The Pentagon: A History by Steve Vogel Page B

in premature labor, possibly caused by her exertions when she rushed young John to a doctor after he cut himself falling from a rocking chair. Her death left a hole in his life, a loss that he still felt as an old man. “He was a deprived youngster, deprived emotionally because of his mother’s death,” McShain’s daughter, Sister Pauline McShain, said many years later. “His father didn’t give him a lot of affirmation.” The boy struggled at school.
    In the summers he worked construction jobs for his father, who paid him a pittance. When the boy asked for a raise, his father told him he was not worth a raise. Young John quit to work in a shipyard. On his deathbed in 1919, John McShain, Sr., asked his eldest son, Jim, to take over the business. When Jim declined, the father asked his only other son, John, then twenty, who quietly said, “I’ll try.”
    With a modest inheritance, McShain oversaw the firm from a one-room office over a garage at 1610 North Street in Philadelphia, surviving some lean years and slowly building up business. He was a familiar sight in his raccoon coat and derby hat, dashing around the countryside in his Ford Model T roadster to check on the progress of his jobs. He earned a reputation as a highly competitive builder who delivered projects on schedule and on budget. By the time he won his first federal contact in 1932 to build the twelve-story Philadelphia Naval Hospital, McShain had become a force in the city’s building industry.
    What set McShain apart was his genius for pricing jobs. He would pore over estimate sheets and, with a sharp pencil, scribble in savings and shortcuts to underbid his competitors but still make a profit. Arriving at a construction site, McShain would ask a superintendent what he was paying for concrete or for moving dirt and instantly know whether he was making money. “John McShain can figure a job tighter than most men alive,” Matthew McCloskey, McShain’s friend and great rival for the title of king of Philadelphia contractors, once said. In 1936, McCloskey beat McShain by $1,600 on a $6 million job at Pennsylvania State College. A few minutes after the award was announced, McShain encountered McCloskey in the elevator. McShain was “fighting, snarling mad” and told McCloskey that “friendship was one thing, but it was him or me” from there on.
    “I’ll beat you, McCloskey,” McShain spat, “if it’s only by the price of a nail. And I’ll beat you every chance I get.” That McShain did, “too often and by more nails than I want to remember now,” recalled McCloskey, who would become John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to Ireland.
    The building business in Depression-era Philadelphia was not big enough for McShain, and he soon set his sights on Washington, where New Deal dollars were flowing. His first jobs in the capital came in 1934, when he built foundations for the Internal Revenue Building and a Library of Congress annex, and more soon followed. “We were on our way,” McShain later wrote. “Each month we continued to win larger contracts.”
    It was glory, and not cash, that most motivated McShain. “I’d rather break even on a monumental building than make a million on an uninspired warehouse,” he would say, and his construction of the Jefferson Memorial proved him true to his word. McShain’s impetus for building the memorial came soon after he started in Washington, when he brought his family down to see the sights. They rode around town in a limousine, with his young daughter Polly in the jump seat. Walking up the steps to the Lincoln Memorial, his daughter asked, “Daddy, did you build this?” The proud father somewhat abashedly admitted he had not. “Right away I got a great inspiration,” McShain said years later. In 1939, when the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Commission put out a request for bids, he got his chance. “I sent word to all my competitors: ‘Don’t waste your time bidding; it’s going to be our