The Pentagon: A History (44 page)

The landscaping was not primarily a beautification project, although Taylor’s goal was to integrate the Pentagon grounds with the abutting Arlington National Cemetery and National Park Service land along the Potomac. The ground had to be covered with topsoil and planted with grass, trees, and shrubs to prevent serious erosion and possible damage to the highway network. Already there had been erosion in uncovered areas, and drains were clogging with mud. The landscaping had been vastly pared down from what was originally contemplated. Taylor and Witmer had hoped to plant some six thousand trees, but the number was cut in half. To further save money, Groves ordered that they plant only scrawny trees with diameters less than three inches.

The whirl of activity nonetheless raised the curiosity of
Time
magazine, which began asking why the War Department was spending so much time, money, and effort landscaping the Pentagon. Groves resorted to his old tricks, juggling figures to hide costs. “The General figures we ought to do a little chiseling on
Time
magazine…and define landscaping as planting of trees and bushes and shrubs,” Groves’s aide, Franklin Matthias, told Renshaw February 17.

“And leave out the topsoil?” Renshaw asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well that’s one way of handling it alright,” Renshaw said.

That accounting trick, together with the actual cuts, reduced the amount ostensibly being spent on landscaping from $2.3 million to $385,000. But it did nothing to stop
Time
from running a story denouncing the landscaping as a senseless beautification project. The likely explanation, the magazine theorized, was that Somervell and Roosevelt wanted it, and “now, even with the manpower pinch here, no one had the time nor strength to stop its course.”

Groves responded to the criticism by banning the word “landscaping” from any documents related to the Pentagon. He erupted in fury in April when cost estimates from Renshaw’s office violated this edict. “How long is it going to take to eliminate the word ‘landscaping’ from the writings and droolings, and I mean droolings, (good soldiers keep their mouths shut) of your personnel,” Groves wrote in a memorandum to Renshaw on April 9. He also ordered Renshaw to return the memo “so that I can destroy it,” but a copy survived.

By whatever name, the landscaping continued. Once the grading was finished, planting continued well into the spring, performed “almost entirely by squads of Negro women, who all wear straw hats, cotton blouses and blue dungaree trousers, giving the countryside something of a plantation aspect,”
The New York Times
reported.

I prefer not mentioning our fee

Constructing a building that was more than half again bigger than the one they had begun did not translate to a similar bigger profit for McShain and the Virginia contractors. The original contract setting their fee at $524,000 was based on a building of four million gross square feet. McShain argued that the contractors’ fee should be raised by at least $200,000.

Groves mercilessly drove down the figure. “Successive negotiations have brought him to the point where I think he is ready to accept an amount in the neighborhood of $110,000, although he appears none too happy about it,” Groves reported on March 16. McShain was even less pleased when the War Department’s Construction Contract Board reduced the amount to $90,000, making the total fee $614,000. By the terms of the 60-40 split in the contract, McShain would get $368,400 and the Virginia contractors $245,600. McShain would claim it was one of the lowest fees the War Department ever paid to any firm in proportion to the size of the building. “Contrary to the opinion of many, the profits on the job were not too attractive considering the great responsibility,” he said.

Perhaps to soften the blow, the War Department promptly chose McShain to receive the Army-Navy “E” Award for war construction. Major General Thomas Robins, the Construction Division chief, presented the builder with a large “E” burgee at a ceremony in Arlington on April 17. “Fly it proudly, for it is the visible symbol of what your country thinks of your efforts,” Robins told McShain. “It is Uncle Sam’s version of ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’”

McShain did fly it proudly, trumpeting the award in a full-page ad in the
Washington Post.
But it did not quite erase the sting of his fee, which rankled McShain to the end of his days. “I prefer not mentioning our fee, as it will constantly be a source of embarrassment to the Government,” he wrote in a 1978 letter. “They considered it was such a great privilege for me to build the Pentagon that the fee should be very low.”

Yet the Pentagon project had cemented McShain’s reputation. Before long, it was being said in Washington that Pierre L’Enfant may have designed the city, but it was John McShain who built it. That was not much of an exaggeration. So many construction projects in Washington were adorned with the McShain name that a radio commentator would later joke that signs at the city line reading “Welcome to Washington, the Nation’s Capital” should be changed to “Welcome to Washington—John McShain, Builder.”

A Herculean enterprise

By late spring 1943, it was time to close down the job and disband Renshaw’s office. Groves approached the matter with his usual sentimentality: “[Y]ou should be liquidated,” he informed Renshaw.

Various odds and ends needed to be wrapped up, but they were increasingly picayune. The Army would create the position of building engineer to replace Renshaw; the building engineer would supervise all further work, which would be treated as additions, alterations, and improvements rather than as part of the cost of the original construction. The handover was set for June 30.

As the project wound down, there was a growing realization that something remarkable had been accomplished. Already the previous fall, some of the leading project architects and engineers had created the Society of the Pentagon, an organization of 129 members celebrating the “foresightedness…and boundless energy” of the building’s creators—to wit, themselves.

The whole thing smacked of self-celebration, but it was understandable: There had been few public kudos for their work. “In the years to come, the mere mention of the word Pentagon will connote just one thing: the Pentagon Building of the War Department, across the Potomac in Arlington,” the society’s secretary, landscape architect B. Ashburton Tripp, told the
Star
in May. “A Herculean enterprise, done in the manner of Hercules himself.”

Roosevelt and Stimson were given honorary memberships, as well as most of the key Army officers involved, Marshall, Somervell, Groves, and Renshaw among them. Curiously, McShain and Hauck were left off the list, a sign of lingering enmity between the architects and builders.

The society founders did not forget to include a now-absent figure: Edwin Bergstrom, the disgraced former chief architect. Ides van der Gracht, the design team production chief, sent Bergstrom’s certificate of membership to California, where the latter was working on War Department projects. “He was being kicked around quite a lot,” recalled van der Gracht, who included a letter to Bergstrom saluting the “marvelous job” he had done. Bergstrom sent back a note saying he was “exceedingly” grateful for the kind words. “He apparently didn’t get very many of those,” van der Gracht said.

Van der Gracht, who had played such a crucial role organizing the drafting force in the Eastern Airlines hangar, had already left the job, and so had many others. The war was only beginning for many of them, from the lowest workers to the top project leaders.

Van der Gracht had been commissioned as a captain in the Army Air Forces in September 1942, after most of the drafting work was completed. “You are due a large part of the credit which we may receive,” Renshaw told him upon his departure. Van der Gracht was sent to the Libyan desert, serving as intelligence officer for a squadron of Liberator bombers. When the squadron was wiped out attacking the Ploiesti oil fields in Romania in 1943, van der Gracht had the “curious experience” of being assigned to the Pentagon he had helped design, this time to brief officers on lessons learned from the bombing raids. In September 1944, after being assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, he parachuted into Nazi-occupied Holland to gather intelligence on German forces; when Allied forces swept into Roermond, van der Gracht rode with the troops and personally liberated his mother and sister.

McShain’s performance directing men and machinery building the Pentagon had so impressed Somervell that the general tried to enlist the McShain organization into the Army. Soon after the Pentagon was completed, McShain recalled, Somervell called the builder into his office with a proposition: He would create an engineer construction regiment overseas with McShain in command as a brigadier general, and various key men in the McShain organization would be commissioned as officers. “General McShain” had a pleasing ring to the contractor; he accepted on the spot. His wife and daughter were appalled. More details soon emerged. Somervell did not actually have the power to commission McShain as a general; that would be subject to Senate confirmation. But Somervell assured McShain he could begin immediately as a full colonel. McShain began to suspect, not without cause, that Somervell was trying “to get the work of construction done at the minimum price rather than pay me as a general contractor.” Heeding his wife’s pleas, McShain passed on the offer.

Renshaw, to his disappointment, was not sent overseas because he lacked experience as a combat engineer. He was promoted to colonel and served successively as District Engineer for Washington and Philadelphia, prestigious posts in the Corps of Engineers. The War Department would award Renshaw the Legion of Merit in 1945; the citation noted that “his leadership, technical ability and sound judgement made possible the early occupancy of the Pentagon.”

Groves had his eye on a sharp officer in Renshaw’s office: Major Bob Furman. Playing tennis a few months after the Pentagon was completed, Groves ran into Furman at the Army Navy Country Club in Arlington, and he asked the twenty-eight-year-old major what he would work on next. “I told him I didn’t have anything,” Furman recalled. Groves directed that Furman report to his office the following Monday morning: He had some work of a highly classified nature for him.

Furman consulted Renshaw, unsure what to do. Renshaw’s answer was simple: “If Groves wants you, you better go.” Furman was sworn into the Manhattan Project and given a heavy responsibility: Find out what the Germans were up to in terms of building an atomic bomb. Furman was soon traveling the world on missions as Groves’s chief aide for foreign intelligence. He worked in Italy and Germany with agents for the Office of Strategic Services to track the whereabouts of Axis scientists who might be working on an atomic bomb. He dodged sniper fire in Belgium to help recover uranium ore. He helped plan the capture of Werner Heisenberg, Germany’s leading physicist, in the Bavarian Alps, and later escorted Heisenberg and other German scientists to safe locations in France, Belgium, and England.

For a while, Major Furman had the most convenient apartment around whenever he returned to Washington. The bedroom and shower in the Pentagon where Furman and the other officers would spend the night while keeping an eye on construction had never been dismantled. It was now in the middle of a large Ordnance Department office bay. “The bedroom was still there, and I had the keys,” Furman recalled. “And I was the only one left.”

Furman would stay there whenever work brought him to Washington, inevitably getting odd looks when he emerged into the midst of “a clerical beehive” carrying a suitcase. “I’d walk out in the middle of the morning into the Ordnance Department,” he said. “They all wondered what was in that room.” Building administrators eventually wised up, confiscating Furman’s key and later demolishing the bedroom. He had to find new accommodations.

We take ’em back

The end of April 1943 brought the first anniversary of the occupation of the Pentagon, and the occasion was marked by another incident of food poisoning. More than a hundred Army officers and employees were left white-faced and weak-kneed on April 27; three dozen were rushed to hospitals. The culprit this time was found to be the butterscotch cream pie. The assessment of the cafeteria director was not reassuring: “The place seems to be jinxed.”

Yet conditions in the Pentagon were a far cry from those that had greeted the plank walkers on April 30, 1942. The building was no longer a construction site; the mud and dust and noise that had accompanied everyday life had largely disappeared, replaced by an existence that was relatively clean and efficient—even comfortable, once the air-conditioning worked.

Indeed, compared to most Washingtonians, Pentagon employees had it very good. By July, when a wicked heat wave struck the area, there was a distinct change of tone in some of the press coverage of the building. “Pentagon’s Lucky 30,814 Toil in Air Conditioned Beatitude,” read a
Washington Post
headline, and the article continued in the same vein:

Dear War Department: We take ’em back—all of those barbed remarks about the Pentagon that Washington’s civilian populace made between late 1941 and early 1943. Those days, friends, are gone forever; today your happy lot has the rest of the Capital green with envy…. Word has got about that life at the Pentagon isclosely akin to heaven, in comparison with the nonair-conditioned existence required of employes in less swank office buildings.

Even the Pentagon’s six cafeterias—serving up to 55,000 meals a day—were getting swank. The Army would soon coax master chef Otto Gentsch, president of the Société Culinaire Philanthropique in New York and former chief chef at the Hotel Astor, out of retirement to become production manager for the Pentagon cafeteria system. At the Pentagon, Gentsch forsook dishes such as paté de foie gras and breast of guinea hen under glass for more standard fare, but he cooked with no less passion. “Within the labyrinth of the vast Pentagon culinary department he whisks about the experimental kitchens concocting corn fritters with the air of a great master preparing an epicurean delight,” the
Post
reported. “And when Gentsch makes corn fritters, they are no less than that.”