The Pentagon: A History by Steve Vogel Page A

surprise, the battle over the building was only beginning. The immediate focus was turning to the Senate, which would consider the matter later in the week.
    Monitoring the progress of the opposition, Somervell was not daunted in the least; he barreled ahead, convinced that there was no time to waste. “There is an emergency, and we want to get to work…in the next few days so we can get a large part of this done before the bad weather in January,” Somervell said the day after the House vote. He had already lined up a builder.

    A grand fellow

    Across the Potomac, a little less than a mile downriver from where Somervell wanted to build his new War Department headquarters, another edifice was rising on the south side of the Tidal Basin. It looked like a Roman temple under construction, its neoclassical dome and white marble columns surrounded by cranes and hoists. A sign in front of the site read “John McShain, Inc.—Builder.”
    Viewing the progress of the Jefferson Memorial with particular interest was the occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Franklin D. Roosevelt often would watch the construction work while breakfasting at the White House and had even ordered some trees trimmed so that he might have an unobstructed view across the Ellipse to the rising memorial.
    Roosevelt was a great admirer of Jefferson, feeling himself closer in spirit and style to the Renaissance man who wrote the Declaration of Independence than to any other Founding Father, and he had been deeply involved in the memorial’s creation. He had approved the memorial’s Pantheon design despite furious attacks from critics who considered the conservative Roman style to be hackneyed and pedantic. (Frank Lloyd Wright called it an “arrogant insult to the memory of Thomas Jefferson,” while the Washington Times-Herald compared it to “an old-fashioned, overturned crockery thing of the sort you never see in anybody’s bedroom any more.”) There had been further controversy over the need to cut down or transplant some of the lovely Japanese cherry trees that ringed the Tidal Basin in order to make room for the memorial. A group of Washington society ladies chained themselves to the trees and threatened to disrupt Roosevelt’s groundbreaking ceremony on December 15, 1938. (“Dowager Row May Peril Rite at Memorial,” a Washington Post headline warned.) Roosevelt was undaunted. “If…the tree is in the way, we will move the tree and the lady and the chains, and transplant them to some other space,” he said. The dowagers eventually retreated. At the request of McShain, the contractor, Roosevelt returned to lay the cornerstone at the memorial in November 1939—with the condition “that there be some guarantee that we would bar the cherry tree ladies from the site,” McShain later wrote.
    Roosevelt by then had become quite taken with the charming little Irishman building the memorial. At age forty-two, handsome with auburn hair and sharp blue eyes, McShain still looked young despite the neat mustache he had grown years earlier to make people think he was older. McShain stood only five feet seven inches but was a dynamo of nervous energy. He was a perpetual presence at his jobs, “trotting like a coon dog,” as described by one of his workmen. A natty dresser even at construction sites, he would briskly ask questions and issue orders in a voice a listener once described as sounding like a “Mummer’s parade.” McShain was a rarity among builders in that he never used profanity; a Catholic who attended Mass daily, he summarily ripped down any nude pinups he found in construction shacks.
    McShain’s parents had emigrated from County Derry in Ireland in the early 1880s and settled in Philadelphia, where his father struggled but eventually established himself as a builder, constructing churches, rectories, and schools for the city’s Catholic archdiocese. John was born in 1898, the youngest of four children. He was four when his mother died