'A genuine sense of personal loss': Remembering 60 years at the Pentagon

On Oct. 7, 1968, an Indian-summer Monday in Washington, a starry-eyed rookie Army officer reported for duty at the eponymous five-sided government building just across the Potomac River in Northern Virginia.

“Welcome to the Puzzle Palace, lieutenant,” said his new boss, a rear admiral and veteran submarine commander named Shannon D. Cramer. “Try to enjoy yourself. Sometimes that will be hard—the Pentagon has a way of chewing people up. But what we do is critically important to the well-being of our nation. Consider yourself fortunate to be here.”

I did then, and I still do.

Settling into my tiny cubicle on the E Ring, seventh corridor, I could never have imagined that my professional and emotional attachment to the iconic nerve center of the U.S. military establishment would span nearly six decades—a dozen years longer, in fact, than the incumbent Defense secretary has been alive.

Until this week, when National Journal rejected the Pentagon’s dystopian, intellectually dishonest, and arguably illegal new policy severely restricting the media’s ability to report on a department that spends more than a trillion taxpayer dollars each year.

Like the dozens of other reporters whose news organizations declined to sign, my building pass was revoked, 57 years to the month since I was handed my first credential.

Paraphrasing one of President Trump’s favorite lines, nobody’s ever seen anything like it—at least not in the decades I’ve been privileged to navigate the building’s seven levels and 17.5 miles of walkways.

The civilians atop this particular Pentagon chain of command seem to believe reporters get their stories from chance encounters with generals and admirals on their way to the Five Guys burger takeout or the steam room at the athletic center. That’s an affront both to the military and the media.

Sure, we’re always looking for tips—but not secrets. I’ve never walked into the office of a senior official, military or civilian, without an appointment. Nor have I ever solicited or received classified information from anyone.

Reporters live to break a great story, but every Pentagon journalist I know can cite blockbuster scoops that remained in their notebooks.

Here’s mine: Late on a Friday afternoon in October 1983, a call came into Newsweek’s Washington bureau from an old Texas pal.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “We’re invading Grenada.”

He not only knew the time and day of the attack on the island nation—Oct. 25, the following Tuesday—but the precise hour Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and the 82nd Airborne Division would launch a predawn ground and air invasion to protect hundreds of American medical students on the island amid a bloody coup by pro-Cuban Marxists.

I asked how he’d come by this startling news. Sheer happenstance, he explained.

He’d been invited to White House domestic-policy meetings earlier that week. Afterwards, a political acquaintance pulled him aside for a private chat, where the loose-lipped official volunteered that President Reagan had just approved Operation Urgent Fury.

Then he identified his source, one of the highest-ranking officials in the government.

“We have no choice,” my confidant said. “We’re going in.”

As deadline approached, Newsweek debated what, if anything, to divulge about our reportorial coup. We’d inadvertently stumbled upon graphic operational details, about 80 hours before a fierce little war would begin.

But publishing what we knew would have been inherently unprofessional and irresponsible.

My boss, a former Strategic Air Command briefer, agreed. American troops would surely die if we printed what we knew. So we didn’t.

It wasn’t a close call; that’s how grown-ups behave. I’m certain any other news organization would have done the same. Such self-censorship happens all the time.

Now, so long as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his media minions remain in charge, access to the building has ended for dozens of distinguished, serious journalists widely respected by those they cover, and vice versa.

But as Billy Crystal reminds us, they can take away your house, but never your memories.

Like the day my boss called in sick and I had to brief the Army chief of staff, Gen. William Westmoreland, President Johnson’s ill-fated Vietnam war commander. I was terrified, but Westy was kind.

Or my regular visits to the fourth floor of the Air Force wing, where a painting of a B-25 attack on a Japanese base in New Guinea was prominently displayed. My dad, an Army Air Corps bombardier-navigator, flew on that mission.

No partisan functionary can erase the most jarring moment of my military career. As the junior officer in OASD/PA, I drew the unenviable duty of reviewing daily Vietnam casualty reports. One morning in February 1969, I froze in shock when I read the name of Capt. Joseph Kerr Bush of Temple, Texas.

Joe Bush was a year ahead of me in Company A-1 in the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets. Like all sophomores, he made my life miserable as a freshman. But Joe was the finest soldier I’ve ever known. Courageous, patriotic, and principled, he personified what Hegseth likes to call “the warrior ethos.”

Every time I walked past my old office, I remembered Joe, who died in Laos even though President Nixon assured Congress no American troops were fighting there. (That office is now part of the Joint Staff, which has always been closed to reporters, and properly so.)

Then there was the evening my boss handed me the duty book and said if I got a call from a reporter about a place in Vietnam called My Lai, I should say nothing and call him immediately. That query didn’t come on my watch. But a few days later the story broke about the infamous March 1968 massacre of Vietnamese civilians by the Army’s Americal Division.

Similarly, I remember the heartfelt lament of Army Chief of Staff Creighton Abrams, a legendary tank commander in George Patton’s Third Army, at an informal reception with Pentagon correspondents in the '70s.

“I’ll never understand why the Navy can get a billion dollars for a ship, and the Air Force can get a billion dollars for a plane, but the Army has to make do with a goddamn spear from the last war,” Abrams fumed.

Going forward, I’ll savor these memories—what a legendary Texas Ranger captain called “the sunny slopes of long ago”—in absentia.

Hegseth’s draconian new rules have little to do with the paramount task of safeguarding national and operational security; they reflect his obsession with stories that illuminate his professional and personal limitations.

Since 1968, I’ve worked for, interviewed, personally known, or covered 28 secretaries of Defense. Hegseth is widely regarded within the building as the least capable and least competent of them all.

“This goes well beyond the media,” a very senior former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff organization and combat veteran told National Journal last week. “Hegseth has created so much turmoil and chaos that he’s brought the building almost to a standstill and compromised the ability to conduct professional, responsible business.

“It’s very sad to say, but he’s an embarrassment. Nobody respects him. It’s hard to understand why he’s still there.”

Hegseth’s shortcomings are aggravated, not tempered, by his personal staff. Confident leaders surround themselves with subordinates as good or better than themselves—not the supporting cast of sycophants, culture warriors, truth-shaders, and just plain inexperienced underlings this secretary has enabled.

“On their best days, they don’t know what they’re doing,” a retired public affairs colonel who served three Pentagon duty tours, and who saved me from myself many times, said last week.

At moments like this, I’m reminded of how my city editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram described clueless local government officials six decades ago: “delusions of adequacy.”

Having wandered those halls for so long, I’ll confess to a genuine sense of personal loss.

I’ll miss favorite spots like the inner courtyard, an oasis of tranquility, especially glorious when the maple, oak, and elm leaves brilliantly turned each fall. It was commonly known as Ground Zero—until 9/11.

I’ll also miss admission to one of the finest museums in the world. The thousands of portraits, combat art, photographs of men and women at war, and historical exhibits lining those miles of hallways never failed to humble, inspire, and remind.

There’s one other regret.

At least once a month, on business rounds, I made it my mission to seek out a remote second-floor hallway I had traversed every weekday for two years as an Army lieutenant.

Tourists never see it. Yet it’s hallowed ground—memorialized by a wrenching wall graphic plotting the path American Airlines Flight 77 gashed through the building that horrible Tuesday morning. Names of the fallen, including a three-star Army general, are marked in red at the very spot where they died at their posts.

Last week, once more, I paid my respects. Lest we forget.

Even if I’d signed Hegseth’s diktat, it would have been the last time; that hallway will remain off-limits to reporters without a babysitter.

In the 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter promised to deliver “a government as good as its people.”

The 26,000 incredibly dedicated, patriotic, and unsung heroes of my favorite Puzzle Palace deserve a civilian leadership worthy of their sacrifice.

Good luck with that.