ARMED FORCES: The House of Brass

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Set between the lawns there is parking space for 8,200 cars (admirals and generals park at the River and Mall Entrances; lesser officers, enlisted men and clerks have to park half a mile away). There are 30 miles of winding roadways whose signs more often point away from than toward the Pentagon. One bewildered woman trying to find her way finally gave up, drove her car across an acre of grass to the building entrance. But like the Pentagon itself, the roads have an unlikely logic. The system works, as long as the man enmeshed in it keeps in line, cuts no corners, and follows the signs.

On the E Ring. As any military establishment must be, the Pentagon is ruled by rank, and its office layout is an accurate diagram of each man's place in the caste. The outer "E" ring contains the biggest offices and the biggest brass, and caste descends in downward steps toward the center of the building where captains and majors are scrambled together, sometimes dozens to a room, in the inside rings. Along the E Ring's River and Mall sides, which have the only view of the river, are the civilian secretaries—Air's Thomas Finletter, Navy's Francis Matthews, Army's Frank Pace—and the military chiefs of each service—Air's General Hoyt Vandenberg, Navy's Admiral Forrest Sherman, Army's Joseph Lawton Collins. Their offices are luxurious but functional—and about the only place in the Pentagon's chaste modernity where tradition rears its old-fashioned head. By right of office, Joe Collins sits at the massive, heavily carved desk of William Tecumseh ("War is Hell") Sherman; Marshall's desk was Pershing's. Pace has the desk used by Secretary of War William Howard Taft.

Biggest office of all goes to the Pentagon's top man, Secretary of Defense George Marshall, a clean-desk man with a fetish for delegation (in the Pentagon, a clean desk is the accepted symbol of efficiency). From the time he arrives at 8:30 each morning until he leaves at 5, he usually sees no more than six people. He assigns jobs and has his indispensable deputy, Wall Streeter Robert Lovett, see that they get done.

The War Room. Under Old Soldier Marshall, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have become steadily more important, the three civilian secretaries steadily less. On the floor below Marshall's office in Room 3E880 are the staff quarters of the Joint Chiefs and the office of J.C.S. Chairman Omar Bradley. Together, the Chiefs of Staff constitute the top military brains of the U.S.