The Little Capital That Couldn’t--but Did : WASHINGTON GOES TO WAR <i> by David Brinkley (Alfred A. Knopf: $18.95; 286 pp., illustrated) </i>

So much has been written about the more obvious aspects of World War II that we tend to forget that the pivot of the whole thing, the hub, the major nerve center, was that baroque community named Washington. That was where the decisions were made that shaped strategy, mobilized the armed forces, produced the necessary armaments and finally put the seal on the defeat of the Axis powers.

Few would have bet you, even as all this was going on, that it could be achieved. The nation’s capital, David Brinkley observes, was “a town and a government entirely unprepared to take on the global responsibilities suddenly thrust upon it.”

The capital community in some respects was still rooted in the Civil War. One-third of the city’s people were black. Yet segregation prevailed. Black residence was confined mostly to a section where there were still 15,000 back-yard privies. Few blacks had found their way onto federal payrolls, and then only in menial jobs. Mississippi’s outrageous Theodore Bilbo was still haranguing the Senate about “niggers.” And Capital Transit curtailed service even during war rather than hire black bus drivers.

On the eve of World War II, Washington’s old-line elite, the “Cave Dwellers,” had not yet recovered from the shocks of the New Deal, with its influx of pipe-smoking eggheads. Even with Europe at war, isolationism was rife. Four months before Pearl Harbor, a bill to continue the draft squeaked through the House by only one vote.

Then came the deluge. “Washington had no plan to mobilize war production,” Brinkley says, “no plan to manage the economy, prices, materials rationing, no plan to prepare the country for war.”

With a dazed Congress, President Roosevelt seized the helm. The administrative vacuum was filled by a vertiginous avalanche of people, ideas, agencies and machinations. New personnel poured into Washington at a rate of more than 1,000 every week. Living accommodations became so short that officials were sleeping in Philadelphia. Capital desks were being used in three eight-hour shifts. “If you could type and had a high school diploma, you were hired--at $1,440 a year.” (Members of Congress were getting $10,000.)

“The Pentagon, the largest building in the world, (was) conceived, funded, designed and constructed in a little more than a year,” and 15 months after Pearl Harbor, people began moving in. Agencies proliferated, until there was the unpronounceable office PWPGSJSIACWPB, which issued wartime regulations for plumbers.

Highly publicized drives to corral scrap metal, fats, rubber and even typewriters (officials claimed to be 600,000 short) helped galvanize the nation, but otherwise flopped. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau expected war-bond sales to meet 75% of war costs; they met 10%. This led to the revolutionary change in government financing we cope with today: pay-as-you-go income taxes. With wartime prosperity, federal collections soared from $5 billion in 1940 to $49 billion in 1945.

Brinkley, whose gimlet eye and sardonic wit on television rate as a national resource, documents all this in a compendium that he modestly describes as “less a work of history than of personal reminiscences and reflections” of his wartime experiences both in the Army and as a Washington reporter. He has bolstered firsthand knowledge with much meticulous research yielding new insights. He details, for instance, how it was in wartime Washington that Howard University students, in a series of lunch-counter sit-ins, set a pattern for desegregation moves a decade later in the South. Related efforts raised black employment from 8% of federal jobs at the war’s start to 18% at its end.

Brinkley draws a fine portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a sort of twisted genius--bamboozling Congress and the nation about Lend-Lease (nothing was intended to be returned or paid for); unabashedly ostriching unpleasant decisions; craftily papering over administrative impasses; masking an abiding detestation of the news media; in failing health contriving a fourth term in hopes of finishing the war and launching the United Nations, and, ironically, going to his grave thinking that the Pentagon could be converted into just a repository for military records.

The chief flaw in Brinkley’s book is that, once again, a publisher has been too stingy to rovide an index. Otherwise, although the book is unpretentiously entertaining, it could serve as a handbook for future Administrations caught in a national emergency--mostly on how not to do things.

“In the end,” Brinkley says, “the preparations for war succeeded only because the country had manpower, skills, resources and industrial capacity enormous enough to succeed in spite of itself. And because a nation coming out of 10 years of deep depression had a great pool of men and women who had been unemployed for so long that they were hungry for jobs and eager to work anywhere, anytime, doing anything. And because the government applied to the civilian economy the old philosophy of the U.S. Army--if enough men and weapons are poured into a confused battle situation, an enemy can be overwhelmed rather than outmaneuvered; and if masses of manpower and equipment are sent in, the probability is that sooner or later, if only by luck, somebody will do something right.”