Liking Ike at his memorial -- Sept. 17, 2020 column

 By MARSHA MERCER

One of the surprising things about the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, which was formally dedicated Thursday, is that it exists at all.

In our time, many white American men once revered and honored by their country have been toppled – literally or figuratively – from their perches of prominence. 

The reputations of many presidents – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson come to mind – have been tarnished.

And yet, the new Eisenhower memorial makes admiration not only possible but likely, even in 2020.

Renowned architect Frank Gehry elevates Eisenhower by focusing on his personal story, his ideals, his integrity and his lifetime of service to country.

The 34^th president and five-star general is portrayed in the four-acre space at 540 Independence Ave., SW, in three separate, sculptural vignettes representing different phases of his life – boyhood, the military and the presidency.

But the memorial also includes two gigantic cylindrical pillars that look like smokestacks and a 450-foot-wide, 8-story-tall metal “tapestry” of woven stainless steel whose main purpose seems to blur the ugly federal office building right behind it. For that, the location is to blame.

The memorial sits in a new urban park across Independence Avenue from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and in front of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building. That modernist building, completed in 1961, is so charmless it was originally known as Federal Building #6.

The National Mall is nearly full, and this location does offer a view of the Capitol, where President Eisenhower respected and worked with Republicans and Democrats. It’s near buildings that house federal departments with links to his presidency. In time, when the trees grow, the location may feel less odd.

Creating a memorial to the man who led the troops that saved the world from Nazism and was twice elected president might seem straight-forward, but the process was mired in controversies that lasted far longer than World War II.

Congress authorized the Eisenhower memorial in 1999 and chose Gehry’s design a decade later. But the Eisenhower family was dead-set against having a statue of Eisenhower as a boy as the centerpiece as well as three huge, metal scrims. 

After congressional hearings and years of negotiations, the family came around when Gehry moved the boyhood statue to the side, dropped two of the scrims and changed what’s shown on the remaining one.

Instead of Kansas, it’s Gehry’s own sketch of the Pointe du Hoc cliffs at Normandy, France, in peacetime. Army Rangers scaled the cliffs under German fire on D-Day, the air, land and sea invasion that changed the course of World War II and history.

The bronze statues depict Eisenhower first as a boy in Abilene, Kansas, dreaming of his future, then as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, boosting the morale of six paratroopers on the eve of D-Day.

Finally, he’s shown as president with three aides in the Oval Office. Seeing the office takes a bit of imagination, but the free audio tour, part of the E-memorial available on personal electronic devices, provides context.

The three aides are symbolic of the competing influences of domestic progress and strength abroad. Closest to Eisenhower is a Black man, carrying a briefcase. He symbolizes the work Eisenhower did to advance civil rights, the audio tour explains.

In 1957, he sent 1,000 troops from the 101^st Airborne to protect nine Black students as they integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Etched into the reverse side of huge granite blocks behind the sculptures are excerpts from Eisenhower’s most famous speeches.

“I’m quite overwhelmed by it,” granddaughter Susan Eisenhower told CBS News as she toured the memorial for the first time this week. “I’m really thrilled.”

But the $150 million memorial has received mixed reviews. “Monumentally Mediocre,” pronounced The Wall Street Journal.

 The audience for the Eisenhower memorial is not art critics, of course. The main audience is children in grades K-12, who may be inspired to dream of greatness, as well as tourists and office-workers.

They are likely to visit the memorial in the daytime, but the better views are at night, when the sketch of the cliffs is illuminated.

I think children and their families will be grateful the Eisenhower memorial exists.

©2020 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Ike deserves better -- Aug. 7, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

While controversy rages about how to memorialize Dwight D. Eisenhower, bells chime on Capitol Hill in a lasting, impressive memorial to Robert A. Taft, a man few Americans probably remember.

That’s not a knock on Taft. The Republican from Ohio served in the Senate from 1939 until his death in 1953. He is honored a block north and west of the U.S. Capitol on Constitution Avenue with a 10-foot bronze statue and a simple, 100-foot marble carillon. You can hear the beautiful bells chime on Capitol Hill on the hour and quarter hours. 

But it is a sign of our peculiarly dysfunctional Washington that Ike – the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe in World War II, the man who ended Taft’s presidential ambitions in the 1952 GOP primaries and served two terms as president -- has been “memorialized” so far by costly bickering and ego wars.

In the case of Taft, who was Senate majority leader, Congress authorized the memorial in 1955, and public subscriptions from around the country totaling more than a million dollars paid for it.

President Eisenhower dedicated the memorial in 1959, six years after Taft’s death, and former President Herbert Hoover said, "When these great bells ring out, it will be a summons to integrity and courage." 

In the case of Eisenhower, who died in 1968, Congress authorized a memorial in 1999 and a commission to study the “nature, design, construction and location” of the memorial. The commission has a full-time executive staff of nine, six part-time or contract workers and offices on K Street.

Taxpayers have spent $41 million, but after 14 years, there is no memorial, no acceptable design, not even a date for a ground-breaking ceremony, according to a scathing July 25 report by the majority (Republican) staff of the House Natural Resources Committee that called the memorial a “five-star folly.”

And the meter is running. Even before the commission picked a site or a design, its staff estimated that the memorial would cost $100 million and take up to six years to design and construct. 

The commission chose world-famous architect Frank Gehry and a four-acre site on Independence Avenue SW, across from the Air and Space Museum and adjacent to the Education Department.

Gehry’s firm has received $11 million in fees and is due an additional $3.3 million, the report said, but it has yet to deliver a design that meets the approval of the Eisenhower family or requirements of the Commemorative Works Act, a 1986 law that sets standards for memorials, or various commissions.

The family wants a memorial that’s “simple, sustainable and affordable,” Susan Eisenhower, Ike’s granddaughter, told Congress in 2013.

The most contentious design elements are 80-foot tall columns with huge stainless steel tapestries that would be woven and welded to show landscapes of Kansas, where Ike spent his boyhood. The Eisenhower family and others worry that about durability and the potential for snow, ice and trash to be caught in the scrim.

The group Right by Ike: Project for a New Eisenhower Memorial, says it’s time for Gehry to step aside and for the process to start over. The congressional staff oversight report made no recommendations, and the committee has not taken a vote.

Congress has pulled the plug on construction appropriations and is funding only commission salary and expenses, about $2 million in 2013 and $1 million this year. A bill in Congress would dissolve the commission and appoint new members.

In response to the report, memorial commission chairman Rocco Siciliano likened the current controversy to the uproar over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial more than 30 years ago. Many vets disliked Maya Lin’s design and insisted on construction of a separate statue with flag nearby, ‘’yet it is now the most visited memorial in Washington,” he said. The earlier controversy is largely forgotten.

“It is unfortunate that history appears to be repeating itself with the Natural Resources Committee staff unfairly and inaccurately attacking Frank Gehry, the commissioners and staff,” Siciliano said.

Gehry, in a statement to The New York Times, said he has worked on the design pro bono and regrets seeing the project “engulfed by the political process.”

Another historical note: Robert Taft’s father, William Howard Taft, was the first president to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His family paid for the 14-foot memorial there.  

It may be time for the Eisenhower family to take over planning and fund-raising for a memorial that is indeed “simple, sustainable and affordable.” Ike deserves better than this.

 ©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Ike and the monumental headache -- July 12, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

On Veterans Day 1954, President Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower and his family -- brothers, wife, son and grandchildren -- gathered in Abilene, Kan., for the dedication of the Eisenhower boyhood home and museum.

Ike emphasized that the museum would focus on promoting good citizenship. Nothing else, he stressed, “could ever have induced the Eisenhower brothers to attach their name to something which inescapably would have certain elements, let us say, of self-glorification, except that this project was presented as something for the future good of America.“

Speaking with “humble pride” for the six generations of his family buried nearby and for generations yet to come, he said, “I am privileged to dedicate this shrine to the future citizens of a great and glorious America.”

His remarks are relevant because they provide a sense of how the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe in World War II and the two-term president, from 1953 to 1961, would want to be remembered. And that’s a matter of great 21st century debate.

Time and again over the years, Eisenhower chose to downplay his own personal triumphs, which were many, and to celebrate instead the shared effort of the nation and its future good. He had no use for “talking Generals” or for the cult of personality that most politicians cultivate. 

Ike’s granddaughter Susan Eisenhower, who was 2 years old that November day in Abilene, now leads the family fight against the proposed design of the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington.

In 1999, three decades after Eisenhower’s death, Congress authorized construction of a permanent national monument equal in caliber to the Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR presidential memorials. Like those, though, the execution of the Eisenhower memorial has been fraught with disputes and delays.

Competing visions of how to commemorate Ike have pit world-class architect Frank Gehry against the Eisenhower family and an array of traditionalists. The Interior secretary has told the Eisenhower Memorial Commission to keep working on the design, and a House appropriations subcommittee last month pulled the plug on nearly $60 million in funding for construction of the memorial starting in fiscal 2013.

The memorial is to be located on four acres adjacent to the Education Department and other federal office buildings at the foot of Capitol Hill, off the National Mall. To partly shield the view of office buildings and create a square, Gehry envisions stainless steel mesh screens eight stories high.

The Toronto-born Gehry, 83, a star architect with a portfolio of internationally acclaimed structures, is known for his use of unconventional materials. He wrapped his own California home in corrugated metal and chain-link fences, infuriating the neighbors but winning a big architectural award.

His Eisenhower design, which beat out other contenders in a national competition, is Gehry’s first memorial and will be his first project in Washington.

Susan Eisenhower, testifying before a congressional panel in March, denounced the screens – Gehry calls them tapestries – for evoking memories of the Iron Curtain or chain-link fences around concentration camps. And she predicted practical difficulties.

“It is easy to imagine that 80-foot metal mesh curtains would require constant maintenance. Any high wind would assure that everything from leaves to trash could easily get caught in the metal gaps. It is hard to imagine that the National Park Service would be equipped to handle the constant cleaning, especially at the higher reaches,” she said. She and other critics also objected to the depiction of Eisenhower as only a barefoot boy in Kansas, dreaming of his future.

When it comes to choosing how we remember America and Americans past, conflict is more the rule than the exception.

The Washington Monument -- plagued by political battles, lack of money and the Civil War -- was under construction, off and on, for 36 years. Critics worried that the Jefferson Memorial’s Parthenon design would compete with the Lincoln Memorial. The FDR Memorial was built after nearly half a century of debate.

Gehry produced a design revision in May that keeps the young Ike and the screens but adds sculptures of Eisenhower later in life, along with limestone blocks with quotations.

Better but not enough change, the family and other critics said. They want a simpler, scaled back, less expensive memorial that reflects the values Eisenhower held dear.

They’re right. Drop the gigantic, ultra-modern screens and let the memorial honor Ike and the future good of America.

©2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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