The Pentagon: A History (54 page)

McNamara, as always, tried to seize control of the situation. “Let me see if I can’t get this to work,” he said, reaching past the sergeant and pushing buttons on the panel. Nothing happened. McNamara directed Potter to turn the switch from manual to automatic. The elevator did not budge.

“You better use the telephone,” McNamara said.

Potter opened the elevator’s telephone box and got a maintenance man on the line. He told him the elevator was stuck.

“Do you have a full load?” the maintenance man asked.

“We sure do,” the sergeant replied.

Johnson kept calm, even as a Secret Service agent wedged next to him made frantic radio calls. LBJ jokingly told McNamara he was going to take a line out of his speech saluting the efficiency the secretary had brought to the Pentagon.

Waiting outside in the rain—it was starting to sleet—Clark Clifford wondered where everybody was. Clifford had been on hand the dramatic day more than twenty years earlier when Jim Forrestal had been sworn in as the nation’s first secretary of defense, and in two days it would be his turn. Since his days as a young naval aide to Truman, Clifford—tall, elegant, perpetually unruffled—had established himself as the premier Wise Man of Washington, and he was Johnson’s choice to succeed McNamara.

Watching McNamara’s last months in office, Clifford could not help but draw comparisons to Forrestal. He was not the only one. “We mustn’t have another Forrestal,” LBJ said privately in the summer of 1967. McNamara would later deny that he had been on the verge of an emotional collapse, but, he acknowledged, “I was tense as hell.” Late one afternoon during his last year, pacing back and forth in his office as he considered a request to ship more ammunition to Vietnam, McNamara suddenly stopped and stared at the Forrestal portrait. As an aide looked on, McNamara’s body shuddered with silent sobs. At the White House the day before the Pentagon retirement ceremony, McNamara had choked up and been unable to speak when the president awarded him the Medal of Freedom. Johnson had put his arm around him and led the secretary out of the room. To Clifford, silently watching, “it was an eerie echo of what Jim Forrestal had gone through nineteen years earlier.”

Inside the Pentagon elevator, the air was getting stuffy. They had been stuck for ten minutes. Johnson told aide Will Sparks to wedge a notebook between the outer doors to get more air. Sparks managed to pry the doors open an inch, and, through the crack, they could see a landing, but no one knew which floor. Clint Hill, the exasperated head of the Secret Service detail, radioed his agents to go to every floor and “open the damn doors.” Within two minutes they could see several people on the landing, including a maintenance man who promptly pried the doors open.

The elevator was still three feet below the landing, so someone grabbed a leather chair and put it inside the elevator, allowing LBJ and the others to climb out. The party found itself on the fourth floor, in the outer office of the under secretary of the Army. With McNamara in the lead, they raced down two flights of steps and came bursting out the River entrance. “At least this one didn’t happen on your watch,” someone quipped to Clifford.

The ordeal was not over. McNamara, wearing a blue suit with no hat or coat, stood in the driving rain as four 105 mm howitzers fired a nineteen-gun salute. A young aide held an umbrella over Johnson, but all it did was channel water onto McNamara’s glasses, leaving the secretary “standing at attention going blind,” as Johnson later recounted. The president took the podium: “I have heard this building referred to as the puzzle palace,” he said. “Bob McNamara may be the only man who ever found the solution to the puzzle, and he is taking it with him.” It was a nice tribute, but nobody could hear it: The rain short-circuited the public-address system. The climax of the ceremony, a scheduled flyover featuring the new Air Force F-111 all-weather fighter—a controversial McNamara initiative—was canceled due to the rain. Thoroughly soaked and chilled, McNamara saw Johnson off, went inside, and cleared his belongings out of the Pershing desk.

McNamara had served longer, and with more consequence, than any other secretary of defense. In the view of Clifford, one of the authors of unification, no one had done more to move the Pentagon “toward what we had intended it to be during the battle for military reform.” Applying systems analysis—breaking complex issues down into their component parts for better understanding—to every problem he faced at the Pentagon, McNamara brought order to budget planning, curtailed duplication in weapons development, and contained the rivalry among the services. (Even the Pentagon march came in for the McNamara treatment: The protest leaders had not properly organized the demonstrators, McNamara later said; had he been in charge, “I absolutely guarantee you I could have shut down the whole goddamn place.”) He applied the same techniques to Vietnam, Clifford wrote, failing to recognize that “Vietnam was not a management problem, it was a war, and war is about life and death, filled with intangibles that defy analysis.”

McNamara had come to the building believing no problem could withstand rational analysis, and, at the end, he found himself imprisoned in a Pentagon elevator. Even McNamara appreciated the irony, though he could not quite put his finger on it. “God, it was symbolic of something,” he later told writer Paul Hendrickson.

The bastards were going to get it

Much had happened in the more than four years since Bill Ayers jubilantly danced on the Pentagon Mall plaza during the 1967 march. Ayers followed an increasingly radical course, taking to the streets of Chicago for violent protest during the 1968 Democratic convention and the “Days of Rage” the following year. In 1969, he was among those who broke off from Students for a Democratic Society to form a more radical group, the Weathermen, taking their name from a Bob Dylan line: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

The Weathermen wanted to use bombs to bring the Vietnam War home to what they called “Amerikan” soil, but their efforts did not begin well. In May 1970, Ayers’s girlfriend, Diana Oughton, who had celebrated with him at the Pentagon, was among three Weathermen blown to bits when a homemade bomb meant for an Army dance at Fort Dix instead accidentally detonated in their Greenwich Village townhouse. Devastated by the loss, Ayers and other Weathermen went underground. A photograph of Ayers, head tilted and smirking, was on FBI wanted posters hanging on every post office wall in the country. Also featured on the posters was his new girlfriend and fellow Weatherman, Bernardine Dohrn, a black-leather and mini-skirt-wearing firebrand whom FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover labeled “the most dangerous woman in America.”

The Weathermen retreated from bombing people after the Greenwich Village disaster and instead targeted government buildings. The group bombed the New York City police headquarters building in 1970 and a marble-lined bathroom in the U.S. Capitol building in 1971, both times with no casualties. By early 1972, the Weathermen—now variously also known as the Weather Underground or Weather People, after objections from female members—focused on a familiar target. “The Pentagon was ground zero for war and conquest, organizing headquarters of a gang of murdering thieves, a colossal stain on the planet, a hated symbol everywhere around the world,” Ayers later wrote. In April 1972, when President Richard Nixon launched Operation Linebacker—a major bombing campaign against North Vietnam in response to a Communist offensive—the Weather Underground decided it was time to strike.

A team of three Weathermen—Ayers identified them only as “Anna and Aaron and Zeke”—was sent to the Washington area, where they rented a cheap apartment and scouted the Pentagon. The team learned what Pawel Monat and his fellow spies had discovered nearly two decades earlier: Despite the climate of the times, the Pentagon remained a remarkably open building. Anna, wearing office clothes, a dark wig, and thick glasses, her fingertips covered with clear nail polish to hide her fingerprints, entered the Pentagon every morning with hundreds of workers, walked the corridors, and ate breakfast in the cafeteria. No one ever challenged her. “Their reconnaissance led them deep into the bowels of the Leviathan, and they soon knew every hall and stairway, every cul-de-sac and office and bathroom,” Ayers wrote.

In an Air Force section of the building, on the fourth floor, Corridor 10, Anna found a women’s restroom that seemed isolated and had a floor drain in a toilet stall. On a subsequent visit, she measured the drain. Back in the apartment, Aaron fashioned a twelve-by-three-inch sausage-shaped bomb, tailored for the drain, with a timing device at one end. On the morning of May 18, Anna entered the Pentagon carrying a briefcase with the two-pound bomb hidden underneath papers and personal effects. She went to the selected restroom—4-E10W—and locked herself in the toilet stall. Anna took the screws out of the drain, popped off the cover, placed the bomb inside, and replaced the cover. She immediately left the building and linked up with Zeke at a prearranged meeting place. They were soon on a train out of town while Aaron closed down the operation, cleaning out their apartment. The bomb was set to go off at 1
A.M.
the next morning, Friday, May 19, 1972—the date had been picked to honor Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader who had died in 1969, on what would have been his eighty-second birthday.

Ayers awaited word on the operation from a safe house in another city where he lived with Dohrn. “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,” he later wrote. “The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.”

The bastards, in this case, were Rita Campbell and her cleaning ladies who scrubbed floors and toilets, picked up the trash, and dusted the offices on the Pentagon’s fourth floor. The crack Weathermen reconnaissance had somehow missed the fact that custodians cleaned the Pentagon bathrooms at night. It was not a state secret, nor was it even surprising. Moreover, the Weathermen had chosen one of the busier locations in the building at that hour; just down Corridor 10 was a bustling mailroom filled all night with workers, many of them women.

At 12:42
A.M.
on the morning of May 19,
Washington Post
operator Bernadine Gibson answered a telephone call from a man who identified himself as a “weatherman” and warned that a bomb would explode on the Pentagon’s “eighth floor.” Gibson immediately telephoned police in Washington to report the threat. The police department informed a night-duty officer at the Pentagon at 12:53, and the Pentagon officer quickly called the
Post
for more information. According to Ayers, Aaron also called the Pentagon from a telephone booth in Washington to warn that a bomb would explode in twenty-five minutes in the Air Force section of the building. No evacuation was ordered, probably because the information was too sketchy and there was little time to respond; the Pentagon often received bomb threats that turned out to be hoaxes.

In her office on the fourth-floor A Ring, Rita Campbell, the custodial foreman for the floor’s cleaning force, looked at the clock on the wall. It was almost 1
A.M.
The “zone ladies”—Mrs. Wilcox, Mrs. Delaney, Mrs. Colbert, and one other woman, all black and in their forties and fifties, friends who had cleaned the same zone together for years—would just about be finishing up in restroom 4-E10W, always their last stop before going to the locker room to change when their shift ended at 1:15
A.M.

Campbell was chatting with a colleague at 12:59
A.M.
when the building shook and she heard an enormous boom. She rushed down the A Ring and around the corner to Corridor 10, where she saw a billowing cloud of black smoke. The mailroom people said the explosion had come from the far end of the corridor, where the restroom was.

“Oh, no, not the bathroom,” Campbell called. “I hope not the bathroom.”

She tried to get closer but somebody stopped her: “You can’t go down there, Mrs. Campbell, because whatever was down there is gone.”

The explosion had blown out a twenty-five-foot section of wall separating the restroom from the corridor. The lavatory was entirely destroyed, its ceiling buckled, its toilet stalls smashed, and a two-foot-wide hole blown in the concrete slab. Water was shooting in the air as thousands of gallons of water poured from broken pipes.

Campbell was frantic. “Where are the ladies?” she yelled. “Where are the ladies?” A voice finally called to her: “Here they are, Mrs. Campbell, they were in the locker room!” The ladies had finished early and sneaked off to change. Campbell recalled: “They were crying, we were all crying, they were apologizing for going to the locker room early, and I said, ‘No, I’m glad you went to the locker room early, because if you hadn’t, we would have lost four women.’”

Later that day, the Weather Underground issued a communiqué boasting that “today we attacked the Pentagon, the center of the American military command.” No one had been hurt, though the explosion caused $75,000 in damage. The water gushing from the pipes soaked offices on the floors below, disabling an Air Force computer center and damaging the department store and Pentagon bookstore on the concourse. The cleaning ladies were terrified to return to work but all did; none could afford to lose their jobs.

At his safe house, Ayers found himself in “deepening shades of delight.” He and Dohrn took time “to rejoice and congratulate ourselves and laugh some more.” When interviewed in 2006, Ayers said he was unaware that cleaning crews had been working in the area. “I didn’t know about it, and definitely had no intention of hurting anybody, and didn’t hurt anybody,” he said.