The Washington Spectator: And the War Memorial Came
Collins, Reid
Johnson is not alone in sticking to his belief that a bomb most likely caused the plane's destruction. Last October, Boeing hired an independent explosives expert to review the TWA Boo...
...To his left is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Wall, established in 1982 , a subterranean rebuke to U.S...
...Its design would encompass a smaller pool called the "Rainbow Pool" that heads the reflecting pool...
...In court documents fried six months ago by Perkins & Cole, the law firm representing Boeing in civil suits arising from TWA 800, the attorneys presented the bomb theory as a credible explanation for the plane's destruction...
...Since the previous figure for U.S...
...More paces apart, dedicated in 1993, is the Vietnam Women's Memorial, known to most as the "nurses statue," a wounded man in a woman's arms, a nurse looking soulfully skyward for a medivac helicopter which the mood conveys is not soon coming...
...killed in action in Korea was 33,651 this has given rise to a muted dispute, resolved if all those who died in service during the span of the Korean War are counted...
...Designers are Rothko, but Americans are Rockwell...
...Nineteen largerthan-life metal soldiers wearing ponchos and many carrying M-1 rifles make their way cautiously up a slope toward a pool and a granite slab declaring "Freedom Is Not Free...
...Still, Cummock's attorney says it's "a matter of months, not years" before she gets access to all the documents she needs to complete her final dissent...
...It's the theory you're most comfortable with," says Young...
...The sheer grievous effect of the war is to be found in the smaller out-of-the-way places such as Bedford, Virginia, which surrendered more than a score of its sons on Omaha Beach in Normandy on D-Day and treasures a stone from the French village that was the unreached objective of those men...
...Literally below ground level, it contains the names of nearly 58,ooo Americans who perished in that long debilitating struggle...
...They appeared in 1984 and a large flagpole was placed nearby...
...Last summer Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) held hearings to discredit the FBI's handling of the TWA 800 investigation and lend credence to the NTSB theory...
...There's no evidence of that, either...
...As one who has spent a lifetime with spoken words, I have often thought that a proper memorial to World War II would be a national place on the radio dial, AM or FM, where the sounds of those years could be heard: FDR, Truman, MacArthur, Ed Murrow intoning from London, General Eisenhower, Charles Collingwood at Normandy, Daly flubbing "Oahu" in announcing Pearl Harbor...
...U.S.A...
...KoIesnik's statement summarizes the self-contradictory position advanced by the NTSB and its bureaucratic allies...
...Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima speaks to Americans--of victorious struggle, of reality...
...But the physical World War II memorial will come, in some form or other...
...As one of the prime movers, former Senator Robert Dole, points out, ten of the sixteen million American veterans of it are now dead...
...Is it a veterans' memorial, as the Vietnam Wall and the Korean War Memorial clearly are7 Or is it a commemoration of a larger, national p.urpose, one that so changed the fiber of American life, that thrust the nation a conqueror onto the world's exhausted stage, that extinguished Town America, educated it, and, yes, rushed a generation that had lost time into parenting an alien generation...
...Advocates of the WWII construct keep reassuring critics that it will be unobtrusive, a mere blip on Lincoln's view beyond the reflecting pool...
...Barring dMne intervention it will be at the far end of the reflecting pool that stretches beyond Lincoln toward the Washington Monutnent...
...The "Rainbow Pool" will be redug, some 15 percent smaller in size, and something will be placed in the center...
...Whoever is called on to dedicate it will know, as he knew, that in a larger sense we cannot dedicate--we cannot consecrate--we cannot hallow this ground...
...His nation is now engaged in another battle over how and where to commemorate the American role in a subsequent war, World War II...
...He found three pieces worthy of reexamination, including one fragment from the fuselage underneath the center fuel tank bearing a suspicious hole...
...dead are given as 54,246...
...But the lack of evidence for the accidental explosion theory doesn't trouble those who've long considered TWA 8oo a closed case...
...It actually depicts the American flag...
...Last October, Boeing hired an independent explosives expert to review the TWA Boo wreckage...
...There is a treasure-trove of sound...
...The ultimate irony is that despite the best efforts of Gore and his longtime political ally Jim Hall to stifle dissent over the destruction of TWA 800, it is Victoria Cummock who will have the last official word on airline security...
...It owns a powerful centrality that is shunned by artistic design today...
...The toll thus approximates that on the Vietnam Wall across the pool...
...Under NTSB rules the wreckage was examined by' an independent lab in Chanfilly, Virginia...
...Etched on the poolside are casualty figures...
...The result didn't rule out high explosive damage," says Boeing spokesman Russ Young...
...So the most obtrusive event of the twentieth century is to be memorialized unobtrusively...
...Those whose lives were broken then, those whose lives were lost then, and the thousand men who struggle every day to reach that shingle sanctuary beyond the breaking surf have done that already...
...The Marine Memorial of course, across the Potomac from Lincoln, next to Arlington Cemetery...
...Casualty figures are a small part of the difficulty of embracing vast, epochal events in stone, or even panorama, which is the World War II proposal...
...The Justice Department has been dragging its feet in complying with court orders to turn over documents, and periodic status reports with the judge are necessary to resolve impasses...
...Within Lincoln's gaze on a leafless winter day is a modest memorial to the District of Columbians who died "in the World War," as the rotunda dedication says, innocent of the possibility that there ever might be more than one...
...How like what we are become...
...W hen America thinks of a war memorial, what comes first to mind...
...If not a bomb or a missile, then what did it...
...The current design calls for two arches surmounting the rows of smaller monoliths, to represent the Atlantic and the Pacific theaters...
...It came back 'inconclusive,' which means it could be caused by a bomb...
...The only mystery was what caused the spark...
...On the Lincoln or western front would be a wall nine feet...
...But it does explain how political considerations drove the Clinton-Gore Administration to use the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security to siphon campaign contributions from the pockets of airline companies in exchange for downplaying evidence of sabotage and soft-pedaling counter-terrorism security measures...
...This 62 O c t o b e r 2 o o o The American Spectator rendition of the famous photograph showing U.S...
...His Second Inaugural exegesis of the CM1 War that ends simply, "...and the war came...
...To the right of the reflecting pool, dedicated in 1995, is the Korean War Veterans Memorial...
...T here is an urgency to the establishment of a World War II Memorial...
...Marines raising the flag on Mr...
...The evidence Victoria Cummock has uncovered doesn't answer the technical riddle ofTWA 8oo's demise...
...Cloistered in trees east of the Korean War statues, it is a classic marble-columned temple and was dedicated by President Herbert Hoover on Armistice Day in 1931...
...N RIGID - - ":B'_,IIr i I I l l e t I I [ o l l I " ! all : l q l I f ' _ l i I t , l l : by Reid Collins And the War Memorial Came Is this the way to commemorate World War II ? O ne of the succincfly eloquent phrases of the English language is on the wail to the left of the seated Lincoln in his Memorial on the Washington Mall...
...Given his mother's heritage, we could even slip in a little Sir Winston Churchill...
...Washington, D.C...
...Since the entry stairway must be situated on the east, Atlantic will be north and Pacific will be south, hardly noticeable given the current state of geographic instruction of those whom the memorial will inspire...
...The American Spectator _9 0 c t o b e ~" 2 o o o 63...
...Within Lincoln's purview are sites commemorating other struggles...
...policy in Southeast Asia...
...In one, three servicemen, ethnically diverse, stand with their weapons in hand...
...And the mall vista Lincoln looks out upon will change...
...was once a town...
...dead are stated as 628,833...
...high containing more than 4oo stars, REID COLLINS/'S a former CBS and CNN each representing loo American casureporter alfies of the war...
...I don't think there's a mystery," Grassley aide Chris Kolesnik told me at the time...
...The rate of passing is approaching one thousand a day...
...As afterthoughts and to ameliorate the grimness of the wall's message, two bronze statuary tableaus were added nearby...
...If radio frequencies can be dedicated to outdated turnpike conditions, why not one for the real sounds of a time that made our time...
...It would be an open theater dug out of the existing pool, surrounded by monoliths representing the states and territories, hung with wreaths...
...Perhaps the best of memorials were placed when America was a nation of towns in which entire lives were spent, and not the continent of itinerants that the war produced, twenty percent of whom would move every second year...
...Unclear, and perhaps a reason for the ambivalence of the design, is what we are memorializing here...
Vol. 33 • October 2000 • No. 8
