Steve Vogel - The Pentagon: A History

Steve Vogel - The Pentagon: A History
R..dom House | English | 2008 | ISBN: 0812973259 | 672 pages | EPUB/MOBI | 2.59 MB / 3.11 MB

Washington Post journalist Vogel provides an incisive history of the Pentagon both as an architectural construct and as an American symbol, though not as an institution. Vogel traces the politics and design considerations involved in planning a new home for the previously scattered War Department (forerunner of today's Department of Defense) in the early 1940s.

The Pentagon was constructed in a frantic rush in 1941–43; its physical history is as bland as poured concrete but as significant as the symbolism the building has acquired. Washington Post reporterVogel narrates the backroom handshakes that initiated the project—no environmental impact statements needed in 1941—and centers it on the army general in charge. Brehon Somervell sited it first on a pentagonal parcel adjacent to Arlington Cemetery, but FDR ordered it moved down the Potomac. Vogel introduces the architects, contractors, and workers involved; relates labor and social (i.e., segregation) incidents during the construction; and pauses for ideas proposed for postwar disposition of the Pentagon. It never became an archive center as FDR imagined, but instead was retrofitted, restored, and after 2001, partially rebuilt to maintain it as the American military's central command post. Covering quotidian events such as broken pipes, eccentric ones such as Abbie Hoffman's 1967 "levitation" of the building, and the devastating terrorist attack of 9/11, Vogel produces a comprehensive biography of the Pentagon.

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