WWII, and the failed bombings on North Viet-Nam. See my review of the superb DVD documentary with McNamara, The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara where I itemize the 11 lessons this great man shares with us.

The other two themes that drive this book, apart from self-interested paranoia and the suppression of individual conscience to the "tide" of bureaucratic politics, are the manner in which the Pentagon in general, and the services in particular, have deliberately ignored good intelligence and manipulated the threat in order to increase their budgets, at the same time that the domestic political process has found that corrupting intelligence in order to feed the military-industrial complex leads to more bribes to Congress to pay for more television ads which keep the same individuals in power over the years--as Ronald Reagan pointed out, there is less turnover in the Congress than in the Politburo, and this author makes it clear that the American public cannot trust the Pentagon, the White House, or the Congress to be honest about the threat or prudent with the taxpayer dollar. Right now, today, the National Ground Intelligence Center, the Army's intelligence center, is under investigation for having an officer specifically assigned to manipulate, modify, and exaggerate the "official" database on ground force threats so as to justify bigger more expensive systems that are not actually needed nor affordable. The Air Force and the Navy are guilty of similar lies. Our military leaders are normal honorable human beings, but "the system" sweeps them along in ways that would shock any citizen.

Another major theme in this book, and it is especially timely as we confront Iran, is that the US has consistently failed to understand normal nationalism, and instead chosen to interpret the Soviet Union, Iran, China, Islam, and the African nations as part of a grand conspiracy. Institutionalized paranoia, and bureaucratic politics (see my review of Morton Halperin's Bureaucratic Politics And Foreign Policy in which one "rule" is "lie to the President if you can get away with it") lead to pathological budget-driven decisions that REDUCE national security as well as the integrity of both the nation's policy process and the nation's budget, over time.

The author quotes General Lemay, who demanded the U-2 program for himself, as saying that he would launch a pre-emptive war without Presidential authority, if he felt America was threatened. As the Pentagon consolidates its total control over all U.S. national intelligence agencies, we can but lament the very high probability that we will see Iraq times ten as the Pentagon "manufactures" or "perceives" threats that would not be validated by a truly independent intelligence authority.

The author is very careful, as am I, to avoid confusing the "malevolent impersonality of forces they cannot control" (page 302) with the essential goodness and honor of the individuals that serve in the Pentagon and the services. He quotes McNamara on page 303 as saying "Wars generate their own momentum and follow the law of unanticipated consequences."

The author ends on a positive note. He praises Jonathan Schell, and MIT PhD Student Ms. Randall Forsberg, the latter responsible for The Freeze campaign that ultimately influenced President Reagan and the Congress.

This is a very fine book. Good notes, index, bibliography. This book has soul.

Carrol's Most Important Work
James Carrol has given us three wonderful books: Constintin's Sword, An American Requiem, and his current flawed but exceedingly important work, HOUSE OF WAR. Why flawed? While this is an important book, there are several dozens of redundencies and reiterations of the same, admittedly important passages, again and again. I like Carrol's language and certainly respect his vast knowledge of events that I thought I was very familiar with, but actually had little knowledge concerning the currents and eddies roiling the tides of our common experiences. However, with better editing and an elemination of many of the reiterations, the book could have been shortened by perhaps a hundred pages. And at 512 pages of text and 142 pages of acknowledgements, notes, bibliography and index, it is a veerry long and heavy tome.

Carrol, because of his father's position as a centrally located Air Force general, and eventually first head of the Defense Intellegence Agency, has been afforded remarkable access to opinions of and inteviews with many of the players who were responsible for many of major decisions and events that were so important to the American experience from his birth in 1943 during the week the Pentagon, the House of War, was dedicated, to the current disasterous administration of the man who characterizes himself as The Decider, that very worst president of the United States, George W. Bush.

Carrol, a defrocked Catholic priest, and I am certain a major disappointment to his father and all the father's military comrades who knew him, has amazing insights in the happenings in every adminstration from FDR to GWB. He gives the first Bush presidency and the two terms of Bill Clinton and the first term of "The Decider" pretty short shift, but his knowledge and expressions of the activities and decisions, made and not made, by the presidents from FDR to RR are intelligent, informed and mostly dead on. Like most of the Eastern elite media, he considers the Kennedy brothers, at least John and Bobby, to be nearly godlike, but finds the last two southern country boy president's, Jimmy Carter's and Bill Clinton's, flaws to be unforgivable, especially Bill's daliences with Monica. I am always amazed at how all the alpha male Kennedy brothers have been so easily forgiven for their sexual escapades with the likes of mob girls and emotionally wrecked, but beautiful movie stars and who knows who else, but find it so difficult to forgive Clinton the one episode that we have proof of. However, if one ignores Carrol's obvious biases opposing Clinton and Carter, this is a fine examination of the many dangers to which we have been exposed by the activities of those occupying the White House and the House of War, and the handful of men who have tried to control it's military commander's Dr. Strangelove-tendancies to nuclear armaggedan. A fine and important read.