Press Release
House of War
by James Carroll
winner of the National Book Award
• About the Book
• About the Author
• A Conversation with James Carroll
A sweeping yet intimate look at the Pentagon and its vast — often hidden — impact on
America
"Carroll is the author of the 1996 National Book Award–winning memoir An American
Requiem, and his latest impressive offering may garner similar tributes . . . Certain to be
one of the most talked about nonfiction books of the season." — Booklist
About the Book
James Carroll was born in the same fateful week that the Pentagon was dedicated. As a
child, he often visited the Pentagon with his father, who served as an Air Force general
and a top Pentagon official for more than twenty years. For Carroll, this vast building was
a first playground, and later a place to explore. It was there that Carroll decided to
become an Air Force officer like his father. And that ambition prompted his enlistment in
ROTC when he was a student at Georgetown University. But during the Cold War crises of
the early 1960s Carroll felt the existential dread of a threatening nuclear war, which
spawned a spiritual crisis that led him into the priesthood. During the Vietnam War,
Carroll became a peacenik priest, which brought him back to the Pentagon, but this time
as a protester — with his father still working inside. Carroll's parents are now buried near
the Pentagon, in Arlington National Cemetery. After 9/11, from a spot near their graves,
Carroll looked down on the damaged Pentagon and realized that after spending a lifetime
in and around this American landmark, and having learned to loathe and fear the place,
he still loved it. That is why he wrote House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous
Rise of American Power (Houghton Mifflin; May 16, 2006).
In House of War Carroll 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 Pentagon. Here are some other revelations in the book:
www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
1 of 6
Copyright © 2006 Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
• The United States always demonized the Soviet Union, but the leader of the arms race
was in fact the Pentagon.
• Ironically, the most hawkish president of all, Ronald Reagan, ended the
upward spiral of the arms race. Famous for not trusting Communists, he trusted
Mikhail Gorbachev. Together they broke the Pentagon-generated momentum.
• Although the Cold War ended, the Pentagon did not change. Only weeks after the
Berlin Wall fell, and as Mikhail Gorbachev was ordering his soldiers not to fire on crowds
demanding an end to Communism, George H. W. Bush invaded Panama. The United
States was alone in refusing the new culture of peace.
• Even Bill Clinton, who had been a peacenik, kept the Cold War momentum
going. He did not challenge the U.S. military's dominance.
• George W. Bush's disastrous war policies were primed by a decades-long
momentum that was generated as much by Democrats as Republicans. Now
America spends more on "defense" than all the other nations of the world combined. And
what does that treasure buy? Incredibly, not enough to defeat a small, ragtag force of
"insurgents" in Iraq.
In House of War, 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. With a breadth and focus that no other book has yet mustered, House of War
explains what the Pentagon and America have become over the past sixty years. Carroll
draws on extensive research and interviews with Washington insiders. The result is a
grand yet intimate work of history, unashamedly polemical and personal but unerringly
factual.
About the Author
James Carroll was born in Chicago in 1943 and raised in Washington, D.C., where his
father, an Air Force general, served as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Carroll attended Georgetown University before entering the seminary to train for the
Catholic priesthood. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees from St. Paul's College, the Paulist
Fathers' seminary in Washington, and was ordained as a priest in 1969. Carroll served as
the Catholic chaplain of Boston University from 1969 to 1974, after which he left the
priesthood to become a writer.
In 1974 Carroll was the playwright-in-residence at the Berkshire Theater Festival in
Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1976 he published his first novel, Madonna Red, which
was translated into seven languages. Since then he has published nine additional novels,
including the New York Times bestsellers Mortal Friends (1978), Family Trade (1982), and
Prince of Peace (1984). His novels The City Below (1994) and Secret Father (2003) were
named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times. Carroll's essays and articles
have appeared in The New Yorker, Daedalus, and other publications. His op-ed column
has run weekly in the Boston Globe since 1992.
www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
2 of 6
Copyright © 2006 Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Carroll's memoir, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came
Between Us, received, among other honors, the 1996 National Book Award in nonfiction.
His book Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, a History, published in 2001,
was a New York Times bestseller and was honored as one of the best books of 2001 by
the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. It was
named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and won the Melcher Book
Award, the James Parks Morton Interfaith Award, and the National Jewish Book Award in
history. Responding to the Catholic Church's sexual abuse crisis in 2002, Carroll published
Toward a New Catholic Church: The Promise of Reform. In 2004 he published Crusade:
Chronicles of an Unjust War, adapted from his Boston Globe columns since 9/11. In May
2005 he will publish House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American
Power, a history of the Pentagon.
Carroll is a regular participant in ongoing Jewish-Christian-Muslim encounters at the
Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is a member of the council of PEN/New
England, which he chaired for four years. He has been a Shorenstein Fellow at the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a fellow at the Center for the
Study of Values in Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School. He is a trustee of the Boston
Public Library, a member of the advisory board of the International Center for Ethics,
Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University, and a member of the Dean's Council at
Harvard Divinity School. Carroll is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
where he chairs the academy's Visiting Scholars Center, and is a member of the
academy's Committee on International Security Studies.
James Carroll lives in Boston with his wife, the novelist Alexandra Marshall. They have two
grown children.
A Conversation with James Carroll
Your perception of the Pentagon was formed at close range and at a very early
age. Can you talk a bit about your personal connection to the subject of your
new book?
As a child, I went to the Pentagon with my father, who spent his career there as an Air
Force general. The Building was a first playground on Saturdays, and then, when I
stopped there on my way home from high school, it was a place to explore. I formed my
first ambition there: to be an Air Force officer like Dad. And that prompted my enlistment
in ROTC during my freshman year just upriver at Georgetown University. But during the
Cold War crises of the early 1960s, again with Dad at the Pentagon, I felt the existential
dread of a threatening nuclear war, which spawned a spiritual crisis that took me into the
priesthood. Ironically, during Vietnam, I became a peacenik priest, which brought me
back to the Pentagon, but as a protester. My parents are buried up the hill from the
Building, in Arlington National Cemetery. When I stood near their graves after 9/11, I
looked down on the damaged Pentagon and realized that, having learned to fear the
Building, I still loved it. That is why I wrote House of War.
www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
3 of 6
Copyright © 2006 Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
When and in what political environment was the Pentagon created?
The Pentagon was formally dedicated in the same week of January 1943 in which FDR
demanded the unconditional surrender of the Axis enemies, the week that Los Alamos
was established, and that the first U.S. bombing runs against German cities were ordered.
These three events were the beginning of a new American spirit of total war that
culminated not only in the total destruction of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki,
but also, ultimately, in the Cold War doctrines of massive retaliation and mutual assured
destruction. The American economy, the academy, the political system, and the culture
were transformed by this new dynamic. It was set in motion as the Pentagon came into
being, and the Pentagon kept it going even after the Cold War ended — until now.
Who was involved in its creation?
Great characters built and then defined the Pentagon, including General Leslie Groves,
who went on to head the Manhattan Project; Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who
presided over the construction of the Pentagon and then tried to temper its savage new
spirit; the first secretary of defense, James Forrestal, who defeated Stimson but whose
fears later drove him to suicide; Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington, who, with
Stalin, made Forrestal afraid; Curtis LeMay, who imposed his belligerent spirit on the
Pentagon at the start; and Robert McNamara, who began by working on LeMay's staff and
ended as LeMay's boss, yet he lost out to the very thing he represented.
You have referred to the way power is passed on within the Pentagon as similar
to the "apostolic succession" of Catholicism. What do you mean by this? How
have individuals come to power within this institution?
The spirit of fear-driven preference of military over diplomatic solutions that defined
American Cold War policy began with Forrestal, whose psychological paranoia spawned
the nation's political paranoia. Forrestal handed his martial spirit on to his protégé Paul
Nitze, who handed it on to graduate students Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, who
inspired Donald Rumsfeld, whose protégé was Richard Cheney. Wolfowitz, in turn, passed
on the mantle to his graduate student Scooter Libby, who ended up as Cheney's chief of
staff (until he got into legal difficulties). Such figures kept alive the evil-versus-good
mindset of the early Cold War, which always depended on an orthodoxy of political and
physical fear (whether of Communists or terrorists) to gain and keep power.
How would you characterize the balance of power between the Pentagon and the
White House?
The Constitution assumes the president's supremacy over the military, but dependence on
the nuclear arsenal has quietly shifted real dominance to the Pentagon. The military has
effective control of nuclear weapons, from what the targets will be to how the decision is
made to go to war. This accounts for the extraordinary fact that, once the justification for
the massive nuclear arsenal (the USSR) disappeared, the United States did not lessen its
dependence on that arsenal, and even expanded it. The Pentagon is the quiet center of
power in Washington, with the State Department (which ceded its primacy as far back as
Dean Acheson), the Congress (which is dominated by defense contractor lobbyists), and
the White House (which can never appear "soft") in no position to challenge it. This is
exactly the "disastrous" power that President Eisenhower had warned of.
www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
4 of 6
Copyright © 2006 Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
How has the Pentagon influenced the nation's sense of itself — and its place in
the world? How has the struggle for the American soul been won or lost here?
Without fully realizing it, America has been profoundly militarized, with either the actual
use of force or the mere threat of it defining our nation's way of being in the world. The
most obvious evidence of this is the huge proportion of the American budget that goes for
"defense," more than the rest of the world combined. After the Cold War, which ended
nonviolently (despite all Pentagon predictions), unimagined opportunities for peace broke
out across the globe, but the United States went to war again and again. After 9/11 this
spirit resulted in a disastrous war in Iraq (led by George W. Bush and cheered by most
Americans until it began going badly) and the destruction of America's place in the good
opinion of mankind. The present crisis is the result of more than Bush's mistake. It follows
from a momentum set running long ago in the Building by the Potomac.
How have the presidents in power since the creation of the Pentagon influenced
its course of action?
The rise of the Pentagon went hand in hand with the rise of nuclear weapons. After World
War II President Truman tried to demobilize, but, having initiated the nuclear age himself,
he defined the threat from Moscow in quasi-religious terms, and responded to Moscow's
atomic bomb by pushing the world across the even more dangerous thermonuclear
(hydrogen bomb) threshold. The 200 nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal in 1950 grew to
almost 20,000 by 1960 — a staggering increase, the insanity of which is not understood
today. Eisenhower and Kennedy both tried to stop this horror, but both made it worse,
and their successors followed suit. Carter came into office promising to reverse the arms
race, but he left office having quickened it. Finally, Reagan, in the story's unexpected
climax, became the unlikely hero when he embraced the goal of nuclear abolition — and
almost achieved it with Gorbachev. Now, under Bush, America has returned to the
primitive (and dangerous) attitude that nukes are necessary and even good — which is, of
course, why Iran and other rogue states want them.
You've said that you want House of War to prompt people to reconsider the
presidencies of the past sixty years and to reexamine the decisions our leaders
have made. Why?
The Pentagon is the headwater of the current rushing toward the "Niagara Falls" of
military catastrophe. Each administration since Truman's should be considered in the light
of how the president dealt with that current. By that standard, Truman should be
remembered as the man who both decided to use the atomic bomb and (however
justified, or not, one regards that first decision) ordered (with dubious justification) its
genocidal successor, the H-bomb. Kennedy, in the Berlin and Cuba crises, drew closer to
the abyss than any other president — and therefore grew determined to turn the world
away from it. The tragedy of his assassination takes on far more significance in light of
the too-little-understood antinuclear decisions of his last weeks (see his famous American
University speech and the Partial Test Ban Treaty). It was Reagan who did more to stem
the current of disaster than any other president, but he was responding to his Soviet
counterpart, Gorbachev, who contradicted everything Reagan ever believed about
Communists. And just as surprisingly, the president best equipped (by age, experience,
and temperament) to lead the nation out of this trap, Bill Clinton, did almost nothing
about it, leaving the nuclear arsenal about where he found it. Clinton kept the monster
www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
5 of 6
Copyright © 2006 Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
alive for George W. Bush, who set it loose again.
You've spoken before about how the fear of the Cold War during your childhood
was overwhelming and distracting for everyone, and how today debate over the
war in Iraq is being carried on almost exclusively by mothers of dead soldiers.
Why do you think we as a country have become so ambivalent, even after
tragedies like 9/11 and despite a war involving 150,000 soldiers?
Nuclear fear explains our inability to deal with the war in Iraq. We experienced the 9/11
attacks as if our long-delayed nightmare had finally come (which is why we called the
World Trade Center ground zero, the designation for a nuclear target). The stated
justifications for the war in Iraq had all been shown to be false even before the 2004
election, yet Senator John Kerry, the Democrats, and the electorate all declined to make
it an issue. The war is an issue now, more because it is going so badly than because it is
unjustified or wrong. Americans, in other words, have still not confronted the true horror
of what we are doing — waging an unnecessary, unjust war for reasons having more to
do with the trauma we suffered on 9/11, and the fears it has left us with, than with any
real "cause" of war. Bush exploits our fears, and we let him. Even today, no mainstream
U.S. politician is calling for an immediate end to this immoral war.
The best history lessons help us avoid repeating mistakes. What do you think
lies ahead if we don't learn from the mistakes of the past half century?
The prospect of terrible things ahead — further chaos in the Middle East, a war of
civilizations with Islam, a new arms race with China, the resurgence of a militarized
Japan, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, world poverty as the great security threat,
deployment of weapons in space — is clear enough. The policies of George Bush must be
stopped and reversed, and soon. Diplomacy must be resurrected as the main mode of
American influence; soft power, not hard. Treaties and forums of international law must
define Washington's political agenda, not invasions and "force projection." This change
must occur not just for reasons of morality, but because it is only realistic. As a ragtag
bunch of "insurgents" has shown, America's massive military is actually quite impotent.
The hope of stemming the current toward war lies in the other story that House of War
tells, which is of the great countercurrent of nonviolence that ran through the twentieth
century, from Gandhi in India through the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. The
world's people embraced an ideal of peace (from Walesa and Sakharov to Randy Forsberg
and the Berrigans), and that, finally, is what ended the Cold War. The nonviolent demise
of Soviet tyranny and the peaceful resolution of the East-West conflict defied the
predictions of every Pentagon expert, and proved at last that the dream of peace is no
dream. It is the world's only hope.
www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
6 of 6
Copyright © 2006 Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.