Dimensions
167 x 244 x 50mm
The Pentagon And The Disastrous Rise Of American Power
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 argues that the Pentagon has, since its founding, operated beyond the control of government and society, and changed the character of the United States more than any other institution.
In 'House Of War' Carroll marshals a trove of often chilling evidence. He recounts how the Pentagon and its denizens achieved what Eisenhower called "a disastrous rise of misplaced power", from the aerial bombing of Germany and Japan during World War II to the "shock and awe" of Iraq. He charts the colossal US nuclear build-up, which far outpaced and outlived that of the USSR. He reveals how consistently "the Building" has found new enemies just as old threats, and funding, evaporate. He demonstrates how Pentagon policy brought about US 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.
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.
