Talk:Hugh John Casey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is within the scope of the Military history WikiProject. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see lists of open tasks and regional and topical task forces. To use this banner, please see the full instructions.

Start

This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale.

Additional information and associated task forces:

	This article has been checked against the following criteria for B-Class status: Referencing and citation: criterion not met Coverage and accuracy: criterion not met Structure: criterion not met Grammar: criterion met Supporting materials: criterion met
Associated task forces (nations and regions):
	United States military history task force
Associated task forces (periods and conflicts):
	World War II task force

[edit] Copyright Violation?

It sure seems to me that this page largely cribs from here: http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/hjcasey.htm and it even uses the same photograph. However, it is possible that both pages are derived from the Army-published memoirs of Gen. Casey listed as a reference for this article: Engineer Memoirs: Major General Hugh J. Casey, Office of History, US Army Corps of Engineers, 1993.

What strikes me is that both pages repeat the at least hyped story of General Casey's involvement in the design of the Pentagon when this page: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5438635 provides a much more in-depth discussion of the design and construction of the Pentagon which does not even mention General Casey. And in fact, the original design of the Pentagon was a rectangle with one corner cut off due to the constraints of the originally proposed site at Arlington Farms. The two stories can't be reconciled without further research. Did General Casey originate the rectangle with one corner cut off? Or did he take that design and regularize it into a true pentagon after President Roosevelt ordered the building to be moved south? It would seem that to legitimately include this story, you have to put it into contect one way or the other, and it is not clear from the above web pages exactly what happened. But given that Gen. Casey was (at that time) assigned to "standardize designs," I would suspect that he took the original design and regularized it into a true pentagon shape, which would make the story more meaningful if this can be verified. Perhaps somebody has access to the cited book? (I do not.)

But the story does appear to be clarified a bit here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/23/AR2007052301296_pf.html which is an excerpt from the book The Pentagon: A History, to be published by Random House. ©2007 by Stephen F. Vogel. That article makes it appear that Gen. Casey (then a Lt. Col.) picked the original Arlington Farms site that led to the five-sided design by architect George Edwin Bergstrom and his team.

ElbonianFL (talk) 14:53, 22 November 2007 (UTC)