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153 chapter ten Inside the Pentagon “Iam the resurrection and the life. . . . Death is swallowed up in victory,” intoned the white-robed Episcopal priest. Thus began the burial service for the ¤rst U.S. secretary of defense in the marble-columned Arlington amphitheater. As the marine corps honor guard ¤red three sharp volleys and a bugler sounded taps, James Forrestal ¤nally found peace in a sailor’s grave beneath a plain white marker. Big bald Louis Johnson, Forrestal’s successor, walked down the hill, hat in hand, amid the crowd of departing mourners. Only a few days before, on May 22, 1949, Forrestal had shocked the nation when he either leaped or tried to hang himself and then fell to his death from the top ¶oor of Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he had been hospitalized for severe mental illness. Louis Johnson had visited with him for half an hour on April 27 and told reporters that Forrestal “looked ¤ne” and was “making good progress.”1 But everyone knew he was deeply disturbed. Moments before his death, he was copying Sophocles’ poem “The Chorus from Ajax,” in which Ajax, forlorn and “worn by the waste of time,” contemplated suicide.2 Many in the capital were saying that the enormous pressures of managing America’s defense establishment drove Forrestal to commit suicide. At the funeral and memorial services, they said the job was simply too dif¤cult for one man to handle without losing his sanity. Johnson knew this wasn’t true. He had seen the face ofmental illness in his daughter Lillian.He believed thatForrestal’s paranoia and increasingly erratic behavior were due to some inherent mental defect , not to the stresses of the defense job, no matter how dif¤cult it was. Johnson seemed to be immune from stress. When Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, toldhim, “You hold the most important, 154 louis johnson and the arming of america most controversial, most thankless and most fateful post in the city of Washington ,” Johnson could not have been happier. Unlike Forrestal and subsequent secretaries of defense who heard similar words, Johnson felt no sense of dread, no sense that the weight of the free world rested on his shoulders. He cherished Vinson’s words, particularly the phrase “most important.”3 As head of the National Military Establishment (as it was called before August 1949, when it became the Department of Defense), Johnson was in charge of an organization that was the largest employer and biggest single spender, public or private,inthenation.Thedepartmentemployed1.6millionuniformedpersonnel and several hundred thousand civilian workers. It had an annual budget of $15 billion , more than one-third of the entire federal budget.4 The management of such an enormous operation would have been a staggering task, but to add to that the handlingsuch thornyproblemsasuni¤cation,economization, equalopportunity, selective service, and the Soviet threatin a manner pleasing to the president, Congress , the armed services, and the public made the job close to impossible. Yet Johnson reveled in the opportunity to tackle it. The reasons for the thrill of the challenge were complex, but they went to the essence of the man. In addition to vindication, there was an opportunity to put his own stamp on the American military establishment; a chance to achieve lasting fame; and the possibility that the position could serve as a stepping-stone to even bigger and better things—namely the presidency of the United States. The defense post offered a perfect opportunity for Johnson’s massive ego to be stroked. Whether Johnson ever seriously considered parlaying the position into a presidential nomination in 1952 will never be known, but a number of Pentagon of¤cials, numerous political observers, some close associates, and most of the people back in Clarksburg steadfastly believed that the ambitious lawyer had his eyes on the White House. Johnson, however, consistently denied he had any such aspirations.5 The only elected of¤ce that he ever acknowledged any interest in was U.S. senator, but he never seriously pursued that idea.6 Colossus The Pentagon was perfect for a man with Johnson’s raw ambition and thirst for power. It was the biggest building in the world—a colossus which symbolized America’s preeminence as a military superpower. It was also the corporate headquarters for by far the largest business organization the world has ever seen. From its inception, the Pentagon was highly controversial. It was the subject of months of debate in Congress on...

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