House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American PowerHarperCollins, 2007 M06 4 - 1073 pages "A masterful achievement...[Carroll's] prose is elegant, his viewpoint bold." —Howard Zinn, author of The People's History of the United States "One cannot understand the impact of the Pentagon on US foreign policy. . . without reading James Carroll's House of War." —Lawrence Korb, former Undersecretary of Defence under Ronald Reagan From the National Book Award–winning author of An American Requiem and Constantine's Sword comes a sweeping yet intimate look at the Pentagon and its vast—often hidden—impact on America. This landmark, myth-shattering work chronicles the most powerful institution in America, the people who created it, and the pathologies it has spawned. James Carroll proves a controversial thesis: the Pentagon has, since its founding, operated beyond the control of any force in government or society. It is the biggest, loosest cannon in American history, and no institution has changed this country more. To argue his case, he marshals a trove of often chilling evidence. He recounts how "the Building" and its denizens achieved what Eisenhower called "a disastrous rise of misplaced power"—from the unprecedented aerial bombing of Germany and Japan during World War II to the "shock and awe" of Iraq. He charts the colossal U.S. nuclear buildup, which far outpaced that of the USSR, and has outlived it. He reveals how consistently the Building has found new enemies just as old threats—and funding—evaporate. He demonstrates how Pentagon policy brought about U.S. indifference to an epidemic of genocide during the 1990s. And he shows how the forces that attacked the Pentagon on 9/11 were set in motion exactly sixty years earlier, on September 11, 1941, when ground was broken for the house of war. Carroll draws on rich personal experience (his father was a top Pentagon official for more than twenty years) as well as exhaustive research and dozens of extensive interviews with Washington insiders. The result is a grand yet intimate work of history, unashamedly polemical and personal but unerringly factual. With a breadth and focus that no other book could muster, it explains what America has become over the past sixty years. |
From inside the book
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... Washington, and these eyesores were still there twenty years later, despoiling especially the Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The structures were a source of self-rebuke to Roosevelt. The War Department ...
... Washington it still looked different, but that was certainly, in part at least, because Washington's very existence, unlike London's, was not felt to be at risk.44 At Casablanca, Americans wanted no part of British “area bombing,” as ...
... Washington with the rest of my family. To my surprise and delight, my parents allowed me to stay on in Wiesbaden, living in the dormitory, to complete my senior year. I graduated from H. H. Arnold High School in 1960 and then returned ...
... Washington. He was an old man now, his hair still slicked back but very thin and white. Wary of interviews,75 McNamara had agreed to see me, he said at the outset, because “I have great admiration for your father.” My father had died in ...
... Washington, and he immediately protested that he wanted a combat assignment. “If you do the job right,” the general said, “it will win the war.”82 The job had begun in a laboratory. The nucleus of a uranium atom had first been split at ...
Contents
1 | |
40 | |
3 The Cold War Begins | 103 |
4 SelfFulfilling Paranoia | 161 |
5 The Turning Point | 227 |
6 The Exorcism | 293 |
7 Upstream | 345 |
8 Unending War | 418 |
Acknowledgments | 515 |
Notes | 517 |
Bibliography | 609 |
Index | 624 |
Photo Credits | 658 |
Back Flap | 659 |
Back Cover | 660 |
Spine | 661 |
Other editions - View all
House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power James Carroll Limited preview - 2007 |
House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power James Carroll No preview available - 2006 |