Fitzgerald, A. Ernest. The Pentagonists: An Insider's View of Waste, Mismanagement, and Fraud in Defense Spending. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. 344 pages.

Ernest Fitzgerald is perhaps the most famous whistle-blower in Washington. While employed by the Pentagon as an engineer and cost expert, he testified to Congress in 1968 and 1969 about the concealed cost overruns and the technical problems of the Lockheed C-5A transport plane. He was fired by Nixon for telling the truth, and wrote about it in "The High Priests of Waste" (1972). After a 14-year legal battle against duplicitous Pentagon brass and self-serving executive-branch careerists, a federal judge ruled that the Air Force had to restore Fitzgerald to his former position.

That happened just as the new Reagan administration handed the Pentagon a blank check for bigger and better procurement scandals. Some years later, congressional committees were clucking over $748 pliers and $500 cotter pins, and then they'd walk away from the issue (they knew that congressmen come and go, but Pentagon generals live forever). Fitzgerald's politics are centrist, yet he considers America "the world's largest banana republic." (page 3) "In other banana republics the military comes to power with a sudden coup and the installation of a junta. Here it is different.... America runs on money. And the military has quietly come to vast economic power by taking vast amounts of the federal income for itself." (page 70)
ISBN 0-395-36245-8

Extract the names from this source

Back to search page