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
Results 1-5 of 6
... father to the Pentagon — except for the two years in Wiesbaden, he served his entire career in the Building — and he returned to Washington with the rest of my family. To my surprise and delight, my parents allowed me to stay on in ...
... father.” My father had died in 1991, his death coinciding exactly with the start of the Gulf War. (In another of those coincidences, the 2003 Iraq War had begun on March 19, my late father's birthday.) Instead of asking first about the ...
... father, too? Beginning in January 1943, an Army engineer in effect solved the existential problem with which the Air Force was left after the evaporation of its strategic bombing doctrine, and he did it with the nuclear weapon. The ...
... father in his prime as a prelate of the Cold War, fearlessly tossing back salutes with me happily by his side, striding from the River Entrance toward the waiting blue staff car, my having to take two paces for his one. I'd have reached ...
... , and personal history — my nation's story, my father's story, and mine — because in that week, like the Building's twin, I, too, was born.126 two THE ABSOLUTE WEAPON 1. “Truman's Decision” The phrase “Truman's one week in 1943 39.
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 |