The historian Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics states:

The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

What other explanation is there for some of the recent additions to the National Mall and the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C.?

The World War II Memorial was completed in 2004.  Its location at the opposite end of the Reflecting Pool from the Lincoln Memorial is significant and symbolic.  The Memorial surrounds an elliptical pool whose long axis is perpendicular to the line of the Reflecting Pool that runs to the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.  One end of the ellipse has a large arch labeled Atlantic.  The identical arch opposite reads Pacific.  The China-Burma-India theater of war is not memorialized.

The pool is surrounded by smaller identical arches, each labeled with the name of one of the 48 states that existed in 1945, with additional arches added for each U.S. territory.  I have never seen an explanation for building a monument to the states and territories to memorialize one of the most significant national efforts ever undertaken by the United States.  Was this a war of Tennessee against Bavaria, South Carolina against Tuscany, Colorado against the Tokyo Prefecture?  What do the names of the states have to do with the world-historical event that the monument memorializes for all time to come?

The key elements of the Korean War Memorial are equally puzzling.  Realistic oversized statues of 19 service members, all in action, stand in a loose formation.  A reflecting element creates an image of an additional 19 figures.  The two together, the statues and their reflections, total 38.  The truce line at the end of the war was set at the 38^th parallel, which was also the line that separated the two Koreas at the war’s beginning.  A monument to an event that called for stern national purpose and personal sacrifice ought to use architectural, symbolic, and monumental elements to impress the historical significance of the war on the visitor’s mind.  Instead, we get numerology.

Moving from the National Mall to the Tidal Basin, this visitor to the memorials to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King has been disappointed.  These are two of the most consequential figures of the 20^th century, but their monuments will, I fear, fail to give the future a fair view of them.

In my opinion, FDR will in time be remembered more for his errors than for his accomplishments.  For example, he is credited with delivering the country from the Great Depression, yet the rate of unemployment was higher in 1940 than it was in 1930.  He presided over a major recession in 1937-38 in the middle of an economic depression, something that no one had ever done before.

In the fall of 1939, Adolf Berle, Assistant Secretary of State, informed Roosevelt of a credible report that the administration was honeycombed with Soviet spies.  Roosevelt refused to hear of it or to authorize an investigation.  As a result, figures like Alger Hiss (State Department), Laughlin Currie (Roosevelt’s personal staff), Harry Dexter White (Treasury) and many others were free to continue their work.

Roosevelt’s conduct of World War II successfully ended totalitarian regimes in Germany and Japan but allowed the expansion of the totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union.  World War II began in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, followed a few weeks later by Soviet forces once Stalin was sure that the Polish army was defeated.  At Yalta in 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill accepted Soviet control of the rest of Poland and eastern Europe.  Earlier, FDR had pressed Churchill to agree that Allied war aims should include the unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers.  This policy probably prolonged the war by denying to the German High Command the possibility of a negotiated peace through a de-nazified government.  Thus, it gave the Soviets additional time to occupy territory that might have been behind an armistice line established by a negotiated peace.  Tens of millions of people in eastern Europe endured 45 years of Soviet tyranny.  It might have been avoided.

Mr. Roosevelt was given star treatment by the press when he was alive and has had warm fans among the historians.  But a long-overdue reassessment will, I think, gain strength in the decades to come.

But I will say two positive things about FDR.  First, although he was paralyzed by polio in the prime of his life at the age of 39, he never complained about his condition in public and he never allowed himself to be photographed in a wheelchair.  When he met Churchill for their first war conference in August 1941 at Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, he walked, supported by his son, down the length of HMS Prince of Wales, to the place where Churchill awaited him.  He refused to arrive in a wheelchair.  A photograph of the two men on board shows them sitting in identical conventional chairs, as do photos from their other wartime conferences.  Yet, the designers of the FDR Memorial insisted on showing him in a wheelchair as a way to inspire disabled persons who might visit the memorial.

Also, Roosevelt was a smoker.  Because he was also an aristocrat, he used a cigarette holder.  And because he was a master showman, he could use that cigarette holder as a prop to help make a point, to exude charm, and help cement his presidential persona.  Anti-tobacco scolds refused to allow the memorial to show Roosevelt with a cigarette.

So, the man who could play a cigarette holder like a violin and who kept his disability out of the public eye is presented for all time sitting in a wheelchair, waiting for the smoke that is not going to arrive.

King was a man of complex and subtle views who could use the cadences of a preacher to speak profound truths to a mass audience.  The place on the Tidal Basin that he occupies might have presented him with warmth and humanity.  Marble, such as that used to depict Abraham Lincoln inside his memorial, would have been the appropriate material to permit the sculptor to present the man in full. Instead, his gigantic statue was carved from unyielding granite.  He is posed with arms folded, breathing defiance.  He looks more like an angry Aztec deity than the man who called a nation to live up to the high ideals on which it was founded.  True, his attitude was becoming angrier, less patient at the time a murderer ended his life in April 1968.  But it is the restatement of the principles of the Declaration of Independence in his “I Have a Dream” speech that places him in the American pantheon.  His memorial fails to present him as, in my opinion, he ought to be remembered.

But really, the trouble began much earlier, inside the memorial to the man who wrote the document that expressed the ideals that Dr. King challenged the nation to actualize.  The Jefferson Memorial was built to celebrate the author of the document that stated our founding principles with clarity and elegance. The designers of the memorial edited Mr. Jefferson’s work to obscure his meaning for their own purposes.

Five great architectural structures are laid out on two lines that intersect at right angles at the Washington Monument.  The National Mall runs west from the Capitol through the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, a distance of some two miles.  A line of about a mile runs from the White House south through the Washington Monument to the fifth site, the Jefferson Memorial.  It was the last of the five to be built and was dedicated on April 13, 1943.  Jefferson’s birthdate was April 13, 1743.  At the time the memorial was planned, constructed, and dedicated, the federal government was as powerful as it had ever been to that time.  For the previous 14 years, the government had been intervening in the American economy in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.  When the nation went to war in 1941, the extraordinary powers thought necessary to win the war were added to those that had already been exercised.  The memorial was planned by officials who were comfortable in the uses of power and confident in their ability to exercise it.

But the exercise of power is not legitimate if it is performed without the consent of the governed.  If those who exercise power illegitimately do so out of good motives, that is preferable to those occasions, unfortunately far more numerous, when the motives are bad, but it is better still not to exercise power except with the consent of the governed.  And that consent can only be granted through the use of documented, precise constructions aimed at ensuring that when power is exercised, it is held within the constraints that the terms of consent have established.  The governing class of 1943 was not happy with these constraints.  They shortened Jefferson’s elegant statement, to remove the concept they found so inconvenient.  This is the portion of the famous paragraph that appears in the Jefferson Memorial, marked to show the words they deleted:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Did they leave those words out to save space?  Other statements from later parts of the Declaration appear below the quoted language. It wasn’t a question of space.  They removed the phrase on consent because they didn’t want to remind the public that it was there in the original.

It’s not a minor excision.  A government “instituted among Men” that takes the first part of the famous sentence seriously, one that believes and acts on the principle that all humans are equal in their natural rights, the right as Lincoln said to eat the bread that one’s own hands have earned, must necessarily believe that no one has a right to govern another person without the other’s consent.  That is the logical consequence of the self-evident truth that all persons are equal in their natural rights. That’s one reason, the most important reason, why slavery is inconsistent with the principles of the Declaration.  But when a government ignores the terms of the compact under which its power was granted, it violates the purpose for which it was created.  To quote a former president: “We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around.”

If you think you have the right to govern me without my consent, you don’t think we are equal.

As I have written before, one of the great ironies of the nation’s presentation of itself on the National Mall and the Tidal Basin is that the author of the clearest and most elegant statement ever written on human equality, a man who hated to have his work edited, suffered, on the 200^th anniversary of his birth and at the hands of the government he helped to found, the most egregious editorial treatment his work had received since the day Congress authorized its publication on July 4, 1776.

In 1943, the reach of the self-assured arrogance that edited Mr. Jefferson’s work was limited to a single panel inside his memorial.  As time has unfolded, that same attitude has affected entire monuments and has permanently altered the structure of the National Mall and Tidal Basin.  Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics grinds on.