Download House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power AudioBook Free
From National Book Award–winning author of An American Requiem and Constantine's Sword comes a sweeping yet intimate go through the Pentagon and its own vast — often hidden — effect on America.
This landmark, myth-shattering work chronicles the most powerful institution in America, people who created it, and the pathologies they have spawned. James Carroll proves a controversial thesis: the Pentagon has, since its founding, operated beyond the control of any force in government or society. It is the biggest, loosest cannon in American history, and no institution has changed this country more. To argue his case, he marshals a trove of often chilling evidence. He recounts how "the Building" and its own denizens achieved what Eisenhower called "a disastrous rise of misplaced power" — from the unprecedented aerial bombing of Germany and Japan during World War II to the "shock and awe" of Iraq. He charts the colossal U.S. nuclear buildup, which far outpaced that of the USSR, and has outlived it. He reveals how regularly the Building has found new enemies equally as old threats — and funding — evaporate. He demonstrates how Pentagon policy brought about U.S. indifference to a epidemic of genocide through the 1990s. And he shows how the forces that attacked the Pentagon on 9/11 were set in motion exactly sixty years earlier, on September 11, 1941, when ground was broken for the home of war.
Carroll draws on rich personal experience (his father was a top Pentagon official for more than two decades) as well as exhaustive research and dozens of considerable interviews with Washington insiders. The effect is a grand yet intimate work of history, unashamedly polemical and personal but unerringly factual. With a breadth and focus that no other book could muster, it explains what America is becoming over the past sixty years.
