The Pentagon

Administration

The War Department's colossal headquarters building across the Potomac from Washington was no longer the $85,000,000 butt of jokes by capital wags. The Pentagon building was a focus of statistical bewilderment: population capacity 40,000; a telephone switchboard big enough for a city of 125,000; enough pavement for a 24-ft. roadway 49 miles long, including parking space for 8,000 cars.

No one denied that the War Department needed a building like the cobweb-shaped Pentagon. Washingtonians could even explain its intricate network of clover leaves and curlicues that wound and curved for some 28 miles about its five-story sides, its network of approaches that eliminate grade crossings. These had been planned and begun before rubber and gasoline shortages were real. But no one attempted to explain the $21,000,000 these roads and bridges would cost.

What they could not explain was the landscaping project which was going full blast last week. Between the Pentagon and the Potomac men were working with picks & shovels, bulldozers and trucks, moving tons of earth and stone, lugging in tons of grass seed.

A triangular area a mile on each side was being graded and landscaped at a cost of $4,000,000. The old Washington airport (tailed the "Hoover Airport" in pre-New Deal days) was flooded to make a lagoon that would enhance the vista from the War Department. Upwards of 1,000 trucks and bulldozers were on the job. From its start in September until its completion in the spring, the landscaping project will have employed an average of 1,000 men each day. The number of man-hours necessary to beautify the land around the Pentagon was estimated unofficially at 1,500,000 to 2,000,000.

For all these goings-on there was at least one likely explanation. The Pentagon landscaping sired by Lieut. General Brehon

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