House of War

The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power

James Carroll

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780618872015
• eBook ISBN: 9780547526454
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"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.

Index

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

A

ABM. See Antiballistic missile system

ABM gap, 307, 324

ABM Treaty. See Antiballistic Missile Treaty

Abrams, Elliott, 403

Abu Ghraib prison, 497, 505, 604 n. 9

Academia (universities), xiv, 29, 126, 212

Accidental launch, in post–Cold War Russia, 470

Acheson, Dean, xiv, 178, 180–81, 181–82

on Berlin, 277

coercion more important than persuasion for, 476

and Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, 327

and control of atomic bomb, 167

and Cuban Missile Crisis, 279

and Dulles, 205

and H-bomb, 174–76, 180, 196, 197

on Islamic threat of previous centuries, 183

and Korean War, 186, 423

on Korea as outside defense perimeter, 188, 547 n. 101

and MacArthur, 194

on retreat from Chinese attack, 191

as war advocate, 189

and Nitze, 179, 279, 327, 482

and Stimson proposal, 116, 182

Acheson-Lilienthal report (1946), 119

Adams, Gerry, 474

“A-Day,” 210

Adelman, Kenneth, 412, 414

“Advice for President Clinton” (Powell article), 461

Afghanistan

and “Arab Spring,” 607–8

Soviet invasion of, 49, 371, 377, 407

as Cold War spur, 424

and impotence of nuclear arsenal, 432

Soviet withdrawal from, 411, 412

support by Reagan for “freedom fighters” in, 406

U.S. attacks on, 98, 502, 504–5, 603–4 n. 6

African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty (1996), 471

Agnew, Spiro, 337

Ahab

Cohen as, 473–74

Johnson or McNamara as, 254, 305, 326

Aidid, Mohammed Farah, 466–67

Aircraft carrier(s), 126, 148–49, 154

Air Force Association, and Smithsonian exhibit, 62

Air Force culture, 229

“Air power the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• One Week in 1943
• The Absolute Weapon
• The Cold War Begins
• Self-Fulfilling Paranoia
• The Turning Point
• The Exorcism
• Photos
• Upstream
• Unending War
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Credits
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH