James N. Hendricks has a long track record of public service in law enforcement, from a police officer and sergeant at the Henderson Police Department in Kentucky to a Special Agent-in-Charge at the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Albany, New York. During his 22-years-long service at the FBI, James N. Hendricks merited multiple cash awards and the FBI Director's Award for Outstanding Counterterrorism Investigation in 2013. He was also credited to have led an undercover operation that took down two al Qaeda terrorists during his assignment in Bowling Green, Kentucky and led an Evidence Response Team during the aftermath of the terrorism attack at the Pentagon.
The Pentagon is one of the three institutional buildings in the U.S. classified as a national monument, the other two being the White House and the Capitol. The five stories (77 feet) facility in Virginia, which covers about 6.6 million square feet of land, serves as the U.S. Department of Defense headquarters. After it was built, the Pentagon was the largest office building in the world.
Arlington Farms was the first site chosen for the Pentagon. Since the area was bordered on five sides by roads, the building architects had to adapt a design that will fit into the proposed location. But President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was concerned that the building would obstruct Washington's view from Arlington Cemetery; hence, another site was proposed, but the pentagonal design was maintained.
Construction of the Pentagon began in 1942 and was completed the following year within 16 months. For a construction project as complex as the Pentagon to be completed at such a dramatic rate, it indicates that drastic measures had been employed. Even with a thousand architects onsite, the pressure to build quickly was so great that some parts of the Pentagon were built even before the blueprints were ready.
