The House of Brass

(See Cover)

Almost before the roof was on, it was a butt of criticism, a begetter of jokes and a breeder of legend. There was the story of the Western Union messenger who went in on a Monday morning, got caught in the red tape, and walked out on Friday a full colonel. There was the man who sat down at an empty desk to rest his feet and forthwith found himself with a phone, blotter, desk set and secretary. And then there was the acutely pregnant woman who accosted a guard and urgently demanded the way out. "Lady, you shouldn't have come in here in that condition," he said. "But I wasn't, when I came in," she wailed.

The Pentagon, now as familiar an address around the world as Whitehall, 10 Downing Street or the Quai d'Orsay, is a vast concrete and limestone materialization of the military mind. Like the military mind, it inspires awe, often admiration, sometimes exasperation. It is simple in concept and organization, infinitely complex in detail; a marvel of systematic sense when the system is mastered, a mire of confusion when it is not. It is the brain of the U.S.'s armed might. Through its radio antennae its nerve ends reach to a bloody hill in Korea, to Eisenhower's SHAPE headquarters, to a destroyer squadron in the Mediterranean. The incoming messages are caught up by the churning life which animates its rings of corridors, flow to high, bare spaces where it weighs, remembers, balances before it makes its decisions; the answers clatter out over its ceaseless machines.

The housing for this vast brain is a marvelously articulated mechanism, unique on the face of the known world. It is the world's largest office building--three times the size of the Empire State Building, 50% bigger than Chicago's Merchandise Mart. The U.S. Capitol would fit neatly into just one of its five segments. It was built low because of the nearby Washington airport, with stairways and ramps instead of elevators* to save wartime materials, and with five sides to add wall space without adding walking time (the way to save steps is to walk around the hub-like ring to a numbered corridor, then walk out the spoke to the proper ring). Each of its five outer walls is roughly the length of three football fields, and in all, its corridors stretch for 17 1/2 miles.

Somervell's Folly. The Pentagon was built in a wartime hurry for the wartime Army. The Army's Engineer General Brehon Somervell (now retired and president of Koppers Co.) drove the work at a prodigious clip. The first offices were occupied in seven months; the job completed in 16. Some 300 architects had a hand in its design. It has five floors, each of which is painted a distinctive color--powder blue, grey, peach, green and tan. It has 7,370 windows, but it is entirely air-conditioned by a unique system, regulated by electronic "eyes" on the roof which adjust the temperature by the sun's heat. By conservative official reckoning, it cost $83 million. At first it was called "Somervell's folly"; critics predicted that after World War II it would become a vast, desolate pigeon roost. Now actually filled to overflowing, it is probably the most efficiently used building in the Government's vast catalogue of real estate.

Squatting hugely across the Potomac from Washington, it is a defiant enclave of non-segregation in segregated Virginia: Negro & white personnel use the same rest rooms and eat in the same dining rooms. Its teeming workers communicate with each other through 2,100 intercoms, 15 miles of pneumatic tubes, and the world's largest private branch telephone exchange. The Pentagon switchboard, Liberty 5-6700, plugs in 40,000 telephones and is growing at the rate of 200 phones a week. Every military man working in Washington (inside the Pentagon and out) is on the exchange. The Defense phone bill: $4,000,000 a year.

Except for electric power, which it buys, the Pentagon is as self-sufficient as a city. Most of its 31,300 inhabitants--of whom only 10,000 are uniformed, the rest civilians--are fed in six cafeterias, at ten snack bars, or at the pavilion in the middle of the central courtyard, surrounded by beach umbrellas. There are two private dining rooms, one for general officers, another for field-grade officers (lieutenant colonels and colonels eat from 11:30 to 1, majors either before or after). The Secretary of Defense and the chiefs and secretaries of each service have their own dining rooms where they and their guests eat in sacrosanct seclusion. There are two hospitals, a television-radio studio which transmits three nationwide programs each week. Underneath the River Entrance there is an officers' club and gymnasium with five handball courts, Turkish baths and four bowling alleys.

In the low-ceilinged concourse, 21 broad stairways lead to 28 bus-loading stations where 750 buses load and unload the building each day. The concourse's walls are lined with shops where the Pentagonian can buy a uniform or a brassiere, a bestseller or a funeral wreath, a birthday cake or a railroad ticket, get a haircut or a loan. Once a guiding officer boasted to visiting General Henri Giraud that the Pentagon office girl could buy both a wedding ring and a baby carriage within its walls. The Frenchman asked: "Which do they buy first?"

Guards & Sewage. Just to service and guard this vast machine takes about 1,000 men & women. A daytime visitor no longer needs a pass to enter the building as in wartime, but some 170 security officers prowl its corridors, bar the unauthorized from restricted areas. There is but one chimney atop the Pentagon; black smoke rising from it is a sign that sergeants are busy burning classified papers.

Four workers are assigned the sole task of replacing the 600 light bulbs which burn out each day. Another four are professional clockwatchers; their job is to keep an eye on the master control panel on which 4,000 Pentagon clocks are synchronized. Carpenters pedal from job to job on bicycles. The day's waste paper (ten tons of it, not including classified material) is trucked away and sold for an average $80,000 a year. In an outlying building, the sewage is processed and tidily packed for use as fertilizer on the Pentagon's surrounding lawns.

Set between the lawns there is parking space for 8,200 cars (admirals and generals park at the River and Mall Entrances; lesser officers, enlisted men and clerks have to park half a mile away). There are 30 miles of winding roadways whose signs more often point away from than toward the Pentagon. One bewildered woman trying to find her way finally gave up, drove her car across an acre of grass to the building entrance. But like the Pentagon itself, the roads have an unlikely logic. The system works, as long as the man enmeshed in it keeps in line, cuts no corners, and follows the signs.

On the E Ring. As any military establishment must be, the Pentagon is ruled by rank, and its office layout is an accurate diagram of each man's place in the caste. The outer "E" ring contains the biggest offices and the biggest brass, and caste descends in downward steps toward the center of the building where captains and majors are scrambled together, sometimes dozens to a room, in the inside rings. Along the E Ring's River and Mall sides, which have the only view of the river, are the civilian secretaries--Air's Thomas Finletter, Navy's Francis Matthews, Army's Frank Pace--and the military chiefs of each service--Air's General Hoyt Vandenberg, Navy's Admiral Forrest Sherman, Army's Joseph Lawton Collins. Their offices are luxurious but functional--and about the only place in the Pentagon's chaste modernity where tradition rears its old-fashioned head. By right of office, Joe Collins sits at the massive, heavily carved desk of William Tecumseh ("War is Hell") Sherman; Marshall's desk was Pershing's. Pace has the desk used by Secretary of War William Howard Taft.

Biggest office of all goes to the Pentagon's top man, Secretary of Defense George Marshall, a clean-desk man with a fetish for delegation (in the Pentagon, a clean desk is the accepted symbol of efficiency). From the time he arrives at 8:30 each morning until he leaves at 5, he usually sees no more than six people. He assigns jobs and has his indispensable deputy, Wall Streeter Robert Lovett, see that they get done.

The War Room. Under Old Soldier Marshall, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have become steadily more important, the three civilian secretaries steadily less. On the floor below Marshall's office in Room 3E880 are the staff quarters of the Joint Chiefs and the office of J.C.S. Chairman Omar Bradley. Together, the Chiefs of Staff constitute the top military brains of the U.S.

No place in the Pentagon is more closely guarded than the Joint Chiefs' area. The original wall-boarding has been torn out and replaced with sheet steel. Somewhere in this area, its exact location secret, is the J.C.S. War Room. Entrance is through double steel doors operated by buzzers. For swift communication the Chiefs use one of the Pentagon's telecon rooms, where incoming messages are decoded and flashed on a glass screen and the outgoing replies appear on another screen beside them. Four-way conversations can thus be carried on with points as far apart as Tokyo, London and Berlin. Deep in the basement is the War Room of the Air Forces' steel-shielded command post, where nine-foot-high maps slide on tracks along the wall. Here the word of enemy attack would come, and from here the word would be flashed to the White House. Day & night a general officer is on duty in the command post, empowered to hurl the U.S. air force into action at Truman's order if an emergency demanded it.

Books & Flaps. The organization the Chiefs preside over is a world of "Standard Operating Procedure." S.O.P. is a system designed to assure that things get done, not to find better ways of doing them. Every man has a superior looking over his shoulder and the top men have Congress and the White House peering over theirs.

The Pentagonian always lives "by the book." Confronted with a problem, his instinct is to find a precedent (nothing makes a Pentagonian feel snugger than to curl up inside a precedent), to make a survey, to appoint an "ad hoc" committee, or, if possible, to hand the problem to someone else. When "the flap is on," a process which can be set off by as little as a Congressman's letter or a sudden demand from a Chief of Staff, he responds by producing a protective cloud of paper in which he can safely disappear in a smother of initials and information copies.

The run-of-the-corridor Pentagonian makes no basic decisions. He prepares the information for decision by a superior. What is more important than being right is to have thought of all the ways of being wrong. For him, no question can have only two sides. Each, like the building he works in, has at least five sides, none of which is exactly opposite the other. It is a place of the heavily guarded "yes."

The Cog. The average Pentagon officer, unless born to paper-pushing routine, is apt to be a dissatisfied man. In the brassbound Pentagon, there are more admirals than ensigns, more generals than second lieutenants. The most common rank is lieutenant colonel or (in the Navy) commander. Before he was ordered to the Pentagon, a typical lieutenant colonel might have been commanding an antiaircraft battalion in Germany, with 31 officers and 723 men under his command, along with several million dollars' worth of guns and equipment.

In the Pentagon, he becomes an anonymous cog in, say, the Reserve Components Branch of the Organization & Training Division in the office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations. He exchanges his comfortable rent-free house in Germany for a six-room row house in Arlington County which he has to buy for $23,000 because no houses are available for rent. His $632-a-month salary barely covers his expenses (some captains have to drive taxicabs at night to make ends meet). In the Pentagon he finds that a lieutenant colonel rates lower than one of his own first lieutenants did back in Germany. He commands nobody, not even a stenographer, does not rate an office to himself. He embarks on a career of reading thick reports, writing analyses.

The Pentagon vocabulary closely resembles plain English, but must be learned. "Implement" means do, "formalize" means write it down, and "finalize" means finish it. Cynics devise more irreverent definitions :

Program: Any assignment that can't be completed in one phone call. Channels: The trail left by an interoffice memo. To Expedite: To confound confusion with commotion. Under Consideration: Never heard of it. Under Active Consideration: We're looking in the files for it. Coordinator: A guy who has a desk between two expediters. Modification Policy: A complete reversal which nobody admits. A Survey Is Being Made of This: We need more time to think of an answer. Note and Initial: Let's spread the responsibility for this. Point Up the Issue: Expand one page to 15 pages. Referred for Appropriate Action: Maybe your office will know what to do with this.

The endlessly flowing paper is controlled by colored tags and big "buck-slips." Congressional letters, of which the Pentagon gets about 300 a day, get a yellow "expedite" tag; an "urgent" tag is red, and one "rush-rush" marker is known as "the green hornet." An expert use of the buckslip--a small routing slip on which higher authority checks off directions such as "for action," "please brief for me," etc. --is an essential Pentagon skill. The classic story is one of a newly arrived Navy commander, snowed under with accumulating papers, who stumped over to an old hand behind a spotlessly clean desk and demanded to know how it was done. "Its easy," said the old hand. "I just write on the buckslip, 'Commander Smith probably would be interested in this.' " Roared the newcomer: "You b......, I'm Commander Smith."

Through Channels. Into this labyrinth of procedure, personalities and policy, messages chatter night & day, seeking decisions, recommendations, remedies. They range from the crucial to the trivial.

A typical message to the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics: a report from a patrol-bomber squadron that the windshield wipers on its Lockheed P2V planes did not work because the windstream lifted them off the glass. The report went down through the aircraft division to the Lockheed patrol plane desk officer, headed through the airborne equipment division until in the aircraft systems design section it found a man who specialized in nothing but wipers. A copy went through the P2V maintenance section of the airframes structures unit of the aircraft maintenance division. Final action will be taken by an officer in the design of cabin and cockpit enclosures section, after he gets authorization from the budget section to pay for a modification. Six months after the original complaint, the squadron can hope to get windshield wipers that work.

The File That Wasn't There. Absurdities to the civilian eye sometimes have a certain wild bureaucratic logic, such as the file in the basement called "the file of non-filed files"--a list of files that have been sent somewhere else. The Pentagon explains that it saves searching for a file that isn't there.

Not the least of the Pentagon's complexities is the complex problem of simplifying itself. For the past two years, a civilian firm of management consultants has been studying its problems. Louis Johnson abolished several hundred long-standing committees that past Pentagonians had set up and forgotten. Samples: the Committee on Improved Career Outlook for Intelligence Personnel, the Committee on New-Type Sea Bag. But some 232 committees remain, including the Committee on Purchase of Blind-Made Products.

The Comers. However disagreeable he may find it, his Pentagon tour of duty is often crucial for a rising young officer. The years between 30 and 35 and the rank of lieutenant colonel are critical for him. Until then, promotion is almost automatic; after those years, he has to show special abilities if he is to make the jump to higher rank. The Pentagon is a good place to make the jump.

In the Pentagon, the able young officer is under the eyes of the big brass. He learns that he can argue with his superiors with impunity, provided he is concise, polite and logical. Such arguments are permitted more freely in the Air Force than in the Army, more freely in the Army than in the Navy. If he shows exceptional ability, a high-ranking officer may pick him for his staff, later see that he gets good commands. Then the word goes out that he is a "comer."

Long before Pentagon days, Lieut. Colonel George Marshall so impressed General John Pershing. The Navy's Forrest Sherman was taken under the wing of Admiral Chester Nimitz; Lauris Norstad, now top airman in Europe, was tapped by General Hap Arnold. Lieut. General Al Gruenther, generally regarded as the most impressive briefing officer the Pentagon has produced, was once a comer himself, is now Eisenhower's chief of staff at SHAPE. Recently, Gruenther called for the Army's brightest comer, Brigadier General Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Schuyler, 50, to serve as his plans officer. He also got the loan of the Navy's Captain George Anderson, 44. Anderson, whom Sherman had picked as his operations officer when he commanded the Sixth Fleet, is, according to Pentagon scuttlebutt, "sure to be CNO some day."

Though the military lives by the book, the real operator is the officer who knows how to stretch the letter of the book just a bit but not too much. He is an innovator but not a rebel. The operator is the officer who wangles just a little extra, whether he is a bureau chief wangling an extra stenographer from the personnel department or Chief of Naval Operations Forrest Sherman wangling a supercarrier out of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--after his predecessor had failed and gotten fired for his pains.

The Pentagon's S.O.P., for all its shortcomings, is necessary in an organization as vast as the U.S. defense establishment. The thing works. It is designed to work despite the changing individuals who operate it, or their varying competence--whether brilliant, merely adequate or downright dumb. The Pentagon contains all three. But from its desks came the plans, and also many of the fighting men, that helped win World War II. General Matthew Ridgway was a deputy chief of staff at a Pentagon desk until called to take over the Eighth Army.

Inevitable & Durable. Good & bad, it is the military system, and the Pentagon is its shrine. At its best, it provides what Sun Tzu 2,400 years ago enjoined on commanders: "The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory and few calculations to defeat." At its worst, it suffers from the fault Napoleon pungently expressed in Maxim 65: "If a commander seeks wisdom in debates and conferences, he will arrive at the result which through all ages has followed such a course--namely, by making the worst decision, which almost always in war is the most pusillanimous, or, if you wish, the most prudent."

But in an age of complete communication, where a company commander in a Korean foxhole can theoretically pick up a field telephone and talk to Omar Bradley in his Washington office, the Pentagon is inevitable. And as long as there are modern armed forces for a Pentagon to direct, a Pentagon will exist. It will even survive an atom bomb. For the Defense Department is even now busy building another one, safely tunneled under a hill in Maryland.

* There are actually 13 elevators, but to the public they are hidden and forbidden. Most are for freight, others only for the topmost brass, cripples and cardiac cases.

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