The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

by Max Boot

minimize the use of steel, which was in short supply in wartime, so it featured concrete ramps rather than steel elevators. “The Building,” as it came to be known, had five rings of drab offices housing twenty-seven thousand functionaries, more than seventeen miles of gray corridors, seventy-seven hundred no-frills, institutional windows, eighty-five thousand fluorescent light fixtures, and six and a half million square feet of floor space, three times more than the Empire State Building.11 Even General Dwight D. Eisenhower got lost in the building when he became Army chief of staff at the end of 1945. “One had to give the building his grudging admiration; it had apparently been designed to confuse any enemy who might infiltrate it,” Ike wrote.12 The future president was inaugurating a long tradition of Pentagon employees joking about the place where they worked—a sign of how unhappy most officers were to find themselves confined within its walls, far from the work with soldiers in the field that had drawn them into military service.