Quiet contemplation reveals a memorial’s power

The 17 years that it took to get the new National World War II Memorial in Washington from a Congressional proposal to architectural completion are more than four times longer than it took to fight World War II. During this time, the memorial, which was dedicated in May by the president, was praised by some of the country’s leading architectural historians, among them Witold Rybczynski and Richard Longstreth. But the memorial was also heavily criticized both for its site and design, particularly in the Los Angeles Times, where art critic Christopher Knight found virtually every aspect of the memorial overbearing.

Knight trashed the work of the memorial’s design architect, Friedrich St.Florian, its sculptor, Ray Kaskey, and the memorial’s sponsoring agency, the American Battle Monuments Commission. A few weeks ago, he added my history of the memorial, “Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial,” to his hit list (“One-Sided View of a Memorial,” Sept. 3).

I find it ethically questionable that someone with Knight’s biases should have taken on a review of “Their Last Battle.” But my biggest quarrel is not with his attack on my book but with his failure to deal adequately with the questions surrounding the site and design of the National World War II Memorial.

Knight repeats, without providing a credible foundation, the charges by the National Coalition to Save Our Mall (which happily e-mailed his review to all its members) that the decision to locate the memorial on the central axis of the National Mall between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial was a result of a backroom power play that threw democracy and environmental law to the winds and fostered an intrusion on the Lincoln Memorial.

In making these charges, Knight ignores the following: the public record showing that the location of the World War II Memorial on the Mall’s central axis at the site of the Rainbow Pool was openly discussed long before a final decision was made; the National Park Service’s May 1998 Environmental Assessment report stating that the changes in the Rainbow Pool brought about by the World War II Memorial would “maintain its overall character”; the World War II Memorial’s vast distance (more than seven football fields) from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the site of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech; and decisions made in district court, appeals court and the Supreme Court upholding the legality of the process by which the World War II Memorial was brought to completion.

Knight has written movingly of the impact of World War II on his parents, but that war’s veterans, who poured into Washington for the dedication of the memorial and supported it with generous contributions at their Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion posts, deserve better treatment for their memorial than his review provides.

Like the obelisk that is the Washington Monument and the Greek temple that is the Lincoln Memorial, the National World War II Memorial is not a structure that dazzles us with its originality. What makes it vital is the experience it allows us to have when we come to it with a sense of history.

The World War II Memorial gives us the freedom to respond to its architecture and sculpture without feeling overwhelmed. Families standing in the intimate space created by the memorial’s arches do not find themselves asked to admire military genius as if they were in an American Arc de Triomphe. They find themselves looking up through the memorial’s bronze laurel wreaths and oculus and seeing sky and, by extension, the belief in higher law that America defended during World War II.

Similarly, at the last stop at the memorial, the Freedom Wall with its Field of Stars, visitors do not see jingoism at work. They see an elegiac reminder of the cost of World War II in symbols that recall both the American flag and the personal tragedy that every Gold Star mother felt with the news of a son or daughter lost in battle.

It is this overall memorial experience that I am most concerned with in “Their Last Battle” and that will, I believe, determine how the World War II Memorial is viewed by future generations. In the meantime, I can only wish that Christopher Knight, gifted critic as he is, would stop his sneering long enough to walk silently through the memorial with a World War II veteran at his side. Knight still might not change his thinking, but at least he would recognize, as he never has, the emotional power of the new World War II Memorial.