by Steve Vogel
In the hallway outside Murphy’s office, workers adjusted fluorescent lights. Others hooked up computers and telephones in neighboring suites. The muffled sounds of hammering and drilling drifted down the corridor.
Murphy, tall and lean and dressed in a blue suit, walked over to where he had been standing at that moment, in front of a blast-resistant window that had saved his life. He opened the shades and looked out the new window. The Pentagon heliport below was now a staging area filled with construction equipment and workers. “We used to consider this place so incredibly safe,” he mused.
“Welcome back” signs emblazoned with American flags hung on the walls of the offices, and Rumsfeld came by to shake hands. But the sense of celebration was muted. Everyone felt a bit uneasy about moving back, remembering those who had died and would not be returning.
Murphy needed no reminders. But some Pentagon employees had been far from where the plane hit and had never seen the damage. Earlier, Evey overheard some of them talking in the corridors. “They see it looking exactly like it did before, and they think there was no damage here, maybe they came through and spritzed it a little,” he said.
That bothered Evey. It was almost as if September 11, 2001, had never happened. He ordered photographs put up on the bulletin boards in the corridor near the escalators. They showed the twisted shards of metal hanging from ceilings, the smashed doors, the burnt-out offices. People needed to remember.
Murphy had been astonished when he was told he would reoccupy his office before a year had passed. He had gone back to the scene a few days after September 11, accompanied by Kilsheimer. It was an unsettling experience. His desk was near the open edge of the four-story abyss. Had the plane hit ten feet to the left, he and everyone in his office would have perished, Kilsheimer told him. “The idea of getting back in seemed so unrealistic,” Murphy said. “It was god-awful in there.”
Outside, the countdown clock was stopped at 10:51 that morning, the exact time Murphy’s desk was delivered. The 3,000 workers of the Phoenix Project, led by Evey and Kilsheimer, had made good on their promise, and beaten the deadline by more than three weeks.
“They felt they had been watched,” Evey later said. “Not just by the eyes of an anxious nation, but by the spirit of the workforce that first wrestled the Pentagon out of the quagmire of Hell’s Bottom.”
The common wisdom was that the World War II esprit and national purpose that built the Pentagon in seventeen months would be impossible to recreate sixty years later. It seemed all the more unlikely, given the problems the Pentagon renovation had faced. Yet the doubts had been proven wrong. The damaged building had been restored in a manner that echoed its creation.
Artist’s rendering of the Pentagon memorial shaded with maple trees, with 184 benches representing the victims.
September 11, 2002
Except for the wind, the morning of September 11, 2002, was much like that of a year earlier, a pleasant, warm day under a brilliant blue sky. A crowd of thirteen thousand filled the grounds in front of the Pentagon’s healed west wall to mark the one-year anniversary of the attack. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, rescue workers, airline pilots, and construction workers were packed into bleachers, their uniforms, dark-blue suits, and hard hats reflecting the great scope of the disaster that brought them together. The victims’ relatives sat in front of a bunting-decked stage, their faces telling of the enormous loss suffered September 11, 2001.
Dozens of flags flapped furiously on their poles. Clouds of dust swirled around the construction site and blew above the crowd, over husbands without wives, wives without husbands, and children missing parents. As the national anthem played, soldiers atop the Pentagon unfurled the same American flag that hung from the side of the building after the attack. But the wind kept blowing it back to the roof. At 9:37 A.M.—the time the plane struck the building—the crowd fell silent for a long moment. When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke, he chose words meant to echo those spoken 137 years earlier by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. “In a sense, we meet on a battlefield,” Rumsfeld said.
If it does not appear so today, that is because of the singular devotion of the men and women who worked day and night to fulfill a solemn vow that not one stone of this building would be out of place on this anniversary…. But one year ago, this was a battlezone, a scene of billowing smoke, towering flames, broken rock, and twisted metal. It says much about our nation and the fierceness and resilience of the American people that were we not here now in this solemn ceremony, a visitor passing would see no hint of the terrible events that took place here but one year ago today.
All around the Pentagon that day, a sense of change was in the air. The focus inside the building was already moving away from hunting al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and toward a new conflict with unclear connections to September 11. Speaking after Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush made a veiled reference to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, whom the president had accused of harboring weapons of mass destruction. “As long as terrorists and dictators plot against our lives and our liberty, they will be opposed by the United States Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force and Marines,” Bush said. In the audience, Cory Holland, the nephew of Pentagon victim Rhonda Rasmussen, thought there was no mistaking the intent of those words, and he felt uneasy. “It was prepping for what’s going to happen in Iraq,” he told a reporter after Bush spoke.
Doc Cooke was conspicuous in his absence from the ceremony. After forty-five years and fifteen secretaries of defense, the mayor of the Pentagon was gone. Three months earlier, driving to a conference in Charlottesville, Virginia, Cooke was severely injured when his car veered off the road. He died on June 22, 2002, at age eighty-two. Hundreds had attended a memorial service for Cooke in the Pentagon courtyard, among them Secretary of State Colin Powell, honoring the man who had bailed him out of the Pentagon hoosegow almost two decades earlier. Rumsfeld noted that without the renovation championed by Cooke, “many more than 184 lives would have been lost” on September 11. Cooke had been a towering figure at the Pentagon for four decades—“not only its operational brains but its spiritual ballast,” Rumsfeld observed—and his loss still hung heavy at the one-year anniversary of the attack.
The Phoenix Project was winding down, its leaders departing. Lee Evey would retire from government service in a few weeks, having put off retirement after the attack. But by June 2003—three months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq that toppled Hussein—he would be sent to Baghdad by the U.S. government to serve as the senior adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Housing and Construction. Insurgents attacked Evey’s convoy on the day he arrived, forcing the caravan to hightail it back across the Kuwaiti border temporarily, setting the tone for a frustrating four-month stint.
Allyn Kilsheimer was leaving the program, his work largely done. In the final weeks before the ceremony, Kilsheimer visited the cemetery where his parents, refugees from Nazi Germany, were buried, near Washington in Prince George’s County, Maryland. It was the first time he had been able to make it since the terrorist attack. He told his parents he had been able to pay back a debt the family owed to America.
The Pentagon ceremony on the morning of September 11 was somber and sad, and properly so, honoring those lost in the attack. But in the afternoon, there was a second gathering honoring the construction workers—the “hard-hat patriots of the Phoenix Project,” as General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called them. It was a more casual, celebratory affair. Construction workers, their hard hats covered with patriotic stickers, whooped and cheered and waved American flags. They sat with their families, along with Pentagon employees, military officers, and victims’ relatives who had come to thank the workers.
They had dedicated a year to the project, putting their own lives and families on hold in pursuit of something greater than themselves, and the thanks they received were heartfelt: “The honor at this moment is ours, as we stand among those of you who represent the very best of Ame
rica, to be among men and women who have demonstrated once again that America is a land where dreams are large, where hearts hunger to build a better world, where ordinary people achieve extraordinary things,” Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary, told them.
Evey, emotional and ebullient, addressed the crowd of six thousand: “We promised, with the eyes of the nation on us, that we would rebuild the damaged portions of the Pentagon faster than anyone has a right to expect. Today we are delivering on that promise. We are back in business with a building stronger and more capable than ever before…. America, we give you back your Pentagon.”
A $5 billion affair
The work on the Pentagon was far from done. There were no countdown clocks ticking toward deadlines, and no media glare on the construction, yet more than a thousand workers remained on the job, the largest reconstruction project in the world. Indeed, the renovation and add-on projects soon ballooned into a $5 billion affair. It was a figure that dwarfed the estimated $75 million cost of building the Pentagon and surrounding roads and facilities when it was finished in 1943; even converted to 2006 dollars, Somervell’s Folly had cost approximately $925 million.
Upon the official completion of the Phoenix Project in February 2003—with the restoration of all Wedge 1 areas damaged by the attack—the main effort turned to renovating the remaining four Pentagon sections, led by the Colorado-based contractor Hensel Phelps. The old $1.1 billion congressionally mandated cap had been dropped to speed the work. New legislation provided more than $1 billion for wedges 2 through 5 alone, with adjustments allowed for inflation. That cost did not include the complete transformation of the Pentagon’s information-technology infrastructure, itself a $1 billion-plus project overseen by General Dynamics. Another $50 million was being spent to replace the 1.3-million-square-foot roof, which had proved such a fire hazard on September 11.
Further adding to the tally were the security upgrades ordered after September 11—the rerouting of roads, the chemical, biological, and radiological safeguards, the stronger building. A $300 million Command Communications Survivability Project added backup communications throughout the building and elsewhere around Washington; it came from the realization that, had the plane destroyed the building’s telephone or classified messaging centers, the Pentagon could have been forced to close.
As Evey had predicted after September 11, the Pentagon’s command centers were being moved to the basement. An additional $175 million was appropriated to create another 200,000 square feet of space in the basement, put the command centers under the building, and finish the work by 2007. Crews were digging again in the basement, picking up where they had left off after the costly excavation in the 1990s was canceled. Workers spent months in 2003 welding together a huge steel-plate box to house sensitive portions of the new National Military Command Center.
Rumsfeld had seized the opportunity to overhaul and create a more unified command infrastructure. He was dissatisfied with the chaos on September 11, with command and communications spread in different locations. “The question came up as you redid the Pentagon…can we merge them in ways that are useful and create a more joint approach?” he later said. Rumsfeld wanted command more centralized in the National Military Command Center, with better collaboration among the services and the Joint Chiefs. The services would retain their individual centers, but Rumsfeld wanted them to serve as operations centers, not command centers. When the new NMCC opened in early 2005, it included a unified command center watch cell, with all four services always represented. The destroyed Navy Command Center was replaced with a Navy Operations Center in the basement, with a plaque dedicating it to the memory of the forty-two Navy victims and with the Arleigh Burke Bell, which survived the inferno, back on display.
Various extras were thrown into the Pentagon renovation. A new $25 million Pentagon Athletic Center was constructed with features that Dick Groves, the original Pentagon gym advocate, could only have dreamed about. The athletic center—built outside the building, partially underground, between the Mall terrace and Doc Cooke’s delivery facility—had an Olympic-sized pool, basketball, squash, and racquetball courts, a weight room, whirlpools, and a suspended jogging track. The space included a $15 million Pentagon auditorium, complete with a television studio where the Defense Department could produce its own programming. Meanwhile, the old gym that Groves had created six decades earlier underneath the River terrace was expanded and converted into a $38 million Pentagon Library and Conference Center, a state-of-the-art meeting facility for banquets, performances, and lectures; the once-gloomy underground space was illuminated with large skylights and a glass wall. Even the Ground Zero Cafe in the courtyard was to be rebuilt and quadrupled in size.
By 2007, the renovation was on pace for completion by 2011. Wedge 2, the second of the five Pentagon wedges, was finished in the fall of 2005, four years after it began. Demolition of Wedge 3, home to the most senior Pentagon officials and including the space once occupied by Henry Stimson and George Marshall, proceeded apace. In November 2005, Rumsfeld was evicted from Room 3E880, the first secretary of defense forced out of the prime space atop the River entrance since Louis Johnson commandeered it in 1949. Movers wheeled out the great Pershing desk. The office was shifted to the newly renovated third-floor offices in Wedge 2, above the Mall entrance, the area once home to James Forrestal and, before him, Brehon Somervell. Rumsfeld groused about leaving and complained the new space was not to his liking, but he had no choice. To save money and the trouble of moving again, renovation officials wanted to keep future secretaries in the Mall offices. But, at Rumsfeld’s insistence, his successors will be back in the old location after the renovation of the area is finished in 2007.
Ironically, despite the billions of dollars spent and more than fifteen years of work, the Pentagon will in the end hold many fewer employees than when the renovation started. Office space is being swallowed up to bring the Pentagon into compliance with handicapped-access laws and fire-safety codes; more space is being lost to senior officials insisting on private offices. “When we get done, the whole Pentagon will hold approximately 20 percent fewer people than it held at the beginning,” said Ken Catlow, who took over as director of the Pentagon renovation in 2004. “But it wasn’t safe when we started. It will be safe when we finish.” When completed, the Pentagon will hold just under twenty thousand people—five thousand fewer than before the renovation started, and less than half the forty thousand Somervell once envisioned.
Despite the safety upgrades, a palpable uneasiness lingered among many Pentagon employees, an inescapable realization that the building remained a target in the new age of terrorism. As time passed, workers—especially those who had narrow escapes—worried that the lessons of September 11 were being forgotten. They complained that exits were once more being blocked off as Army colonels and Navy captains rearranged their spaces. They feared that people could be trapped again behind fire suppression doors. Their fatalistic notions were not unlike those of Pentagon workers from the Cold War generation, sitting at ground zero in the center courtyard, munching a hot dog.
Perhaps inevitably, the renovation drew carping from some employees. Partly this was because the new construction did not always seem as solid as the original; the new walls were soon gouged with holes and scuffmarks, bathrooms with fancy modern sensors fell out of order, and concrete steps crumbled. And partly it was intangible nostalgia about the original building, with its design quirks, World War II–era decor and signs on the walls, and ancient fixtures. Somehow, they liked the old Pentagon better.
We claim this ground
The aspect of the Pentagon renovation program that now held the greatest emotional resonance was the construction of a memorial to the victims of September 11.
The project moved swiftly at first; the Corps of Engineers began planning it within days of the attack. In spring 2002, Doc Cooke—in one of his final acts before his death—chose a two-acre memorial site on land outside the west wall near
the point of the plane’s impact, on the ground over which the jet flew in the last split-seconds before hitting the building. An open design competition held soon afterward generated more than 1,100 entries from around the world. A panel of jurists, including family members of victims, chose a design submitted by two young New York architects, Julie Beckman and Keith Kaseman.
It would be a peaceful, tree-shaded memorial with 184 illuminated benches, each representing a victim. The benches—cantilevered, stainless-steel structures—would be set above individual reflecting pools of water and lit from beneath. They would be oriented along a timeline set to the age of each victim, from the youngest, three-year-old Dana Falkenberg, to the oldest, seventy-one-year-old Joseph Yamnicky. Some eighty paperbark maples—their bark cinnamon-brown and their leaves brilliant red in the fall—would shade the site. “The memorial had to be like no other memorial, because September 11 was like no other day,” Beckman said.
When the design was revealed on March 3, 2003, renovation officials said they expected to break ground that June and finish the memorial by September 11, 2004. This prediction soon proved wildly over-optimistic, and the initial cost estimate of between $4.9 million and $7.4 million far under the mark. Groundbreaking was pushed back. By 2005, the cost was estimated at $22 million, with another $10 million for an endowment to maintain the memorial. The federal government contributed $1 million, but most of the money would have to come from private contributions. Family members led the fund drive, but raising that much money proved challenging. Donations came from many sources—Pentagon employees, defense corporations, newspapers, churches, and construction companies, among others. Rumsfeld and his wife gave $100,000. Sixth-grader Kelsey Donovan—whose father, Commander Bill Donovan, was among those killed in the Navy Command Center—held a bake sale and set up a drink stand along a bike trail in Northern Virginia. Slowly but surely, the money was raised.