by Steve Vogel
Truman, alarmed by Clifford’s message, scrapped plans for the full-dress ceremony. “The President responded during the night with instructions that I should be sworn in immediately and take action to see that all available reinforcements were provided” for the allied force in Trieste, Forrestal recorded in his diary on September 16.
Forrestal and Clifford went ahead with the plan on September 17. Minutes before noon, Chief Justice Fred Vinson arrived in Forrestal’s office. The military service chiefs—General Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral Chester Nimitz, General Alexander Vandergrift, and General Carl Spaatz, formidable war heroes all—looked on as Forrestal, grim-faced and wearing a gray business suit with a polka-dot tie, prepared to take the oath. A broken nose from a Princeton boxing match gave the wiry Irishman the perpetual look of a tough middleweight—“rather pugnacious,” Eisenhower thought. It was not just the nose, though. “He has the bearing given to goodhearted gangsters in the movies,” one observer wrote. “There is the suggestion of the possibility of violence and the surface of perfectly constrained restraint.”
Amid “an atmosphere of urgency, drama, and tension,” as Clifford later wrote, Forrestal raised his right arm and placed his left hand on the Bible held by Vinson. With that act, the provisions of the landmark 1947 National Security Act would go into effect at midnight. It was the most sweeping military reorganization in American history, creating the National Military Establishment, which would be renamed the Department of Defense two years later. The Air Force was split off from the Army as a separate service. The War Department was renamed the Department of the Army. The act formally established the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it created the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council.
Forrestal crossed the Potomac River the next day to inspect his new headquarters—the Pentagon. Though it seemed an obvious choice, there had been uncertainty about where the secretary of defense would set up. A Forrestal aide recommended that the headquarters be established close to the White House and that the Pentagon be left to the Army. After his nomination in July, Forrestal told reporters that no decision had been made about the location of his headquarters, and no announcement that the Pentagon had been chosen was made until August 28. But Truman told Forrestal in July he was to move into the Pentagon. Angered by the Navy’s continued resistance to unification, Truman did not want the first secretary of defense to be seen as a Navy partisan; the move into the Army building would be symbolic of unification. Even so, Forrestal’s advisers treated the decision as tentative for a week before concluding that the president would not change his mind.
A Navy band gave Forrestal a fond farewell when he left the Navy Building, striking up “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” as he drove off. No band was on hand to greet Forrestal at the Pentagon when the secretary of defense officially moved in on the morning of September 22, 1947. The Army viewed Forrestal suspiciously. During his seven years with the Navy, Forrestal had battled the Army on many issues, most prominently unification. Yet Forrestal—a deferential man, his pugnacious looks aside—was taking pains to be accommodating and to keep his arrival low-key.
Forrestal’s advisers wanted to change the Pentagon’s name to the “National Defense Building,” and they consulted with the Public Buildings Administration on officially making the switch. On the morning of September 22, Marian Bailey and the other telephone operators dropped their traditional “This is the War Department” greeting, and callers instead heard, “This is National Defense.” Road signs went up directing drivers to the “National Defense Building.” But when reporters asked if this was to be the building’s new name, Forrestal balked. The Pentagon would remain the Pentagon.
Most noteworthy of all, Forrestal did not presume to evict the secretary of the Army, Kenneth Royall, from the suite above the River entrance formerly belonging to the secretary of war. Instead, he opted to take the offices Somervell and Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson had occupied on the Mall side during the war. He left the grander suites once home to Stimson and Marshall—with the private elevator, dining room, and dressing room—to his ostensible Army subordinates.
It was a gracious gesture. Yet there was no mistaking that a new era had begun. After five years as the domain of the War Department and the Army, the Pentagon was now home to the secretary of defense and the new American military establishment.
The biggest cemetery for dead cats in the world
There had been no decent peace. Just two years after his death, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vision of converting the Pentagon into an archives seemed hopelessly quaint in the burgeoning Cold War atmosphere. The New War Department Building on Virginia Avenue in Foggy Bottom, long envisioned by FDR as the Army’s future home, was turned over to the State Department in 1947.
Accidental and ad hoc though its construction was, the Pentagon had come to represent the new global role the United States had assumed. The Pentagon’s very size hinted that the nation would no longer be bound by the Founding Fathers’ warnings against a large standing army. Even the iconic pentagonal shape—the five concentric rings—seemed a deliberate statement meant to convey unity and strength, rather than a design born of chance.
The Pentagon’s postwar role as the command center for the Department of Defense and the military services, which it keeps to this day, was born amid an atmosphere of Cold War tensions and new security commitments. The tenuous wartime alliance with the Soviet Union quickly disintegrated after the defeat of Germany and Japan, replaced by a tense rivalry that had raised fears of a third world war. The flare-up over Trieste in September 1947 settled back to a simmer, but tensions remained across Eastern Europe. Ignoring agreements made at Yalta promising self-determination, Stalin had installed pro-Soviet regimes in Warsaw, Budapest, and Bucharest. Looming over the continent was the threatening presence of the Red Army, larger than any in the West. In May 1947, at the request of Truman, Congress approved military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey, filling a breach left by Britain’s near-bankruptcy. The president coupled this aid with a declaration, soon known as the Truman Doctrine, to assist free people against totalitarian aggression.
It was a sweeping commitment, made all the more remarkable by the sorry state of the American armed forces. Enormous cuts since the end of the war had left the services a shell of the fighting force that had rolled through western Europe and island-hopped across the Pacific. When Forrestal took office, fewer than 1.6 million of the more than 12 million American troops in the service at the end of World War II were still under arms. Only ten of the Army’s ninety-one combat-ready divisions on V-J Day remained, just two of them ready to fight. Truman’s cabled instructions for Forrestal to reinforce Trieste had proven moot, but the order “left behind it an obvious and embarrassing question,” noted Walter Millis, editor of Forrestal’s diaries. “What reinforcements, in fact, did the United States possess against menaces which were now apparent in nearly every quarter of the globe?”
The atmosphere lent urgency to a renewed drive to reorganize the armed services for better efficiency and command. Marshall and Stimson’s wartime push for unification—including their fruitless effort to bring the Navy into the Pentagon in 1942—had finally gained traction as the fighting came to an end. It would be unconscionable to fight another such war with the same divided military organization, they believed; the nation might not survive. Based on his experiences in Europe, Eisenhower felt the same way. They found a ready ally in Truman, who had been appalled at the waste and duplication he found while leading his Senate investigative committee. “I have the feeling that if the Army and the Navy had fought our enemies as hard as they fought each other, the war would have ended much earlier,” Truman told Clifford. In a message to Congress on December 20, 1945, Truman had proposed the most fundamental reorganization of the military in American history, building on the proposals of Marshall and Stimson and calling for a single department of national defense unified under a civilian secretary.
Again
, it was the Navy that refused to go along, viewing unification as a threat to its independence. The Army—and the towering figure of Eisenhower—would dominate a single military department, and the Navy would find itself relegated to secondary tasks, Navy partisans feared. The Marine Corps was even more strident in its opposition, seeing its entire existence in question—a not-unfounded fear. Truman regarded the Marines as a naval police force and, were it not for the political backing the Marines enjoyed, would have been happy to see the Corps disbanded. (“They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s,” Truman complained.)
The most formidable opponent to unification was James Forrestal, an irony that would not be lost on anyone when he was named secretary of defense. The son of an immigrant from County Cork in Ireland, Forrestal possessed enormous vigor and drive within his 150-pound frame. Dropping out of Princeton six weeks before graduation, he took a job selling cigarettes before drifting into the investment business. He made his fortune and name on Wall Street, eventually coming to the attention of Roosevelt, who brought him to Washington in 1940.
After seven years with the Navy, Forrestal had adopted Navy mystique and tradition as his own and felt a keen sense of duty to protect it against Truman’s proposal. “We are fighting for the very life of the Navy,” he told Clifford. Forrestal pushed an alternative plan that called for broader coordination of foreign and military policy but preserved the independence of the Navy and Marine Corps. Forrestal’s campaign against the president’s unification plan was bold—some said it bordered on insubordination—and he half-expected the White House to fire him. Meeting with Truman on June 19, 1946, a tight-lipped Forrestal accused the Army of “steamroller tactics” and threatened to resign rather than accept unification.
Truman may have been tempted to take him up on the offer, but he recognized that Forrestal’s resignation would turn him into a naval martyr and doom any hope of unification. Truman ordered Forrestal and Patterson, Stimson’s successor as secretary of war, to negotiate a compromise. They did, though Patterson did most of the compromising, preferring that to seeing the whole effort fall apart. The resulting agreement—creating a weak confederacy of the military departments with little power given to the secretary of defense—was much along the lines of what the Navy had proposed. “They fought a bitter, intelligent, artful and skillful battle, and they won,” Clifford recalled.
Forrestal was not Truman’s first choice to be secretary of defense. The president tried to persuade Patterson to take the job, but the judge’s wife insisted that he earn some money in the private sector. Despite his fight against unification, Forrestal, as a well-respected veteran of Roosevelt’s war cabinet with enormous public stature, was an obvious second choice. It had been Forrestal who had raised early warnings about Soviet intentions and had urged a get-tough policy at a time when many in Washington—including Truman—had taken a more benevolent view. Forrestal was a key architect of the containment strategy then evolving as a way to counter Soviet hegemony. He was a leading advocate of rebuilding military strength as a way of preserving peace.
Beyond that, Truman realized that Forrestal, with his keen sense of duty, would do his best to make the new entity work. It brought Forrestal into the tent. “I believe the President thought the way to get this job done is to put Forrestal in, because if anybody else takes that job, Forrestal is going to sit back and carve him to ribbons,” Clifford later said.
Forrestal, for his part, was not eager for the job. Years of helping build and oversee the largest naval force ever assembled—tackled in his characteristic frenetic manner—had left him exhausted and, though no one realized it, on the brink of a mental breakdown. Forrestal took the post, feeling an obligation both to the country and to the Navy, which he believed he could safeguard as secretary of defense. The job, after all, “was fashioned in his own image,” as New York Times military correspondent Hanson Baldwin, a friend of Forrestal’s, wrote. This was to prove a problem. “The man who had done the most to weaken the unification law was charged with making it function,” writer Carl Borklund observed.
Forrestal had his own doubts. “This office will probably be the biggest cemetery for dead cats in history,” he wrote to his friend, playwright Robert Sherwood, shortly before moving into the Pentagon.
Forrestal quickly set about trying to prove himself wrong.
When the soul’s life is gone
Forrestal brought forty-five employees from the Navy Department, most of them secretaries, clerks, and the like—a tiny drop in the ocean that was the Pentagon. That was the way Forrestal wanted it. The legislation he had framed left him with no deputy and just three special assistants. Large staffs, he believed, “begin to gather the attribute of God to themselves very fast.”
It was immediately clear that Forrestal had greatly underestimated the job; he was trying to manage the new defense entity—representing roughly one-third of the U.S. budget, and thus by far the largest government agency—with a staff equivalent to that of a midsized law firm. Undaunted by the challenge, Forrestal threw himself into the work, but he and his staff were quickly overwhelmed by technical and administrative chores they had not anticipated. Leaving the office one Sunday night at 10:30 after working his staff seven straight days, Forrestal bade farewell without a trace of irony: “Well, have a nice weekend.” The long hours could not disguise that his young aides, though smart and dedicated, lacked the experience and standing to challenge senior generals and admirals.
Forrestal lacked authority too. The secretary of defense was little more than a coordinator; real power remained with the individual services and their secretaries. Forrestal had an idyllic vision of running the Pentagon by consensus, seeing his role in relation to the three service secretaries as first among equals. Instead, he found deadlock. With Truman demanding a pared-down defense budget, the services turned on one another, bitterly fighting for a larger share of the shrinking pie. The Navy and Air Force squabbled over everything, especially control of aviation. The Joint Chiefs of Staff—which lacked a chairman, at the Navy’s insistence—were similarly paralyzed. Forrestal would consult the chiefs on issues but get divided replies or sometimes no replies at all.
Even getting the Navy to move into the Pentagon was a challenge, as in the past. Truman proved to be the strongest champion in adopting a new role for the building; the president told Forrestal that he wanted the Army, Air Force, and Navy headquarters at the Pentagon. But to opponents of unification, the Pentagon was the symbol of their threatened independence. Nimitz, then chief of naval operations, was not eager to move into the Pentagon, and the admirals dragged their feet, arguing that the move would be cumbersome and that putting all the service commanders in one building would leave “all our eggs in one basket,” as one Navy official complained.
Forrestal saw the Navy’s absence as a drag on unification and insisted the service make the move. “This action will undoubtedly facilitate my own work and will make possible a greater degree of day-to-day contact among personnel of the three services,” Forrestal reported to Truman on February 28, 1948. After months of negotiations, Secretary of the Navy John L. Sullivan and Admiral Louis E. Denfield, Nimitz’s successor, finally moved into the Pentagon in August 1948, along with the rest of the Navy high command and 2,500 workers. To free up 300,000 square feet of office space, the Army kicked out a like number of its workers from the Pentagon and sent them to the Navy building in Washington. Like the Air Force high command, the Navy secretary and military chiefs were given offices on the fourth floor of the E Ring, while the Army headquarters stayed on the third floor, a general arrangement that would last a half-century.
Of all the military services, only the Marine Corps held out, stoutly asserting its independence by maintaining its headquarters in the Navy Annex atop Arlington Ridge, overlooking the Pentagon a half-mile away. A Marine officer kept an artillery sight at his window and every morning worked out firing problems using the Pentagon as a target. “I’ve got t
he whole place zeroed in,” he told a visitor. “With a battery of 155s, I could level the place to the ground in two days.” The Corps would successfully stay out of the Pentagon for another half-century, until 1996, when General Charles Krulak, the Marine Corps commandant, decided the self-imposed exile had isolated the Marines from the rest of the armed services.
Getting the Navy into the Pentagon was one of the few concessions Forrestal would receive from the service. He turned to old Navy colleagues, but to his shock found that not only would they not help, they worked actively to sabotage unification. Forrestal found himself treated as a pariah by the Navy, and he came to see the Army as the only service making a genuine effort at unification. Forrestal confided to Eisenhower, who was serving as his adviser, that while “in the army there are many that I trust,” there were only two or three admirals in whom he still had confidence. “It must have cost him a lot to come to such a conclusion,” Eisenhower noted in his diary.
As Forrestal’s frustration grew, he realized that his brand of unification was a failure and that the system needed to be changed. In the summer of 1948 he approached Clifford: “Clark, I was wrong. I cannot make this work. No one can make it work.” Forrestal subsequently told Truman much the same, and, with the president’s approval, he went to work framing changes to strengthen the office.