An Old Soldier Fades Away

It is where a U.S. president and a five-star general drew their last breaths, and where hundreds of thousands of wounded soldiers have been nursed back to health.

Named for an Army surgeon who believed that researching the causes of disease was as important as treating it, the Walter Reed Army Medical Center has been the U.S. military’s premier hospital for nearly a century, treating soldiers and civilians of all ranks and pay grades.

On Thursday, a show of hands in a hotel conference room most likely sealed the august hospital’s fate.

Adopting a Pentagon recommendation, the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission voted to shutter the Walter Reed complex in Washington and build a facility where the National Naval Medical Center now stands in nearby Bethesda, Md.

Despite the hospital’s storied history at its wooded, 113-acre campus in Washington, base closure commission members said that Walter Reed could no longer support the Pentagon’s demands or the steady flow of wounded soldiers that had filled its beds since late 2001.

“Kids coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan ... deserve to come back to 21st century medical care,” commission Chairman Anthony J. Principi said. “Whatever it costs, we need to incur that cost to provide that world-class care to an extraordinary group of men and women in harm’s way.”

The commission’s decision to close Walter Reed stirred little controversy. But some were saddened that a piece of history probably would soon be lost.

“One generation cannot create history, but they can certainly try to destroy it,” said Dr. Jerald Sadoff, who for 23 years developed military vaccines at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, which is affiliated with the main hospital. “The consequences of this decision are unknown.”

Sadoff said he worried that the esprit de corps that has surrounded Walter Reed could be lost with the new hospital at the Bethesda facility, which will be named the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

“The great tradition of that place made you set your standards higher,” he said. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Founded in 1909, the hospital was named for Maj. Walter Reed, an Army surgeon whose research proved that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquito bites. The original building could accommodate just 80 patients, yet during World War I its capacity grew to more than 2,500.

Besides its military patients, Walter Reed has treated presidents, Supreme Court justices and dignitaries such as Winston Churchill, King Hussein of Jordan and the exiled shah of Iran.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur died at the hospital in 1964, and President Eisenhower died there five years later.

Days before his televised presidential debate with John F. Kennedy in 1960, Richard M. Nixon was treated at Walter Reed after he banged his knee on a car door.

The hospital’s grounds house a macabre museum displaying parts of Abraham Lincoln’s skull, President Garfield’s spine and Civil War Gen. Daniel E. Sickles’ amputated leg bone.

Even with its colorful past, some said it was time for a new chapter in the Walter Reed story.

“Walter Reed is not just a building. It’s a way of practicing military medicine,” said Peter Esker, secretary of the Walter Reed Society, which raises money for the families of soldiers treated at the hospital.

“It’s an ethic,” said Esker, who worked at the hospital from 1971 to 1989. “You can move that, and that’s what they’re doing.”

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Storied history

The panel deciding the fate of U.S. military bases sided with the Pentagon and voted to close the historic Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Plans call for much of the hospital’s staff and services to be moved to an expanded National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

Some key events in the history of Walter Reed Army Medical Center:

May 1, 1909: Walter Reed General Hospital opens.

1917-1918: To handle soldiers wounded in World War I, the hospital grows from 80 beds to 2,500.

1948: Gen. John J. Pershing, who lived the final years of his life at the hospital because of an ailing heart, dies there.

1951: The hospital is renamed Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

1952: President Truman is admitted for treatment of a viral infection.

1960: Vice President Richard Nixon, during his campaign for president, is treated for an infected knee.

1969: Former President Eisenhower dies at the hospital.

1977: New 260-bed hospital building opens.

1979: Former First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, who had been under treatment for a stroke, dies at Walter Reed.

1989: President Reagan undergoes hand surgery.

1989: Walter Reed doctors remove a cyst from President George H.W. Bush’s hand.

2003: Pfc. Jessica Lynch is treated for her injuries suffered in Iraq.

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Compiled by Times research librarian Scott Wilson