The Pentagon: A History (49 page)

Room 3E-880 became and would remain the office of the secretary of defense. Bradley’s office would go to Johnson’s deputy. However ungracious, it was a shrewd move. In the hierarchical Pentagon, office size spoke volumes. “He wanted to establish his preeminence in the Pentagon,” Marx Leva, Forrestal’s aide, who stayed on to work for Johnson, later said. “…That was a symbol, but that symbol permeated at various echelons and he also wanted this to be known to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as to the civilian military establishment, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force.”

Johnson did not stop at switching a few offices. Construction crews had been working night and day for months to remodel a pie-shaped ninety-thousand-square-foot slice of the Pentagon into a secure and soundproof area that would be home to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Walls were knocked down, and a huge map room, conference rooms, and rooms within rooms were built. Expensive acoustic tile went up. Thick doors with steel reinforcement were installed, and iron bars placed over windows. The $100,000 project was impressive, but there was one problem: It had been built near Forrestal’s office.

The carpenters and painters had just about finished, and the electricians were starting to install sophisticated communications systems, when Johnson declared in April he wanted the Joint Chiefs near his new office. Building superintendent Carl Muvehill, a testy, enormous man—almost five-sided himself, it was said—felt like weeping when the stop order came. Johnson ordered a new, identical hideout built for the Joint Chiefs, this time on the floor below his office. The area the workers had nearly completed would have to be turned back into regular offices.

The secretary of defense and his staff were taking over all the second and third floors along the E Ring on the River entrance side. Army offices would be concentrated on the first, second, and third floors on the Mall and on the southeast-facing side of the building. The Navy would be concentrated on the fourth and fifth floors along the Mall and west sides of the building. The Air Force would be on the fourth and fifth floors along the River and southeast sides. In all, 12,500 Pentagon workers were moved in “a gigantic game of musical chairs,” as one reporter put it.

Disruptive as it all was, the Pentagon was being converted into the nation’s command post for a unified military in the nuclear age. The Joint Chiefs’ area—once Muvehill’s men rebuilt it near Johnson’s office—was soon bustling with senior officers from all three services and was the most closely guarded area of the Pentagon. The Joint War Room lay behind double steel doors, its walls covered with large maps of the world. The area also included “The Tank,” the conference room where the Joint Chiefs—Bradley, Denfield, and General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, the Air Force chief of staff—regularly met. Nearby were “telecon” rooms, where the chiefs held secure conferences with commanders in Tokyo, London, or Berlin. Incoming messages were decoded and projected on a glass screen; outgoing messages were displayed on an adjacent screen.

The most important command post—even more critical than the Joint War Room—was the Air Force command post in the Pentagon basement. It was here, behind steel-shielded walls, that word of an enemy air attack would likely first come. A battery of direct-line telephones gave the command post instant contact with radar warning networks in the Arctic and on the North American coastlines, as well as with Air Force fighter and bomber bases around the world. The command post was manned twenty-four hours a day, with an Air Force general always on duty and empowered to make immediate decisions in the event of a crisis. Orders could be given to scramble fighters to intercept enemy aircraft, and—should Truman give the command—to launch long-range strategic bombers bearing atomic weapons on retaliatory strikes against Russian targets.

The threat of a nuclear attack on America took on real meaning about five months into Johnson’s tenure, on August 29, 1949, when the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear bomb in Siberia. It was a shocking development, coming three years before U.S. intelligence had predicted. (Before the news was released in September, retired Lieutenant General Dick Groves confidently predicted the Soviets were “ten to twenty years” away from exploding a bomb.)

The news immediately rekindled questions that had been heard after Pearl Harbor about the wisdom of concentrating the military command in the Pentagon. Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin called on the military to immediately abandon the Pentagon, saying it was “suicidal” to keep the defense headquarters there. “We would be a sucker for a solar plexus blow which could knock our country out of an atomic war a few minutes after such a war started,” he said. Johnson, in response, announced a study to create an alternative command post in the event the Pentagon was attacked. By the spring of 1951, locals were buzzing about the construction crews excavating around the clock in secrecy underneath Raven Rock Mountain in Pennsylvania near the Maryland border in the scenic Catoctin Mountains. Some 500,000 cubic yards of the hardest rock on the East Coast was blasted from the mountain’s core and hauled away, and a three-story, 220,000-square-foot building erected underground, its entrance protected by two heavy steel blast doors. It was designated Site R, the nation’s alternate military headquarters in the event of nuclear war.

George Marshall eventually admitted to second thoughts about the Pentagon. “If we’d known there’d be an A-Bomb, the Pentagon would probably never have been built,” he later said.

Pentagonians—as employees were generally referred to in those days—used gallows humor to deal with the anxiety. “No enemy would be stupid enough to bomb the Pentagon, because that would end the confusion in Washington,” a common joke went. Employees would eventually come up with a nickname for the hot dog stand in the middle of the Pentagon courtyard: The Ground Zero Cafe.

We weren’t ready to fight

Louis Johnson was in a dramatically stronger position at the Pentagon than Forrestal, yet he proved unable to capitalize on it. The Pentagon was in chaos. The fighting among the services grew worse; the generals and admirals were united only in how much they despised Johnson. In Omar Bradley’s view, “Truman had replaced one mental case with another.”

Taking the opposite approach from Forrestal, Johnson vowed “to crack a few heads together.” The changes Forrestal had sought were passed by Congress and signed into law by Truman on August 10, 1949, giving the secretary of defense unequivocal power over the armed forces. The unwieldy National Military Establishment was converted into an executive department known as the Department of Defense. The Army, Navy, and Air Force secretaries were removed from the president’s cabinet and their power diminished. The position of chairman was created to preside over the Joint Chiefs.

Johnson launched a crusade against defense spending, but it came to a sudden halt on June 25, 1950, when the Soviet-supplied North Korean People’s Army rolled over the South Korea border and quickly captured Seoul. Poorly trained and poorly equipped U.S. 8th Army troops—living the high life of an occupation army in Japan—were rushed in to support the crumbling South Korean army. The first troops, Task Force Smith, were positioned on the highway north of Osan to stop the advancing North Korean tanks. But the 2.36-inch bazooka rockets fired by the U.S. troops could not penetrate the heavy armor of the T-34 tanks. The American force was overrun. The task force commander, Lieutenant Colonel Brad Smith, could see more tanks approaching, and behind them, stretching for miles, a line of infantry marching four abreast. “We had a pretty good idea right then that we had something that was going to cause us a hell of a lot of woe,” Smith recalled a half-century later. “We weren’t ready to fight, there’s no question about it.” After one week, three thousand U.S. soldiers were dead, wounded, captured, or missing.

The pathetic state of the American military had been revealed. Johnson received much of the blame for the debacle, even though he had been following Truman’s guidance to cut defense spending. The president, already angered by Johnson’s “inordinate egotistical desire to run the whole government,” soon fired his second secretary of defense. Before delivering the news to Johnson, Truman had picked his third.

George C. Marshall had been vacationing in Michigan at the Huron Mountain Resort in August when he was called to the telephone at a nearby country store. It was the president, asking Marshall to come to the White House when he got back to Washington. Truman had already called Marshall back to service twice since he retired from the Army, once as an envoy to China, and then for a momentous two years as secretary of state, overseeing the creation of a recovery plan for Europe. Now, with the nation again at war, Truman turned to Marshall a final time, asking him to become secretary of defense. Marshall had been hoping to retire for five years, but his sense of duty made that impossible. He told Truman he would serve no more than a year.

On September 21, the day he was confirmed by the Senate, Marshall rode to the Pentagon in an old Studebaker and reported to Stimson’s old office, next door to the suite he had occupied as Army chief of staff. “Guess we have to go through the oath business,” he muttered. Ten minutes after being sworn in, Marshall called the Joint Chiefs in for a conference and they went to work. For Marshall, it was a familiar position, reminiscent of when he had been given charge of the Army in the dire days of 1939. “I was getting rather hardened to coming in when everything had gone to pot and there was nothing you could get your hands on, and darned if I didn’t find the same thing when I came into the Korean War,” Marshall later said. “There wasn’t anything.”

Marshall went to work rebuilding the U.S. armed forces. Three months shy of his seventieth birthday when he took office, Marshall did not have the same vigor as in his younger years, and he left much of the detail to his deputy, Bob Lovett. Yet his commanding presence restored order and had an electrifying effect on morale in the building.

Inside the Pentagon, the population of workers in the building soared. By December 1950, six months after the war began, it had jumped 6,000 to 31,000, and would later reach 33,000. Security posters, unseen since World War II, reappeared on corridor walls. In their secure war room, the Joint Chiefs held regular 2
A.M.
“telecon” conferences with MacArthur in Japan. From outside, long rows of lights could be seen burning from windows until late in the night. The wartime Pentagon was back.

He served America magnificently

Marshall was not the only giant of World War II to whom Truman turned. The war in Korea took a desperate turn in November 1950, when more than 300,000 Chinese soldiers launched a massive offensive across the Yalu River, striking a devastating blow at advancing American troops. In the spring of 1951, with the war settling into a long and brutal fight, Truman, through an intermediary, asked Brehon Burke Somervell to take over leadership of the Defense Production Administration, an agency set up to marshal U.S. industry behind military production.

Somervell was astonished. “In view of my experience with the gentleman, this came, to put it mildly, as a complete surprise,” Somervell later wrote to Marshall. Just in January, he had given a speech criticizing Truman’s foreign policy as “vacillating” and “nebulous.” The years had done little to erase the bitterness he felt at Truman’s criticism of Army construction and the Canol oil project. Still, Somervell gave the request serious thought before turning it down, saying he would reconsider if full-scale war broke out between the world powers.

To Somervell’s further amazement, Truman then wrote him a gracious personal letter saying he was “greatly disappointed” by the decision and asking him to reconsider. “[I]t is an assignment for which your previous experience and magnificent contributions have proved you are so eminently fitted,” Truman wrote Somervell on April 23, 1951. “You said you would accept the assignment in the event of all out war. The emergency conditions facing us today are as serious as they would be in that eventuality. The Korean difficulty is enlarging in scope and is obviously very serious.”

Somervell agonized over the decision and came close to accepting before writing Truman a polite note declining the post. His sense of duty—though great—was not as unconditional as Marshall’s. Somervell was entirely a creature of total war, and he doubted that Truman—who had termed Korea a “police action”—was willing to follow through with the commitment Somervell would want. Further, skeptical of Truman’s motives, Somervell thought that the president might be setting him up to take the fall if the mobilization failed.

“He wished to make me ‘Czar of the Pacific’ to clean up the mess left in the wake of the war and otherwise take a terrific beating on all fronts,” Somervell wrote Marshall. “…Though it was very embarrassing at the time, I managed to talk myself out of it and now it seems very funny.”

After his retirement from the Army, Somervell had been recruited by Richard K. Mellon in March 1946 to take over Koppers Company, a Pittsburgh manufacturing conglomerate owned by the Mellon family. Koppers was considered “the dog” of the family’s vast holdings, but Mellon knew from wartime experience that Somervell was just the “scorcher” he needed. In short order Somervell streamlined the company’s management, diversified its operations, and more than tripled its profits.

Somervell, belying his reputation as a publicity hound, had made no effort to stay in the public eye since retiring from the Army. He told a friend that he had “made up my mind that I am going to be the only commander [from World War II] who does not write a book.” Somervell had largely stayed out of the great postwar debates on military organization and strategy.