Washington Goes To War

By David Brinkley

New York: Alfred A. Knopf

286 pp.

FROM a historical perspective, one can view the United States's entry into World War II either as the rather routine story of a government and an economy gearing up for war or as a crucial turning point in American history, in which a city and a nation were forever changed, and new relations between the president, Congress, the federal bureaucracy and the press were permanently formed.

David Brinkley's Washington Goes To War takes the latter view. And Brinklev's description of the transformation of a sleepy, provincial Southern town into an energetic, thriving capital of action and power is more than your typical tale of war-time rationing and wage and price-controls. It is a fascinating portrait of the institutions, issues and individuals that dominated Washington from September 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland and America began its belated preparations to enter the war, up to mid-1945, when the Japanese surrendered.

In detailing the transformation of the city during a few short years, Brinkley, one of the nation's most respected broadcast journalists, not only reminds Washingtonians of their history, but also, indirectly, highlights the racial divisions that still polarize the city and the sycophancy and influence-peddling that continue in its corridors of power and at its cocktail parties.

Brinkley, who based much of the book on his own memories of wartime Washington as well as on research done by his son, Alan, a former Harvard history professor, lays out his central thesis early on in the book, namely that Washington stumbled into World War II woefully unprepared to manage it and somehow improvised its way through the war.

"The preparations for war succeeded only because the country had manpower, skills, resources, and industrial capacity enormous enough to succeed in spite of itself," Brinkley writes. "And because a nation coming out of 10 years of deep depression had a great pool of men and women who had been unemployed for so long that they were hungry for jobs and eager to work anywhere, anytime, doing anything."

Throughout the book, Brinkley reveals with his typical biting wit, keen insight and damning criticism many of the not-so-heroic aspects of Washington during these years: a rapidly expanding bureaucracy and its petty infighting over exceedingly short supplies and space; a rigidly circumscribed, deeply impoverished and grossly ignored Black community; a non-existent municipal government that was in effect run by one of the nation's most outspoken racists, Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo, chairman of the obscure Senate District Committee beginning in 1944; a financial elite far more intent on improving their social status by flattering their fellow hob-nobbers than on making a productive contribution to the war effort.

Congress, Brinkley contends, was at this time an archaic, old-fashioned body more concerned with preserving its own privileges and patronage system than with effectively overseeing the war. While the wartime agencies and bureaus were loaded with economists, professors and specialists in even the most arcane fields, congressional committees had staffs comprised mainly of hacks appointed for reasons of patronage. Thus, Congress was "reduced to waiting for ideas and suggestions from the president and, while bewailing their ineffectuality, rubber stamping their approval."

This was also the age of the "press lords", when publishers such as The Chicago Tribune's Colonel Robert R. McCormick, and Cissy Patterson of the Washington Times-Herald used their newspapers and their reporters to promote their personal political biases, particularly their profound hatred of Roosevelt, their opposition to the Lend-Lease program and their pro-Nazi sympathies.

Despite this portrait of a city remarkably unprepared and unwilling to coordinate the war effort, Washington Goes to War is also a celebration of and a tribute to the men and women whose contributions to the war effort in Washington were invaluable. Chief among these, Brinkley implies, was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt '04 himself.

Brinkley shows FDR at his best, outmaneuvering the isolationists in Congress, stirring the American public to support the war, attacking his opponents in the press and in industry and luring the brilliant dollar-a-year men from business and academe to run the new wartime industries.

Brinkley also pays tribute to the lesser-known heroes of the Allied effort, such as Amy Thorpe, a British intelligence agent who used her "bedroom skills" with officials of the Polish government not only to steal a highly sophisticated machine developed by the Germans but also to figure out how to use it. Considered the greatest and most spectacular espionage achievement of the war, her action enabled the British to read Hitler's most secret messages and orders to Nazi generals before even they had seen them.

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.