The Pentagon: A History

by Steve Vogel

  Bergstrom, at least, was no figurehead. His patriotism fired by Nazi atrocities, including in his father’s native Norway, Bergstrom took his assignment seriously and became Somervell’s key adviser on architectural matters. He worked “every day and long into the nights,” assisting in the design of the camps, munitions plants, and buildings the Construction Division was putting up around the country, and bringing in private architects to help.

  Now Bergstrom was in charge of the biggest project of his long career. Captain Robert W. Colglazier, a Construction Division officer, was under orders from Somervell to get everything Bergstrom needed—people, equipment, office space—and to get it without question. Bergstrom wanted a lot. “He literally, and I mean literally, wanted hundreds of people,” Colglazier recalled. He scrambled to meet the chief architect’s demands.

  Meanwhile, Bergstrom and his assistants gathered with Casey’s team Friday night at the division headquarters in the Railroad Retirement Building in Washington to plan the new project.

  It fit

  The Arlington Farm tract had a peculiar shape, bound on five sides by roads or other divisions. It was roughly a square, with a triangle sliced off one corner, leaving an asymmetrical pentagon. The site was bound on the north for 1,360 feet by Arlington Memorial Drive, the stately road that connected Memorial Bridge to Arlington National Cemetery. On the west the border ran for 1,340 feet along Arlington Ridge Road, an old and important thoroughfare connecting Georgetown to Alexandria. To the south, a double row of oak trees bounded the site, dividing it from a field used for training troops at Fort Myer. Another planned highway would run on a north-south route, forming the southeast border of the site. On the east-northeast side, the borderline followed a branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a proposed truck highway for 1,150 feet.

  Though he had reduced the number of floors from four to three, Somervell still wanted four million square feet of office space. The design team gazed at maps, trying to figure out how to fit such a large building in.

  Bergstrom led the deliberations, working closely with Casey and Frederick H. Fowler, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, another Somervell hire. Roy C. Mitchell, Bergstrom’s longtime chief engineer in Los Angeles who had followed his boss to Washington, brought expertise in structural design and mechanical work. Also detailed to the team was Socrates Thomas Stathes, a young War Department draftsman who had studied architecture at Washington’s Catholic University.

  Stathes was known to friends as Red, in honor of his auburn hair and freckled face. His father and mother had emigrated in 1900 from the Greek village of Isari and settled in Washington, where they opened a restaurant. Red, the second oldest of their five children, was the pride of the Stathes family. He earned an architecture degree at Catholic University and after winning the Paris Prize in 1938 went to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Caught in France with no good way home when the war broke out the following year, Stathes used the Greek he had spoken since childhood to befriend several Greek crewmembers aboard a freighter. They let him stow away back to America. Stathes went straight to work for the War Department, and the gifted draftsman now found himself assigned to sketch the first drawings of the new building.

  Despite the layout of the tract, a pentagonal shape was not immediately obvious to the designers; rather, it gradually dawned on them that it might make sense. The team tried “different setups and layouts, such as square, octagonal and rectangular and so on,” Casey later said, “and finally we came up with sort of a joint expression of views and thoughts and ideas and ended up with this five-sided pentagon structure.” Stathes’s sketch showed an irregular pentagon, like a square with a corner cut off, more or less matching the shape of the tract. It was really two buildings, a five-sided ring surrounding a smaller one of the same shape.

  All through the weekend they refined the design. The interior of the outer ring was lined with forty-nine barracks-like wings, sticking in like the teeth of a comb. The smaller ring had thirty-four exterior wings, all pointing toward the outer ring. The wings were 50 feet wide and 160 feet long, separated from each other by thirty-foot-wide open-air “light courts.” Corridors connected the two rings on the ground and third floors. The whole structure had a gross area of 5.1 million square feet, including 4 million square feet of office space and the remainder for services facilities. Only the most senior officials would have private offices; everyone else would work in enormous open areas. Allowing a hundred square feet per worker, the building could hold forty thousand employees.

  By Sunday night, the plans were completed. Bergstrom had come up with an estimate of $17.5 million for the project; to be on the safe side, Somervell would double that to $35 million. The figure was startlingly high for a single building, yet would prove woefully inadequate. Stathes’s drawings were prepared for presentation to Representative Woodrum’s House subcommittee on Tuesday.

  Two years before his death in 1981, Casey could not conceal his pride over meeting Somervell’s challenge: “I might say that on Monday morning he did have our layout plans, the architectural perspectives, and the general description of this structure conforming generally to his instructions. As I say it was a busy weekend.”

  While all the designers contributed, it was Bergstrom, more than anyone else, who conceived the pentagonal shape. “I would say Bergstrom probably has the greatest credit for it,” Casey said in 1979. Contemporary records reach the same conclusion. “The original conception, the general layout and the overall direction of the design…were the responsibility and the contribution of Mr. Bergstrom,” according to a 1943 Corps of Engineers memorandum.

  There were many problems with the irregular design. The pattern was awkward and the routes between wings of the two buildings were circuitous. Lacking symmetry, with rows of wings sticking out, the building was frankly quite ugly.

  Yet given the five-sided site, the pentagonal design had one virtue that overrode all other considerations, Red Stathes remembered more than sixty years later: “It fit.”

  It should not ever come to pieces

  The whole idea seemed nonsensical to Henry Stimson, still disgusted with the debacle over the last New War Department Building. How could the War Department propose to build a new headquarters when it had just opened one last month?

  Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson had telephoned Stimson early the morning of Tuesday, July 22, to inform him about the building Somervell had dreamed up—big enough “to hold the entire War Department and take the place of the present new building and the old building and the seventeen other buildings that we are scattered in all over the city,” Stimson related to his diary. “[Patterson] said that plans had been drawn on the chance to see whether such a building could be done and he asked me if I would see the architect and the various other people…. So I said, ‘All right.’”

  Somervell had leapt into action upon getting the plans and elevations Monday morning, immediately taking them up the chain of command. He presented the proposal to General Moore, the Army deputy chief of staff, who thought it “very logical.” He won quick approval the same day from Marshall and then Patterson. Now he had to convince Stimson.

  Soon after the telephone conversation with Stimson, Patterson arrived at the secretary’s headquarters in the Munitions Building, accompanied by Somervell, Reybold, and Bergstrom. As they presented their case, the dubious Stimson found himself slowly drawn to the logic. The secretary examined the plans for the building, which struck him as being “on practical and simple lines.” How long would it take to finish, Stimson asked. One year, Somervell promised. It would be built on War Department land, allowing the Army to control the construction rather than depending on the vagaries of the Public Buildings Administration. The efficiency of the War Department would improve 25 to 40 percent by having everyone under one roof, Stimson was told.

  Finally, the secretary conferred his blessing on the endeavor. “I had at first been very skeptical of it, because the whole thi
ng seemed to be silly to start now just when we have gotten one new building, but that has been such a failure that gradually I got interested and finally I came to the conclusion that it would probably be a good thing,” Stimson recorded in his diary. Stimson noted that the new building would free space for the Navy, also bursting at the seams, to move into the Munitions Building. “Of course it will cost a lot of money but it will solve not only our problem…it will solve a lot of other problems,” he wrote.

  Sound it out with the Appropriations Committee and see what they think, Stimson told his visitors. A hearing was already set for that afternoon before Woodrum’s subcommittee; Reybold was supposed to report back with the War Department’s solution for the space crisis. At the suggestion of Moore, Somervell first went to Woodrum’s office to show the proposal privately to the congressman. The Virginian’s support for such a grandiose project would be critical, they knew. Woodrum was impressed, particularly by Somervell’s claim that the building would free 2.1 million square feet now occupied by the War Department in offices around Washington, easing the government’s space problem.

  At the hearing, Woodrum invited Somervell to speak. “Suppose you tell us where the building is to be, and what kind of building it is proposed to construct,” the congressman said.

  Exuding confidence, Somervell presented his plan. The building would be three stories high, a height conforming to its prominent setting by the Memorial Bridge. The first employees would move in within six months. The building would be completed in twelve months. He blithely reported that construction and planning would take place simultaneously.

  “We will have to develop the plans contemporaneously with the building, or we cannot do the job,” Somervell said. Though there would be room for forty thousand people, the War Department expected it would hold thirty thousand for the time being and that the remaining space would be used for storage. The efficiency of the War Department would be increased by one quarter. The building would be of reinforced concrete with a brick exterior, he said. There would be no marble or other fancy materials. The cost would be $35 million, and that covered everything except parking lots for ten thousand cars.

  “How long do you think your estimate will stand without an increase?” Representative Louis Ludlow, an Indiana Democrat, asked suspiciously.

  “We do not want it to stand for more than a year,” Somervell parried. “We will have it finished within a year.”

  “This thing would not come to pieces very easily, would it?” asked Representative John Taber, a New York Republican.

  “It certainly should not,” Somervell assured him. “It should not ever come to pieces.”

  “What would you say would be the life of the building?” Ludlow asked.

  “The life of the building would be a hundred years unless it became obsolescent,” the general replied.

  “If you had the money, how soon could you get under way on it?” Woodrum asked.

  “We could get under way on it in two weeks,” Somervell replied.

  No one questioned Somervell’s stunning promise. As for the huge size, it was no time for restraint, the general told the congressmen. “Every time we have asked for what we thought was just what we needed, by the time the building was finished it was not enough, and I think it would be the height of folly to cut this thing right to the edge and not have any leeway,” he said.

  “Would this probably be the largest single government building constructed, if undertaken?” Ludlow asked.

  “Oh, I do not think so,” Somervell replied dismissively. “Of course we always have to build the biggest.”

  Conceivably, Somervell did not know the full scope of what he was proposing; more likely, he was merely being coy. The Chicago Post Office, then the biggest government building in the country, covered six acres, reached fourteen stories in its northern corners, and contained 1.7 million square feet of space. The Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world at 102 floors, had 2.25 million square feet of office space. The War Department building as proposed by Somervell was far larger; it would contain 4 million square feet of office space and have total space of 5.1 million square feet.

  Somervell had sold them; the subcommittee unanimously approved funding for the new building, sending the recommendation to the full committee.

  Stimson decided it was time to tell the president what was afoot, although he was still embarrassed about asking for another War Department building on the heels of the last one. On Thursday, July 24, he told the president’s military aide, Major General Edwin “Pa” Watson, that he wanted to speak with Roosevelt after that afternoon’s cabinet meeting about a new War Department headquarters in Arlington. “It has now reached the stage where the Appropriations Committee has heard of it, and Stimson wants you to know that he is not [the] author, but that the plan has a lot of merit,” Watson reported to the president.

  Shortly before the cabinet meeting, an objection to Somervell’s plan was finally raised. Harold D. Smith, Roosevelt’s budget director, a former Kansas farm boy known as “a beagle for bargains,” had got wind of the project. He smelled trouble. Smith too sought the president’s ear. Watson reported to Roosevelt that Smith “is very anxious that the President does not commit himself on the proposition” until the planned building’s impact on traffic, water supply, sewers, and the like was studied.

  Smith’s request went unheeded. Somervell’s proposal was reaching the president at an opportune time, as Roosevelt had concluded that America likely could not avoid war with Nazi Germany. Earlier that month the president had agreed to take over the defense of Iceland from Britain, a decision of “first-rate political and strategic importance,” in the estimation of Winston Churchill, the British prime minister. Roosevelt biographer James MacGregor Burns later wrote that “If ever there was a point when Roosevelt knowingly crossed some threshold between aiding Britain in order to stay out of war and aiding Britain by joining in the war, July 1941 was probably the time.”

  When the proposal was raised during the cabinet meeting July 24, Roosevelt breezily approved the building, to the secretary’s relief. Later that afternoon, Stimson sent a letter to Woodrum, who was awaiting word: “In response to your inquiry I am authorized by the President to advise you that he has approved the construction of the proposed War Department building at Arlington Farms. I may say that an urgent need exists for this building, and I hope that we may have the approval of the Congress for it at an early date.”

  In exactly one week, Somervell had proposed constructing a building of unprecedented size and scale, produced preliminary plans out of thin air, won the strong support of the War Department leadership including a skeptical secretary of war, sold it to key Congressional leaders, and received a green light from the president of the United States. Nothing, it seemed, could stop him.

  Lebensraum

  On July 24, 1941, the same day that Roosevelt approved the new building, Representative Merlin Hull, the seventy-year-old Progressive Party member and dean of the Wisconsin delegation to the House, sat at his desk on the floor, looking over House Resolution 5412, a bill just reported by the Appropriations Committee. The House of Representatives had convened at noon that day to consider the $8 billion supplemental spending request for national defense, including money to boost the Army’s size by 300,000 to 1.7 million soldiers. Routine passage was expected.

  Hull’s eye stopped at the last item listed in HR 5412. On chapter 03, under the heading “War Department, civil functions, Quartermaster Corps,” there was an authorization for the construction of a new War Department building across the Potomac River, to cost $35 million. Hull was astonished. It was an enormous amount of money for a single building. It was also against congressional rules. Woodrum had added the $35 million to the appropriation bill as a rider, but the legislation should have originated with the Committee of Public Buildings and Grounds. To get around this inconvenience, Woodrum had enlisted the aid of Representative Fritz Lanham, the Texas Democrat w
ho chaired the buildings committee. Lanham’s committee had met the day before and unanimously agreed to support the measure and ignore the fact that there was no authorization act.

  Now Lanham took the House floor to sing the building’s praises and to urge Congress to lay aside the rules. “I doubt if, during the many years I have served on the Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds, a more practical, feasible and sensible building project has been presented to us than this particular one,” he said. “It is not to be a monumental building, ornate in its details, but a permanent workshop on Government-owned land.”

  Hull, for one, was not going to stand for it. He was known as a stickler for rules and for his diligence, never missing a committee meeting and almost always on the House floor for roll calls. When the House clerk read the last paragraph of the bill—the one for the building’s construction—Hull raised a point of order: The paragraph was unauthorized legislation.

  Woodrum was in a bind. Hull was correct, he responded, but the matter was too important to be stopped by a technicality. “Nothing that we could do in this bill or anywhere else would give such an impetus to the efficiency of our defense program as to be able to get the War Department under one roof in order that they may attend to the business for which we are appropriating these large sums,” Woodrum said.

  Hull would not budge. This building was too big. “It is sufficient to build four capitol buildings the size of the one we are now working in, so I am going to insist on my point of order,” he said. Woodrum had no choice but to postpone the bill until the Rules Committee could consider the matter. The entire $8 billion defense supplemental bill was on hold.