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The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power
Houghton Mifflin
May 2006
672 pages
ISBN: 0618187804
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
This landmark, myth-shattering work chronicles the most
powerful institution in America, the people who created it,
and the pathologies it has spawned. 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 threatsand fundingevaporate. 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 extensive interviews with Washington insiders,
from Robert McNamara to John McCain to William Cohen to John
Kerry. The result is a grand yet intimate work of history,
unashamedly polemical and personal but unerringly factual.
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