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Washington Goes to WarBy David Brinkley
A Review Essay by Sally Morem
How many fiction writers could make their make-believe cities as real andvital as David Brinkley made his real-life city? I knew I had to review this book as I began to read the first few pages. Washington, DC, just before andduring World War II, is of particular interest because of the huge changesthat had swept over the city as a result of world-shaking events.Washington had been up till that era essentially a small, sleepy Southerntown with only one unusual feature: It played host to office holders, bureaucrats, lobbyists, reporters, job seekers, and diplomats who swarmedover Capitol Hill and the White House from across the nation and around theworld every political season.David Brinkley was the perfect author for this book. He had lived inWashington since the late Thirties and was able to spice the book with anumber of his personal experiences. Many years later, he served as half of the renowned Huntley-Brinkley anchor team on NBC’s nightly nationalnews broadcast. And many years after that, he was the host of a Sundaymorning interview show,
This Week 
, in which he gently guidedcommentators and guests through the intricacies of the political topics of theday. I watched that show regularly and always had the feeling that Brinkleywas prepared to ask the questions viewers at home would like to ask. Heasked blunt questions at times, but no one ever got mad at him because hedid it with such dry humor.What viewers saw on
This Week 
readers read in
Washington Goes to War 
.The writing is vintage Brinkley. He was always impossible to pin downideologically, but always ready with a well-turned phrase, which got to theheart of the matter.
 
Here is how he handled the description of one part of Washington’s wartimealphabet soup bureaucracy—the Central Administrative Services or CAS— in charge of office supplies, car pools, mail deliver, etc.:
The catalogue of CAS’s sins and failures was a long document of laziness,carelessness, stupidity, delays, errors and, not least, simple theft. Oneinvestigation revealed that during gasoline rationing when government automobiles were left in the CAS repair shop, mechanics routinely drained their tanks and stole the gasoline for their own use. Chauffeurs reported that, time after time, when they drove away from the CAS stop, their engines stalled and died in traffic.
Brinkley’s flat and droll descriptions of such chicanery should leave readersfar more skeptical about perennial claims made by politicians about howmuch more efficient and transparent American economic activity would beif only more of it would be placed in the caring and compassionate hands of government.It is difficult to tell which aspect of bureaucracy made Brinkley moredisgusted—dishonesty or stupidity. He revealed the fact that production-control bureaucrats ordered industry to stop making typewriters and to retoolfor weapons production, ignoring the obvious fact that typewriters werecrucial to the inner workings of huge new bureaucracies springing up in thenation’s capital. As a result of this unwarranted intrusion in the decision-making processes of private industry, government officials were forced tospend their valuable time going around the country, begging people for donations of their personal typewriters to the war effort!
Washington Goes to War 
is full of stories like that. World War II, even before America declared war, had forced Washington to take on worldresponsibilities it was ill-equipped to handle.But, when they had to, Washingtonians could work with amazing speed.Read my very favorite part of the book. Admire the speed anddetermination with which those crazy Americans built what is still theworld’s largest office building:
…in late September 1941, while Roosevelt still wavered about the location,the army just went ahead. General Somervell…was a West Point engineering graduate whose previous projects had included New York 
 
City’s LaGuardia Airport. He simply told the contractor to start work. Bythe time Roosevelt found out about it a month later, the foundations werealready in place.The construction moved ahead with incredible speed. At one point,thirteen thousand men were working around the clock, with enormousbanks of arc lights burning through the night. Accident rates were 400 percent higher than average. Three hundred architects worked in a large,abandoned airplane hangar near the construction site. They were trying,and failing, to design the building fast enough to keep up with theworkmen. Construction foremen were snatching blueprints off their deskseven before they finished drafting them. Alan Dickey, one of thearchitects, recalled another architect asking him, “How big should I makethat beam across the third floor?”  Dickey answered, “I don’t know. They installed it yesterday.”  By May 1942, half-a-million square feet were ready for occupancy, and the army began moving in. Military guards lined the route from the old  Munitions Building on the Mall, across the Fourteenth Street Bridge and through muddy fields to the half-finished structure. Armored trucks rolled in with secret files. Movers carried in office furniture so hurriedly that workers the next day deluged their supervisors with complaints about broken lamps and damaged desks. For months more, Pentagon workershad to fight construction barriers, wet cement, noise, and dust so thick,one remembered, “you could write your name on any desk with your  finger.”  By early 1943, the Pentagon was complete—a building big enough tohouse forty thousand people and all their accoutrements, the largest building in the world, conceived, funded, designed and constructed in alittle more than a year. And on the day it was finished, it was already too small.
Brinkley interviewed servicemen, government workers, newspaper reporters,school teachers, entertainers, hotel managers and college professors for their memories of wartime Washington. He also used a large number of documents in government archives and libraries, mining them for the mosttelling details, some of which I’ve highlighted above. This research paid for itself by bringing Brinkley’s story to life.
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