House of War by James Carroll
This review by Cy King

If you feel as I do that our world and our nation are in deep trouble, and if you wonder why this is so, “House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power” by James Carroll provides answers. 

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My own inclination has been to blame it all on the Bush administration, and certainly the “neocons” have made a major contribution, but the sad truth is that the mess that we are in is bipartisan: the military industrial complex of which Eisenhower warned  has been nourished and has flourished under both Democrats and Republicans.
  Our nation’s slide toward militarism and imperialism may go back at least to the Spanish American War but Carroll’s account begins with the building of the Pentagon in 1941.  His personal involvement with what he calls that “sacred temple” started very early and runs through the six decades of his memory.  Carroll's father, a Lt. General, was assigned to the Pentagon and his son was a frequent visitor.    When he was ten, The Pentagon was his playroom. After everyone  left and his father worked late he slid up and down the halls and ramps in his stocking feet   The book is both a memoir and a history of a very important building and what took place in that building.  The memoir tells of Carroll’s passage from general’s son, to Catholic priest, to peace activist. During the Vietnam War there developed an inevitable and tragic alienation of father and son. The History begins with Harry Truman, Dean Acheson and James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, and proceeds chronologically through the police actions, wars and threats of war and ends with Bush 1, Bill Clinton, Bush 2 and Donald Rumsfeld, the then Secretary of Defense “when a ragtag group of insurgents fights the most lavishly armed force in history to a virtual stalemate.”  Along the way there is Korea, Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Iraq, Iran and Korea again with the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation as a backdrop.  “House of War” will not cheer you up but I hope you will read it.  It is a very important book and James Carroll is a fine writer with much to share.