MONUMENTAL FOLLY
Arnebeck, Bob
VIEWS REV I E W S MONUMENTAL FOLLY BY BOB ARNEBECK On January 20, 1973, the day of Richard M. Nixon's second inauguration, antiwar demonstrators marched down the Mall in Washington to...
...However, it won't be strictly neutral turf...
...Have you looked at the names on their board of directors...
...Pierre L'Enfant did reserve a place for a Navy memorial in his 1791 plan for the nation's capital...
...Is that not the very Gang of Five who, if you believe old sea dogs like Zumwalt, let our Navy lapse into its current state of shame...
...Then we could put up a heroic statue of a couple of Marines and leave it at that...
...Discussing the Arch at a commission meeting, J. Carter Brown, who is also director of the National Gallery of Art, rhapsodized: "From an urban design point of view, as a solution to the space, I think it is imaginative, daring, and very exciting...
...The films will explain, "Our nation is a maritime nation, born of the sea...
...Yet the ban on protests smells a little partisan itself...
...The avenue has monuments to the Presidents' ears and purse: the J. Edgar Hoover Building at 10th Street and Marriott's hotel...
...He assembled a board of directors including such big guns as General William Westmoreland and Senator George McGovern...
...The shell games of politics may be the number one racket in Washington, but the shells left behind are often thoroughly cleansed of the true scent of politics...
...Both the Vietnam Memorial and the Navy Arch are mired in controversy...
...Marriott stared to the right—the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue, where the usual parade crowd was jockeying for position...
...Instead, the battle against the Arch is being fought over great architectural principles...
...memorial (without an American flag...
...Retired Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, honorary chairman of the Navy Memorial, tells you more...
...black (Vietcong pajamas...
...For most of Washington's history, the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue has been a commercial and residential street...
...bitter, somewhat sardonic, and quite resigned...
...None of the corps of volunteers who work close with the project are communists or were anti-war activists...
...At the Planning Commission hearing, sculptor Stanley Bleifeld flashed slides for some very short seconds showing larger-than-life bronze sailors marching hither and yon on the plaza...
...Was he trying to assess the danger to his President from the noisy rabble on the left...
...Commissioner James Gibson, a city planner representing Washington's mayor on the Commission, described his own soul-searching: Since the square where the Arch is to be erected is "a dramatic nodal point," he wondered whether this plan would contribute to "a lively city...
...A well-connected group of old sea dogs wants to erect a 120-foot-high triumphal arch honoring twenty million souls who have served in the United States Navy...
...The design competition jury used their best professional judgment to recommend a design, being careful to exclude any political discussions or criteria from their decision making...
...And any purist who asks what a memorial to twenty million sailors is doing on the Avenue of the Presidents will find in the arch a small museum highlighting the careers of five sailors— Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter...
...Too bad it wasn't a simpler war," Scruggs told The Wall Street Journal...
...He explained to a commission which must give its approval that near the arch will be "a large body of water, a motif to tie together the bonds all in the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard feel [when] in harm's way...
...L'Enfant would have put his Navy Memorial alongside the Potomac River, of all places, but that choice spot at 8th Street and Maine Avenue is already occupied by Hogate's Seafood Restaurant, J. Willard Marriott, proprietor, flf...
...He called it the "Navy Itinerary Column, proposed to be erected to celebrate the first prize of a Navy and to stand a ready Monument to consecrate its progress and achievements...
...reconciliation and a Big Navy...
...But he knows about power...
...He doesn't sound at all like a chap whose $7 million baby is almost a reality...
...But it did...
...Exercising the prerogative of a grand marshal, Marriott charged ahead of the parade to scout conditions...
...Lowe's complaints were addressed to the National Capital Planning Commission, a bevy of city planners, bureaucrats, and politicians...
...Rear Admiral William Thompson, executive director of the Navy Memorial Foundation, has a noble visage that begs to be on the bridge of a fleet flagship...
...Which is to say, there will be a fountain near the arch...
...Scruggs had to proclaim to veterans who had never let their hair grow long and to their friends in Congress: "vvmf is 100 per cent pro-american...
...Two weeks after the announcement of the unanimous winner, Maya Ying Lin, a twenty-one-year-old Yale architecture student, Wolf von Eckardt, architecture critic of The Washington Post, wrote: "It seemed too much to expect that a worthy memorial design could emerge from the mess that was Vietnam...
...In 1980, Congress endorsed the memorial and set aside two acres on the Mall...
...There are a few Nineteenth Century houses, but they will soon look out of place in downtown Washington, where new hotels and office monoliths are breeding like rabbits...
...The radical fringe could not resist taunting Nixon as he rode by at the head of the Inaugural Parade...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan was putting together a model for redevelopment when the sad news came from Dallas...
...It comes down to a matter of "vocabulary...
...Despite its misgivings about the Vietnam Memorial, the Fine Arts Commission has given its preliminary approval to the 120-foot Navy Arch...
...While the usual preservationist groups oppose the Navy Arch, little is left to preserve at 8th and Pennsylvania...
...Senator John Warner, a memorial board member and one of Scruggs's steadiest backers, convened a meeting of all sides to the dispute...
...Work began in earnest in 1976, and $200 million later an avenue befitting the nation's capital is half-finished...
...designed by Maya Ying Lin (any relation to Ho Chi Minn...
...After preliminary hearings, the Commission's staff issued a report opposing the Arch, but the Commissioners were not eager to kill the project...
...On the Mall site of that last massive rally against the Vietnam war, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial will soon be erected...
...But the controversy was distasteful...
...In the 1960s, a bureaucrat could still flee the Federal Triangle (which was built in the 1930s) by crossing the avenue to watch Minnesota Fats give a demonstration in the pool hall over a beef house fronting on the Avenue...
...As envisioned in Pierre L'Enfant's 1791 design, the Mall is supposed to evoke Versailles—a tasteful promenade that has no room for statues of corporals, not even of Napoleon...
...Atherton of the Fine Arts Commission has been overseeing monumental development for years...
...The sculptures that will fill the plaza around the Arch won't glorify war, but merely "give a person an idea of what life is like at sea...
...Of course, there already is a unifying theme for Pennsylvania Avenue: It is the Avenue of Presidents...
...Will the Arch destroy or enhance the vista stretching from the National Archives to the National Gallery...
...The Lin design sailed through the Fine Arts Commission and the National Capital Planning Commission, but opponents had one card left to play: Since the Memorial was on National Park Service land, Interior Secretary James Watt had to approve...
...There will be no remains entombed at the Memorial, only names...
...At the groundbreaking," Atherton frets, "Scruggs made it sound like the statue would be pretty big...
...Architects submitted more than 1,400 designs in a competition that made history in the art world...
...Harry Lowe, acting director of the National Museum of American Art, finds the Arch "a grotesque travesty" that "will pervert L'Enfant's noble plan" and "obliterate a magnificent vista of one of the city's finest classical buildings...
...In 1973, the space that claimed Marriott's rapt attention was occupied by a restaurant and a sports souvenir store...
...With supporters like Red Auerbach, Pearl Bailey, Carol Burnett, Rosalynn Carter, Howard Cosell, Nancy Reagan, Willie Stargell, and Roger Staubach, and with the usual complement of Senators and military brass on the board, Scruggs and his outfit were not about to be blown out of the water...
...If Reagan sends the boys into Nicaragua, the Reverend Carl Mcln-tyre will probably not want to strut before 57,692 dead and cry glory...
...Needless to say, you can no longer find a pool hall across the street...
...Today, an 800-room Marriott stands on the spot...
...Allegations that they were influenced or controlled by communists or that they were attempting to make an anti-war or un-American statement are pure bunk...
...Not by a long shot...
...I think it has a peculiar plus because it brings the vocabulary over to the north side of the Avenue...
...Will the arch be built...
...But reconciliation is still a bit down the road...
...The 57,692 Americans dead or missing in Vietnam will be listed chronologically on a 496-foot-long, 10-foot-high, open v-shaped black stone buried in the soft clay 600 feet northeast of the Lincoln Memorial...
...It is being built within a generation of the Federal Triangle whose vocabulary comes out of the same classical tradition—it won't be quite such a difficult adjustment to make after this great spree of Bauhaus architecture we have all been on...
...J. Willard Marriott has his name up in lights on what some patriots fancy to be this nation's Via Sacra...
...On the side of the arch was a sixty-foot-tall bas relief of John Paul Jones...
...He prefers the small-scale, tasteful militarism of Lafayette Square to the monstrosities that special-interest groups are always trying to foist on the capital...
...The Grand Marshal of the Inaugural Parade was hotel and food-service magnate J. Willard Marriott, a heavy contributor to Nixon's infamous 1972 campaign coffers...
...Money from private donors began pouring in: at least $170,000 from Texas millionaire Ross Perot, $1 million in pledges from the American Legion, and $1.8 million from 70,000 individuals...
...v-shaped (peace sign...
...Within months, Scruggs's Foundation had to distribute a fact sheet, "The Truth About the Vietnam Veterans Memorial," in reply to criticism directed at the long, half buried (are we ashamed...
...Marriott knew that the protesters and the President were mere sideshows...
...He had a feeling that the phrase "Meet me under the arch" might really catch on in Washington...
...VIEWS REV I E W S MONUMENTAL FOLLY BY BOB ARNEBECK On January 20, 1973, the day of Richard M. Nixon's second inauguration, antiwar demonstrators marched down the Mall in Washington to protest the resumed bombing of North Vietnam...
...His gleaming white convertible stopped at the corner of 14th Street...
...Another monument is in the offing on Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks down from the Marriott shrine...
...the real drama of Washington was about to unfold on the choice piece of real estate at which he gazed...
...It was President Kennedy who put the master planners to work...
...And then there's Marvin Stone, editor of U.S...
...The north side of Pennsylvania Avenue had been scheduled for redevelopment, and it would soon be time to submit bids...
...The citizen who might wonder whether the Navy deserves a massive triumphal arch will be distracted by nightly military band concerts...
...There are twenty honorary chairmen, all former Chiefs of Naval Operations or Secretaries of the Navy...
...This massive list is apparently not potent enough to require 8th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue to be demonstration-free...
...Finally, General Mike Davison, a board member (who had led the invasion of Cambodia) offered a compromise that turned out to be acceptable: The Memorial would be graced by an American flag on a pole and a realistic, larger-than-life statue of a soldier—probably a corporal...
...Scruggs served in Vietnam, studied the psychological adjustment of veterans after the war, saw The Deerhunter, and knew there had to be a memorial...
...He fears it will overpower the Memorial...
...But trouble was brewing...
...He didn't...
...When the bands aren't playing, the citizen will be treated to free movies in a theatre at the base of the arch...
...a vociferous band of Nixon-haters commandeered a small park at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, just a block from the White House...
...Most are Vietnam veterans, spouses of MIAs, or Gold Star Mothers...
...He plays down any military message...
...The films will not just be about the Navy, and even civilian bands will be permitted to use the concert facilities...
...A Quaker prayer vigil at that place, on the other hand, might pack a wallop...
...For the first couple of years, it was a dream project...
...However, he spent his thirty-two Navy years doing public relations, and he admits that the arch is a "PR man's dream...
...News and World Report, and the presidents or chairmen of the American Petroleum Institute, Defense Marketing Management, Ogilvy & Mather, Martin-Marietta, Navy League, and more...
...Charles Atherton, Secretary of the Fine Arts Commission, believes his seven-member board of architects and aesthetes should have some say about the sculpture...
...Hugh Sidey has reported in Time: "The monuBob Arnebeck is a free-lance writer in Washington, D. C. ment sponsors are asking that demonstrations for any cause be perpetually banned from the site (as they are at Arlington National Cemetery) so that the tribute to sacrifice will not be corrupted by partisan politics or position...
...There are no communists or anti-war activists on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund board of directors or staff...
...Reconciliation above politics is the watchword...
...Whirring atop the arch will be a computer programmed, for a small fee, to spew forth the service record of any Navy vet...
...Jan Scruggs, thirty-two-year-old executive director of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation, sounds much like the campaign manager of a defeated candidate...
...Apparently, there was much wrangling—especially between veterans' groups and the Memorial foundation...
Vol. 46 • July 1982 • No. 7
