A few days after Pearl Harbor, BBC correspondent Alistair Cooke walked into the department through a side door, where he found no guards. He visited the officer he had come to see, but when he tried to leave the building, “a guard lowered his rifle and barred the way.” Cooke had been ensnared in one of those distinctive military-bureaucratic paradoxes that Joseph Heller would later describe as a “catch-22.” “The theory,” Cooke wryly observed, “was that if you were not wearing a visitor’s button, you never in the first place came in and were technically not present. This was reasonable but
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