The Pentagon: A History (10 page)

Commissioners raised a few questions about the size of the building and the lack of roads, but Somervell brushed them aside with the simple message that the building was an urgent necessity and that there was no time to waste on nitpicking questions. “I ask that nothing be done to kill this,” the general told the commissioners. “This seems to be an opportunity to get it when we need it most.”

No one challenged Somervell. Delano absolved Somervell of his plan’s imperfections. “I don’t want to play the role of a troublemaker when it looks as though it is pretty evident that the arguments for this are so strong that you won’t be listened to,” Delano said after Somervell departed. “You will only give them the satisfaction of saying I told you so.”

Commissioner Charles W. Kutz made a wistful suggestion: “If Hitler would postpone his war a year or two…”

My God, what will that boy do next?

Yet Delano had not been one in the past to shy away from arguments about architecture, planning, and buildings, even with his nephew.

In 1938, the Navy pushed plans to replace its hospital in downtown Washington with a new one in nearby Bethesda, Maryland, featuring a sixteen-story, 215-foot high tower. Delano was appalled—the tower far exceeded the 130-foot limit established by law in the District, and even if it was in Maryland, it was a bad precedent. At a joint hearing before the planning and fine arts commissions, Delano and Gilmore Clarke resolved to oppose the tower, which stuck up “like a sore thumb,” in Clarke’s words. There was one problem. Rear Admiral Ben Moreell, who presented the plans for the hospital to the commissions, pulled out a crude sketch showing the tower flanked by two-story wings. The sketch was drawn on White House stationery and bore the initials “FDR.”

Delano turned to Clarke. “My God,” Delano whispered, “what will that boy do next?”

“That boy,” Franklin Roosevelt, had long fancied himself a respectable amateur architect, drawing on a childhood interest that continued through his schooling, into his early public life as assistant secretary of the Navy, and on through his presidency. He was particularly active in and around Hyde Park, poking his nose into the design of several local post offices and collaborating with architect Henry Toombs on a Dutch colonial cottage on his estate in 1938.
Life
magazine published the plans for the cottage with the legend “Franklin D. Roosevelt, Architect.” Professional architects were aghast. “After seeing the title Architect after F.D. Roosevelt in your magazine, I give up,” John Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright, wrote to
Life.
“Put me in a concentration camp.”

Roosevelt was not apologetic, suggesting to his private secretary, Missy LeHand, that the following response be given to critics: “By the way, did Thomas Jefferson have a license when he drew the sketches for Monticello, the University of Virginia and a number of other rather satisfactory architectural productions?”

In architecture, as in other pursuits, Jefferson was Roosevelt’s role model. Next to the Virginian, Roosevelt was the American president most engaged with architecture, though, as art historian William B. Rhoads has written, “his taste was Jeffersonian without Jefferson’s inventiveness.” For federal buildings in Washington, Roosevelt favored a conservative and conventional look and was especially fond of neoclassicism, an affinity he shared with the leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler, himself an amateur architect.

Whatever his talent and taste, Roosevelt had an aesthetic sensibility and understood the power of architecture to convey meaning. He believed the buildings his administration left behind would outlive his policies and that “the ongoing presence of buildings could serve as a bond between generations and even centuries,” Rhoads wrote. Roosevelt thus had a deep interest in the look and placement of buildings in Washington, leaving his stamp on the Jefferson Memorial, National Airport, and the Pentagon. However, no federal building was more purely a Roosevelt production than the Naval Hospital in Bethesda.

Roosevelt had been itching to build a government tower ever since a 1936 campaign stop in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he had been deeply impressed by the new twenty-two-story art deco state capitol, the first in the country to feature a tower. Roosevelt decided the new Navy hospital would be the perfect opportunity to build his own tower. He drew his sketch in December 1937, basing it on the Nebraska capitol, and turned it over to the Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks, which prepared drawings for the sixteen-story tower under the direction of architect Paul Cret. The following summer, Roosevelt inspected several sites before settling on a farm along Rockville Pike in Bethesda, about three miles from the District border. To passersby it appeared to be a rundown cabbage patch, but the president, spotting a spring-fed pond on the grounds, was reminded of the Pool of Bethesda, the Biblical place of healing and renewal. He decided it would be the perfect spot for a towering hospital.

After Delano’s planning commission and Clarke’s fine arts commission raised objections, the Navy came back with new plans in the fall, this time for a twenty-three-story tower rising 250 feet. “They exceed in monstrosity the original plans,” an exasperated Delano wrote the president.

“Dear Uncle Fred,” Roosevelt wrote on December 1, 1938, from Warm Springs, Georgia, where he would often visit to bathe his crippled legs in the healing waters.

I have very carefully studied hospital design and, frankly, I am fed up with the type the Government has been building during these past twenty years. Therefore, I personally designed a new Naval Hospital with a large central tower of sufficient square footage and height to make it an integral and interesting part of the hospital itself, and at the same time present something new—getting away from colonial brick or ultramodernistic limestone. All of the doctors who have seen the design are tremendously keen about it as a practical and useful building for the needs it will serve.

The president went on to paint a pastoral image of the hospital he envisioned, likening the effect of his Navy tower to church spires in “the English countryside.”

That reference was too much for Delano. “Oh Sire!” he wrote his nephew on December 14. “…Since the beginning of time the formula has been that ‘the King can do no wrong.’ However, from the time of Solomon and even further back, the King found it necessary to surround himself with soothsayers, astrologers, and other wise men to warn him of the pitfalls and dangers lying ahead of him.”

It was no use. Roosevelt braved a driving rainstorm on Armistice Day, 1940, to lay the tower’s cornerstone. The president stood beside the contractor—John McShain, of course. Grasping a silver trowel, Roosevelt dabbed at the wet cement. “I’ve done it before and I can do it better than John McShain,” he assured his audience. To complete the English countryside effect, Roosevelt ordered the grounds of the tower enclosed by a sheep fence.

Despite his failure to stop the tower, Delano had occasionally managed to rein in his nephew’s grander architectural impulses. Delano had objected, for example, to the size of the Jefferson Memorial—“an effort to outdo the Lincoln Memorial,” he called it—and Roosevelt had agreed to scale it back.

Delano decided it was time to rein in his nephew again. Sometime between the end of the planning commission meeting at 5
P.M.
July 29 and the following afternoon, Uncle Fred changed his mind about the new War Department building in Arlington. He would be a troublemaker after all.

Uncle Fred goes to bat

At 3
P.M.
on Wednesday, July 30, Frederic Delano walked into the Oval Office for a meeting with his nephew about the proposed War Department building. Accompanying Delano was Harold Smith, director of the president’s budget office. Smith had the look and sensibilities of a Midwestern justice of the peace. In his off-the-rack suit and department-store shoes, with calm gray eyes behind his rimless spectacles, he presented the very image of frugality. His opinions, delivered in slow, judicial tones, were held in high regard by Roosevelt.

The visitors had a very direct message: “It was a great pity to construct this building,” the president was told.

Roosevelt had returned the previous day from a five-day visit to Hyde Park, where he had decamped after approving the new building at the Cabinet meeting July 24. Now, faced with his uncle’s protests, the president admitted that perhaps he had been a bit hasty. “After he got to thinking it over he was a good deal disturbed,” Delano related two days later. “Of course I asked how a matter of such tremendous import as that could be passed through without giving it any real consideration.” Roosevelt noted in his defense that most of the Cabinet had raised no objection to the building.

Smith’s concerns about the building were not aesthetic. He just did not think it made any sense. The proposal had been hurriedly and incompletely considered. He could not understand why a huge, permanent building was needed when the growth of the War Department was supposed to be a temporary response to the emergency.

Delano and Smith told the president that moving forty thousand people back and forth across the Potomac River between Washington and Virginia every day would create “terrific” traffic problems and overwhelm the capacity of the bridges and scant road network in Arlington. By the end of the meeting, the president had come to an agreement with his visitors. Somervell’s building would be cut back considerably in size.

Reporters were waiting outside the White House after the meeting, and an unnamed federal official—more than likely Smith—said that the president had agreed to pare down the building. “The problem of getting 40,000 persons to and from the proposed 35 million dollar War Department Building in Arlington County, Va., has so concerned President Roosevelt that, with his blessing, Federal officials have taken steps to modify drastically original plans for the structure,”
The Washington Post
reported on the front page the following morning.

Delano was fortified by Smith’s support. “I am glad to know that the Director of the Budget is fighting as hard as he can on it,” Delano told his commission colleagues.

Delano sent the Senate Appropriations Committee a letter on July 31 outlining the commission’s view on the project. Gone was the bonhomie of the planning commission meeting two days earlier at which Delano had vowed not to interfere with the building. The project “will have a very serious retarding effect on the National Capital,” Delano warned the senators. It would cause traffic chaos, disrupt Washington’s rental-office market, upend long-considered plans for the federal city, and place financial burdens on Arlington County. He questioned the entire rationale for the building: “Is it wise to put the entire general and official staff of the Army in one place where many of them might be subject to being put out of action?”

Delano urged the size of the building be halved, at least temporarily. “We are strongly of the opinion that while the War Department is justified in planning an office building for a maximum of 40,000 employees, it would be unwise to build more than for say 20,000 employees, until some experience shall have been acquired in concentrating this number in an outlying suburban location,” his letter concluded.

No one was more delighted with the turn of events than Gilmore Clarke, chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts. At the Interior building later that morning, Clarke’s commission held a joint session with Delano’s National Capital Park and Planning Commission to coordinate the assault. Clarke played the role of firebrand, passionately urging that the two commissions marshal public opinion and form a united front to defeat the proposal, appealing to the commissioners’ sense of duty to posterity.

“We wouldn’t want to take this thing on alone,” Clarke said. “We wanted some support. It would seem to me the public is rather stirred up about this and now is the time to make a constructive suggestion which might fire the imagination of some of the gentlemen on the Hill.”

Delano glumly warned that there probably was not time to change the site. “One trouble we are up against is that time is pretty nearly the essence of this whole thing,” he said.

The building’s five-sided design with a big courtyard in the middle was atrocious, Clarke said. “The building is designed with a bull’s eye. It is about as bad a plan as could be designed,” he said. “We just wouldn’t have the answer ten years from now for the reason we put that thing there.” He mocked Somervell’s contention that putting the entire War Department staff in one building was necessary for efficiency. “He won’t walk half a mile around that building. He will pick up a telephone. Unless I am greatly mistaken these people do not move around very much—they are glued to their chairs. They get in a car and go someplace.”

Clarke conceded that the War Department needed some solution to cope with the emergency. “What is the answer?” he mused. “It is sort of bad business to condemn things and not have an answer up your sleeve.”

Nobody had an answer up his sleeve. Delano resigned himself to waging further battle. “All right,” he said, addressing the planning commissioners before they left. “We may have to go to bat on this thing.”

Roosevelt’s fishing expedition

Two days later on August 3, at 10:40 on a hot and humid Sunday morning, the American flag flying over the White House came down from its staff, signaling the president’s departure. Roosevelt was escaping a Washington August so hot that “the heat was melting the tar on Massachusetts Avenue,” according to one press account. The presidential limousine carried Roosevelt and several top aides across town to Union Station, where a special train waited to take the president to New England for what press spokesman Stephen Early told reporters would be a relaxing ten-day fishing cruise.