Like the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, the National Park Service wears two faces. One is jolly and warm and fuzzy: the smiling park ranger who's eager to tell you the story of the Lost Colony at the Fort Raleigh National Site, who directs you to the best view at the Grand Canyon, who gives a helping hand when you have a flat tire in Muir Woods. This is the Park Service with which most Americans are familiar, so in much of the country the service enjoys a reputation as friendly, informative and sensitive to environmental considerations.

Then there's the Park Service here in the nation's capital: a wily, secretive player in the Washington power game, a henchman of the edifice-complex gang, a brusque cop bullying ordinary people as they visit the local monuments and other treasures that fall under the service's authority. This is the Park Service that, hand in glove with the American Battle Monuments Commission, railroaded through the aesthetically calamitous and environmentally questionable World War II Memorial in the heart of the National Mall, and that now proposes to do comparable aesthetic and environmental damage a few hundred yards away at the Washington Monument.

Like many other agencies of the federal government, the Park Service has been in what the previous President Bush might have called panic mode since the terrorist attacks of last September. It has surrounded the monuments under its supervision -- Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and others less celebrated -- with row upon row of Jersey barriers, it has stationed police cars around their grounds in profusion, and it has gone hunting for more elaborate and permanent means of protecting these treasures against threats of unknown character, timing or origin.

Nobody except a nut case or a potential terrorist disputes the need for vigilance at these monuments. They celebrate individuals and events central to the national experience and mythology. An attack on any of them would stab at the heart of the nation and be a victory of great symbolic import for terrorists. Americans understand that in some respects the world became a different place after last September, and are willing to accept certain changes in ordinary life to accommodate its new realities. Improved security at national parks and monuments is among these changes; few dispute the need for it.

But improved security is one thing and a construction binge of exceedingly doubtful efficacy is quite another, yet it is precisely the latter that the Park Service is foaming at the mouth to undertake at the base of the Washington Monument. Under the pretext of protecting the monument against truck bombs and other forms of vehicular assault (jet airplanes don't seem to have crossed its radar screen), the service has come up with a bizarre plan that could end up presenting the Mall with an unexpected new treasure, the Leaning Monument of Washington, or perhaps -- even better! -- with 81,120 tons of New England granite spattered all over the Mall.

The service wants to replace the Jersey barriers that now surround the base of the monument with two sunken walkways, 12 feet wide and walled in stone. Visitors no longer would be able to enter the monument at ground level, though they still could walk around its base. Instead they would pass through an underground visitor center and then be funneled into a 400-foot tunnel that would take them to the monument. Precisely how much all this would cost is a mystery -- if the Park Service knows, it isn't telling -- but we are reassured by high panjandrums of the service that the money is there, and as we say in Washington: If the money is there, spend it! The public has until May 23 to comment on the proposal (via www.nps.gov/wamo), after which the service will go back to the National Capital Planning Commission and the Fine Arts Commission for final approval.

Don't hold your breath. As the history of the World War II Memorial all too clearly demonstrates, both of those commissions are rubber stamps for the Park Service. They've already indicated general approval of an underground approach to the monument, so you can bet your lunch money -- hell, bet the mortgage -- that they'll slap a big "Okay!" on this one as it sails through.

Never mind that the soil under the Washington Monument, like the soil elsewhere on the Mall, is soft. The Mall is a reclaimed swamp. A structure as tall and heavy as the monument could be built only because a strong substructure was laid a century and a half ago and reinforced when construction was resumed in 1878. This has permitted the monument to stand tall and presumably strong, but it remains that the soil under and around the monument's base is not rock -- such as permits all those towering skyscrapers in Manhattan -- but sand, clay and gravel.

The Park Service has gone through the motions, producing an "environmental assessment" of the tunnel plan, saying it would produce only "minor soil disturbance from cut and fill," but it's whitewash pure and simple. While it's all too true that, as an informed reader pointed out last week, "the Park Service's recent record on soil dynamics is pretty sorry -- witness the Vietnam Wall's cracking granite panels and the leaking water pool at the Korean War Memorial," it's a lot more true that the Park Service wants to expand its empire while at the same time taking the load off its police force. A sand castle under the Washington Monument looks to be just the ticket.

Copyright © 2002, The Washington Post Company

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