House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power
In his new book, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, Carroll, a former priest and community organizer, details the inner workings of the building at the center of American power. Beginning with the Pentagon groundbreaking on September 11, 1941, he traces the ascendance of American military might up through and including that same date 60 years later. Carroll makes clear that from the onset of the cold war the Pentagon and core components of society–universities, unions, and the media–were defined by their relationship to communism. But he focuses on personalities and the psychology of power as much as Pentagon military strategy. What emerges is part Dr. Strangelove and part Kitty Kelley tell-all.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Despite its 592 pages, Carroll’s book moves briskly, summing up important international events with zippy one-liners and wickedly skewering an endless cast of short-sighted, self-serving Pentagon figures. Carroll’s sharp analysis also succinctly pins down events misread by most foreign policy experts at the time. “By the late 1950s,” he writes, Khrushchev “had reason to fear that the Russian nightmare–West Germany in control of its own nuclear weapons–was coming to pass. That was what all of Khrushchev’s posturing on Berlin was about.”
