Brinkley also salutes Leon Henderson and Chester Bowles, the two largely unheralded heads of the Office of Price Administration--probably the most thankless job in Washington during the war years. Though despised by every lobbying group that found its request for special privileges denied and by must of Congress, Henderson and Bowles managed to enforce some badly-needed rationing and price control programs on a nation that had just emerged from the Depression and was reluctant for another period of sacrifice and scarcity.

YET most of all, Washington Goes to War depicts the remarkable, and largely unintended and unforeseen, metamorphosis of the nation's capital in the course of a mere five years. Washington, D.C. grew from being a quaint Southern town into a bustling, overcrowded city, with an enormous, permanent bureaucracy.

The nation's capital now has its own government and mayor. congress and its members are much more sophisticated in handling a war and are far less likely to be pushed around by the executive branch. The vast military and civilian bureaucracies are now taken for granted, and many neighborhoods, once predominantly Black, have been taken over by young, upper-middle class professionals.

But for someone like myself who lived in Washington after it had already become a government town, the city Brinkley describes is still all too recognizable--the all-Black ghettos remain and the elitist social scene that once dominated can still be found in certain exclusive neighborhoods and institutions.

Brinkley seems to take comfort in relaying the city's faults during World War II as belonging to a different era, and his book is seen by critics as an amused and nostalgic reflection on a past we have supposedly overcome. But such confidence in Washington's progress may be misguided, as recent events have shown.

While the federal bureaucracy's ineptitude and blunders during the war years are obvious, it remains highly entrenched, inefficient and resistant to change, as Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci is now finding out.

Instead of serving the poor communities that badly need a cheap form of public transportation, Washington's rapid transit system is primarily built for the city's plethora of government bureaucrats, lawyers and lobbyists.

Many of the sins that Brinkley describes as characterizing Washington before the war have not left us. And in the cold light of the present they have not a trace of charm about them.