House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power

Five hundred pages of text plus scores of footnotes-- so why wade into the challenge. First, it's well-written so the pages fly; second, it's fascinating so the time flies; and third, it'll give you insight, so you'll know more, from James Forrestall to Donald Rumsfeld. Clearly, we've got a bomb-happy war-machine on our hands with a big money sector to back it up. Iraq is only the latest and most aggressive installment. For 60 years, the Pentagon and its apologists have been confusing national security with bigger and better weaponry. The trouble is that a good portion of the public believes it, or at least wants to believe it. We dodged a couple of nuclear bullets back in the 60's, but how long can our luck hold out. Especially when we've withdrawn from so many treaties trying to control the binge. What's worse, the Pentagon and its weapons programs have taken on a life of their own, beyond the rest of us. Of course, this momentum didn't suddenly drop out of thin air. Carroll shows how it's developed over time, with a fascinating cast of characters and a few surprises. The Cold War period is even managed without the usual good-guy bad-guy Hollywood script. However, not everything in the book is roses. I don't know how he managed 500 pages without once mentioning the 700-plus overseas bases and the empire that goes with it. But I guess that's another story. Sure, the political right hates a work like this since it refuses to pander to patriotic platitudes. But the fact is no country, from Afghanistan to Zambia, has a monopoly on truth, goodness, or fellow-feeling. The trouble is military hubris is blinding us, threatening the democracy, and imperilling the planet. If Carroll can make the journey from bomb-happy air cadet to committed Christian pacifist, so can others, even if his path isn't everyone's. If people started this madness, people can end it.

Beware of negative reviews, since this book has been singled out by the White House, Pentagon and CIA for trashing, not the least of which for revealing hundreds of highly classified historical details and the reasons why they have been hidden from public view. Having said that, Carroll's no-holds-barred look at the history and behavior of the Pentagon since its inception under FDR is on the fast track for a Pulitzer and is already getting the attention of the Nobel Prize Committee. It has become required reading in many college classes, particularly at the post graduate level. Of course, the reader of this review will ask, why? Carroll gives us a rare view of history. He holds no politician or president free from constructive criticism - - in fact, he puts them under a microscope to diagnose their socially contageous disease. Most historians write from the temprocentric viewpoint, their conclusions limited and colored by the current landscape. However, Carroll gives us the eagle's viewpoint; he flies high above past historical terrain and describes all the features in terms of consequences and their relationships to each other. In other words, he does not give the reader the politically correct vantagepoints, or the current revisionist views of the NeoComs in power in DC, but paints political, historical and social reality with the clarity of High Defintion television. His narrative immediately rings true because it is brilliantly and insightfully factual - - sometimes so brutally true that it pulverizes the often distorted, self-justified assumptions of America's war machine( the Industrial Military Complex) that he addresses. Essentially, his book explains why President Eisenhower took the unprecedented step of appearing on telelvision one week before stepping down from office to warn about a new type of Fascism forming in America, comprised of a union of Pentagon, military, corporate and religious elites - - all in favor of an unending war against the rest of the world for their own imperialistic reasons. The country has never understood the warning or that it was given by a Five-Star General. Carroll's eloquence is occasionally so precise and haunting, so emotionally personal, as to run chills down the spine and bring tears to the eyes. He does not hide his bias; nor does he have to, since the book is meticulously documented, one-fifth of the size is set aside for cited references. Instead he explains his bias by way of a thesis statment and then sets out to substantiate it in such as way that the reader sees no bias. He is most of all fair and balanced in presentation. The good news about this book is that America's greatest military secrets, and their faulty and dangerous motivations, are about to become old news. When this happens, the NeoCons will go the way of all those who abuse power and misuse democracy. Their tombstone will joins others in the graveyard of history with the appropriate epitaph about great power's ab

The author is the son of General Carroll, the first Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a former FBI special agent who entered the military with the rank of brigadier general with the mandate to create the Office of Special Investigations for the U.S. Air Force. The author is also a former Catholic priest, sympathetic to the Berrigans and those of the Catholic left who opposed the war in Viet-Nam. The book is in consequence not only an extraordinary reference work, but also a labor of love and a labor of conscience. I read it and appreciated it in that vein. I was surprised to not see in the otherwise excellent bibliography any reference to Lewis Mumford's Pentagon Of Power: The Myth Of The Machine, Vol. II and this confirms my impression that each generation reinvents the wheel, and discovers persistent truths for itself. The author does quote Dwight Eisenhower to good effect--apart from the normal quote warning us of the military-industrial complex, General and President Eisenhower is quoted on page 206 "National Security over the long term requires fiscal restraint," and on page 387, "People want peace so much, that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it." I point to General Smedley Butler's book, War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It and to Jonathan Schell's book, which the author acknowledges, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People as excellent complements to this book. The core concept throughout the book, very ably discussed, is that smart people can be trapped in stupid paranoid bureaucracies. The author takes great care to single out the chain of paranoia from Forrestal to Nitze to Schlesinger to Rumsfeld, Carlucci, and Cheney, with Wolfowift and Perle playing key roles as the apostles of the Cold War and the expansion of Pentagon power and money. There is substantive morality in this book, as the author reviews the implications of the U.S. unilaterally over-ruling Churchill and Stalin and demanding unconditional surrender of Germany in WWII. The author reviews the manner in which the U.S. took what he calls "terror bombing" and fire bombing of Germany to new immoral heights, causing Churchill himself to ask if we had gone too far. Napalm was developed for that war, and in one compelling vignette the author discusses how in the final days of the war the U.S. sent over 1,000 aircraft to drop napalm on a hapless village because that is how much napalm they had to use up. The Tokyo fires, killing 900,000 and leaving 20 million homeless are discussed, as is the use of the atomic bomb as a "signal" to Russia. The author is poignant in quoting McNamara as accepting responsibility for two great war crimes--the fire bombings in WWII, and the failed bombings on North Viet-Nam. See my review of the superb DVD documentary with McNamara, Th

This is a huge book in many ways. The history of the Pentagon is dense and often mystifying, but Carroll manages to show how it is a very human institution with his now patent insight and precision. He manages this by telling its history as a scholar, a journalist of the highest order, and sometimes as a son. Carroll's father was an Air Force general during the Cold War, whose office was located in the Pentagon where the jet struck on 9/11. This book could not have been published at a better time. There is no better way to understand what is at work behind today's headlines than by reading this book. It is at times shocking and frightening, but always illuminating and extremely intriguing. I wouldn't say it reads like a spy novel, even if it is the stuff spy novels are made of, but Carroll's style flows and carries you along effortlessly. There are few politcal heroes here, Democratic or Republican. Carroll is careful to tell this story with unwavering truthfulness, but it would be a mistake to think of this as an attack on the Pentagon or the U.S. military. Carroll has an obvious affection for the place and for the military as an institution, perhaps in spite of himself. Carroll might be the only person in America who could tell this story of immense import with such integrity and thoroughness at this time when we seem so desperately need it.