The Pentagon: A History (33 page)

One day I’ll be famous

The job and the weather were taking their toll on McShain as well—he had lost eight pounds in the heat subbing for Hauck, and he punctured his foot walking around the site. McShain had to answer to a higher authority. His wife, Mary, watching her husband for signs of a physical or mental breakdown, ordered him on vacation. “Mother would use these words: ‘John, go upstairs and get the suitcases. We have to go away,’” Polly McShain recalled. “She knew it was either sickness, death, or a vacation, and she would not let him kill himself.”

Yet there was little time for McShain to relax. Building a bigger Pentagon, McShain wanted assurances he would be paid accordingly. By the terms of the contract, the builders were to be paid a fixed fee of $524,000. The contract had provisions for increasing the fee, but the amount depended on how much space was added, a figure open to interpretation given a building as vast as the Pentagon. “There’s loads of tricks to this figuring on this building,” Renshaw observed.

The Army put McShain off, insisting in August that the matter be settled only after the building was finished. “We’ll have one grand fight instead of a lot of little ones,” a budget official explained. McShain—“a pretty hard customer,” in Renshaw’s words—yelled long and hard, but to no avail. Groves, as usual, was entirely unsympathetic. “If he’d been as much interested in doing the job cheaply as he is in fighting for this little amount of fee, why, we’d have saved a lot of dollars,” he told Renshaw.

Meanwhile, open warfare broke out among the contractors over the wording of a dedication plaque naming the principals in the building’s creation that was to be placed at the Pentagon’s Mall entrance. The inscription approved by Renshaw in late July listed John McShain, Inc., as the contractor, and the two Virginia firms, Doyle & Russell and Wise Contracting Company, Inc., as “associated contractors.” The Virginia firms objected, insisting that the wording on the panel match the language of the contract, which listed all three companies as contractors.

Contract or not, it was a presumptuous complaint. The Virginia firms had served primarily as underwriters for the project, each contributing 20 percent of the financing and each receiving 20 percent of the fee. Except for one man—John F. O’Grady of Doyle & Russell, chief accountant for the job—the two Virginia firms supplied managers only in minor supervisory roles. “There is no question but that Mr. McShain has received little assistance from the other firms in this venture,” Groves noted. “…They have taken little if any part in the management of operations, or in the solution of the many difficult construction problems.”

Indeed, the first time Hobart E. Doyle, president of Doyle & Russell, visited the Pentagon site was when he came to complain about the wording on the plaque. “Whoever it was, it was the first time I’d ever seen him,” said Groves.

The contrast with McShain was obvious. Arguments about fees were one thing, but to McShain the plaque was sacrosanct. It represented the recognition of the ages that he, John McShain, had built the Pentagon.

Renshaw and Groves backed McShain, but the argument raged through August. Lee Paschall, the president of Wise, visited Renshaw’s office on August 29 and was so abusive that Renshaw threatened to call the Pentagon police to escort him out of the office. Paschall apologized and Renshaw accepted it, but Groves was unforgiving, considering the contractor’s behavior “disgraceful and disrespectful.” Groves dismissed the Virginia firms’ demands. “We can force them to accept anything,” Groves told Renshaw.

However, the Virginia firms had an important benefactor—Representative Clifton Woodrum, the Virginia congressman largely responsible for getting them the contract. Woodrum called Somervell August 31, and during their chummy conversation they settled the matter in less than a minute. “These people, the Virginia contractors, they’re just a little bit upset,” Woodrum explained. “They have a little pride of authorship in that building.” Would it be all right to list all the contractors equally?

“Oh absolutely,” Somervell said. “I’ll have it done right away.”

That was that. The limestone plaque was installed on the Mall entrance not long afterward. There was no ceremony and no photographs; the date was not even recorded. The job was “too rushed to take the time,” Hauck recalled. The stone had Franklin D. Roosevelt’s name at the top, followed by Henry L. Stimson, Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson, and General George C. Marshall. (Patterson’s middle initial was mistakenly carved as “B” and later corrected, but the change remains obvious.) Below were the officers directly responsible, including Somervell, Groves, and Renshaw. Next were the chief architects, Edwin Bergstrom and his replacement, David Witmer. (There had been debate about including Witmer, but Renshaw insisted; Witmer had solved numerous design conundrums after Bergstrom’s departure.) Next were the contractors; as consolation, McShain was listed above Doyle & Russell and Wise, a first among equals, at least. Last was the builders’ manager, J. Paul Hauck.

Just before the rectangular panel was placed in the wall, two more names were added, unbeknownst to almost all. Captain Bob Furman and Major Charles H. Smith, Renshaw’s operations officer, took some tar and impishly wrote their names on the back of the stone. “Roosevelt’s on the front, and we’re on the back,” Furman later said. “One day, I’ll be famous.”

Hell-an-gone

Why anyone would want his name on the building in the first place was beyond the comprehension of the plank walkers. As summer wore on, the good-natured patience of Marjorie Hanshaw and the other government girls was wearing thin. “Hell-an-gone” was one of the nicer nicknames they came up with for the place. Some employees claimed that the architect had gone insane after his design was completed; others insisted he was insane before he started.

The more people moved in, the more chaotic the place got. The question of racial segregation in the cafeteria had been settled, but the food operation was still an endless headache for McShain and Renshaw. Between the construction workers and the War Department employees, they were feeding as many as 25,000 people, going through two tons of meat, four tons of vegetables, and 625 gallons of coffee every day. “I am inclined to believe that the task was even greater than that of erecting the building,” McShain later remarked.

There was no kitchen in the building nor would there be one until the end of the year, when the permanent cafeteria was built. Groves deemed temporary stoves a fire risk, so food was prepared in the construction workers’ cafeteria in a big frame building with a kitchen the size of a football field. Hot food was loaded into vacuum containers and delivered by truck several hundred yards to the Pentagon.

Two temporary dining rooms now operated in huge unoccupied office bays, and together with the construction cafeteria, there was seating for ten thousand people—if only employees could get through the long lines. The thirty minutes that war workers were allowed for lunch simply was not enough. “It takes that much time to walk to the cafeteria and stand in line to wait your turn,” complained J. H. Beswick of Washington. “If you are too long waiting you make a dash for the beverage bar only to learn that the things they call sandwiches are all gone. There is no other place to eat, no time to go elsewhere. You have to eat this outfit’s food or do without.”

Those eating in the Pentagon dining rooms complained of flies and dust or worse. In June a young Ordnance clerk reported to first-aid carrying a “filthy, lousy” sandwich he said he had bought at the cafeteria and had made him ill. Simultaneously, an anonymous caller telephoned the newspapers to report the sandwich was infested with maggots. The story unraveled like a dimestore detective novel. Renshaw ordered the first-aid nurse “to hold the person and the sandwich” and rushed over officers to investigate. “The first thing we found out were the bread and the meat were entirely different brands than we used,” Renshaw told Groves. Under interrogation by Furman and two other officers, the kid admitted the sandwich was planted, but said he “wasn’t going to squeal on anybody.” Renshaw suspected a union operation aimed at embarrassing the contractors.

Nonetheless, most complaints were coming from employees who needed no instruction from the unions or anyone else. “If the city has an epidemic, it will be a safe bet where it started,” wrote the
Times-Herald.

Groves worried obsessively about the complaints, convinced that as much as any other feature, food service would determine whether people considered the building a success. He ordered Renshaw to inspect the cafeteria regularly for cleanliness and to make sure the silverware was polished. “I think until I stop getting complaints, you’d better eat there about every other day,” Groves told Renshaw on July 30.

“That’s a permanent assignment, Colonel,” Renshaw protested. “Because they’re never going to stop complaining.”

Groves was particularly worried about conditions in several dining rooms reserved for Army officers. “Have you got some good-looking hostesses in those other rooms?” he asked Renshaw.

“Beautiful, Colonel,” Renshaw replied.

“How many have you got?”

“One in each room.”

“Well, you better double that number, and get them better-looking,” Groves ordered.

Still dissatisfied, Groves took to sending an officer on undercover missions to inspect conditions in the cafeteria. After receiving the spy’s reports, Groves sent Renshaw a memorandum on August 6 complaining of “a considerable fly problem” and critiquing in detail the condition of the butter patties: “The individual butter pats were piled six deep, separated by layers of oil paper but were in an unsightly condition and had a strong scent inasmuch as no ice had been placed around or underneath the butter.”

Renshaw was infuriated. Here he was trying to construct the world’s largest office building in record time and Groves was sending spies to examine the butter patties? Renshaw reported the butter was now being iced, and as for the flies, workers were spending three hours every morning spraying. “Instead of starting at 5
A.M.
we come in there at 3
A.M.
and spray everything,” Renshaw said. “If we spray anymore we’ll be poisoning the people.”

Renshaw had proudly displayed a gold star that had been awarded the cafeteria by the Arlington County Health Department. The undercover officer recommended that it “be removed entirely, or placed in an obscure location, inasmuch as this undeserved trophy is regarded with manifest scorn by the diners.”

The plank walkers reserved their greatest scorn for the sweltering conditions inside the Pentagon. Air-conditioning was still a novelty for many Washington workers, but in most buildings they could at least open windows and doors to get a draft. In the Pentagon, most workers were stationed far from any openings. Those close to the windows, like Lucille Ramale, were not necessarily better off—the construction was right outside. “When the noise got so bad, and the dust got so bad, we couldn’t even open the windows,” she said. “So I remember getting combs to put my hair up off my neck, because it was so hot. You’d just ruin your clothes because you’d just sweat them completely wet every day. It was miserable.”

Air-conditioning the Pentagon was an unprecedented challenge for the relatively young technology. Not only was the building far bigger than anything previously air-conditioned, its seven-thousand-plus windows and low, spread-out design left it extremely vulnerable to changes in outdoor temperature.

Charles S. Leopold, a renowned Philadelphia mechanical engineer who had air-conditioned big buildings such as the New York Stock Exchange and Madison Square Garden, had been hired by Somervell for $85,600 to design the heating and cooling for the Pentagon. Leopold set up the largest air-conditioning system of its kind, with twelve centrifugal compressors manufactured by the Carrier Corporation of Syracuse, New York. They operated on huge amounts of water—46,600 gallons of water were pumped per minute from the Pentagon lagoon and carried to the building through a 1,200-foot tunnel, where it was chilled by the compressors to forty-three degrees and used to cool the air. The system may have been impressive, but in the hot summer of 1942, with temperatures soaring and more than ten thousand employees in the building, the air-conditioning was simply not working.

It was impossible to cool the building, given it was still a construction site with large sections open to the sweltering humidity. More than three thousand employees were working in areas with no air-conditioning, and there was little hope of getting it to them before the end of August. Huge fans were installed to improve air circulation in the building, but the plank walkers remained thoroughly unimpressed.

The situation here is tragic

The final insult was the commute. Epic traffic jams were being reported with only a fraction of the employees in the building. “The afternoon outbound trip is something like a retreat from Singapore,” the
Washington Daily News
wrote May 27.

The maze of roads around the building was not even half completed. All around the building, roadbeds were being graded, bridges built, pavement poured, and overpasses constructed. The trip was a nightmare for drivers—routes to the building seemed to change every day. Hundreds of cars would end up lost every day, “their drivers completely confused and befuddled, not knowing whether they were going toward the building or in the opposite direction,” McShain later said.

Military police directed the traffic, but it seemed to make little difference. “We’re putting on more MPs, and they run them around in more circles,” Renshaw complained.