A Failed Process
Thus, at every turn, the existing process has failed or been thwarted. A public process has been stymied. Historic preservation has been ignored. Attempts to assure a memorial that properly honors WWII while also respecting the Mall have been abandoned. Once the CFA proposed and then approved the Mall site, and then later when the ABMC kept on with the architect of a rejected design, one agency after another eventually fell into line. The result in this case is a memorial that is a marriage of poor design, expediency, and neglect. It is the formal triumphalist military vision of the ABMC wedded to the security and crowd-control needs of the National Park Service and Park Police.
It is further abetted by federal agencies beholden to the political climates in which they operate. President Clinton rushed to dedicate the Rainbow Pool site on Veterans Day 1995 and he is now planning to break ground on the WWII Memorial on Veterans Day of this year. ABMC only argues that it must be rushed to completion before all the WWII veterans die.
Why all this has occurred is another matter entirely. Certainly the veterans lobby has played a part, as Senator Bob Kerrey (D-NE) sadly discovered when he first led the opposition to the site in 1997. Equally important is the fact that the $100 million is being solicited from private funding sources with the help of Hollywood and multi-million-dollar corporations playing influential roles. Congressional oversight might have been more vigorous had public funds been involved, one could hopefully assume.
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