BLOWBACK
In the fall of 1981 the battle over the memorial turned starkly political and decidedly ugly. Amid the tumult, Maya Lin, designer, worked quietly and productively with Kent Cooper, the architect of record, on practical and aesthetic problems: the stone, the drainage, the safety barrier, the lighting, the problems of etching. There was a natural, healthy tension between them, Lin the artist with her strong vision, Cooper the architect, dogged by the considerable challenges of making her below-grade emplacement both safe and workable. But Cooper respected the artist-architect divide for what it was, and while he argued his positions forcefully, he deferred to her on all design questions.
In October, the issue of the memorial’s inscription was joined. If Lin had won the veterans’ competition, then the veterans had paid for it, and so some gesture of gratitude to them was appropriate, even if an epigraph about duty and honor, country and sacrifice was counter to her vision for the memorial. The veterans threw themselves into the process with gusto, asking for suggestions from a wide range of interested parties, including best-selling author Jim Webb and the actor, Jimmy Stewart, who had been a World War II bomber pilot. General William Westmoreland had to be asked, of course, and he suggested “They gave their lives for a noble cause.” Cooper offered several possibilities about where the words might be placed … on a ground-level plaque, for example, or in a prologue and epilogue for the timeline at the foot of the wall. Jan Scruggs and the organizers finally came up with draft language and clearly imagined it writ large and bold, in the most prominent place possible.
Aesthetically, the apex of the two walls of the chevron was the strongest point of the design. At the top and bottom of the juncture the years 1959 and 1975 were to be cut large and bold, designating the duration of the war. That seemed like the best place for the inscription consistent with the idea of prologue and epilogue. For these two prominent places Scruggs and company came up with two epigrams: “These were the names of those who gave their lives in the Vietnam War. Our nation honors the courage, sacrifice and devotion to duty and country of its Vietnam veteran.”
On October 28, the VVMF held another press conference to announce what would be inscribed on the wall.
Now it was Maya Lin’s time to make her presence felt. This was the moment to push back against the military men and seasoned architects who had been so condescending toward her. Minutes before the occasion began, she turned up with a miniature Styrofoam model of the wall with the VVMF draft inscriptions indeed next to the years 1959 and 1975, but etched in the same, diminutive size as the sea of names all around it. If she had to acquiesce in allowing two patriotic inscriptions, let them be small in size. It was, as if she were remembering the words of her mentor, César Pelli: “You might not win, but fight as hard as you can!” The organizers were shocked and dismayed. But this was a design question. And in this case the designer won out. It was to be Maya Lin’s only compromise.
Once the memorial was built, both inscriptions were overlooked for all but the most limber and keen sighted. Unless one knew they were there, they were easily missed. The one at the top required at least a squint, and the one at the bottom required a stoop. Still, Lin had satisfied the demand of the veterans … technically, while at the same time making the evocative statements nearly indecipherable. By downplaying the theme of glory, she implicitly acknowledged the sensitivities of those who hated the war, had resisted it, had protested against it, and had avoided it.
Always not far beneath the surface was the rift between those who had served in the war and those who had evaded service.
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At the fundraising gala with Senator Warner, Elizabeth Taylor, and General William Westmoreland back in October 1980, the ex-Marine turned author, Jim Webb, had maintained a jolly camaraderie with his fellow veterans. It was not to last. He had agreed to be an original member of the VVMF’s National Sponsoring Committee. In his current job as a minority counsel for the Veterans Affairs Committee in the US House of Representatives, he had worked hard to sign up congressmen as sponsors for S.Res 119. But now, a year later, he had much else to concern him, and he had only fleeting contact with the memorial staff.
Before the competition reached its remarkable conclusion, Webb had, however, sent a clipping from the March issue of Texas Monthly to the staff about the troubled effort in Austin to build a fitting memorial to the Vietnam dead of Travis County. Webb could not know that the Austin brouhaha prefigured the national controversy in which he was about to become a central player. An Austin sculpture committee had chosen a design by a University of Texas art professor of Thai origin, Thana Lauhakaikul, who proposed to mount a field of ninety-eight concrete eggs, each egg three feet tall, on a metal grid. According to the sculptor, the symbolism of egg shells suggested the fragility of life and the egg shape, in Christian thought, represented the resurrection. In the midst of his egg field, he had left two spaces for grass and shrubs, and this was to suggest “the infinity of life.” Inevitably, the military community, which had imaged a traditional artwork, howled and demanded something more like an obelisk or a sculpture of a soldier. The arts community responded with scorn at these “philistine Archie Bunkers” who could not appreciate postmodernist art, nor could they understand the importance of respecting the integrity of a juried artistic competition. Predictably, this fierce conflict between artists and veterans became too intense, and the whole idea of an art contest was scrapped.
Thana Lauhakaikul with his “egg carton” design for a Vietnam Memorial in Austin, Texas
In his note to the VVMF staff, Webb quipped, “We’re not going to get an egg carton, are we?”
When he saw Lin’s design, his ire knew no bounds. They had ended up not with an egg carton but with a mass grave, he thought. He immediately let John Wheeler III, a top official at the Fund, know his disgust. Wheeler did his best to calm down the dissenter, protesting that Lin’s design was high art, akin to the Eiffel Tower. This highfalutin argument was met with guffaws. Black was black, and white was white. There was no American flag; no inscription about a soldier’s valor; not even the word Vietnam on the “grave.” Wheeler pleaded for time. Couldn’t Webb delay going public with his disenchantment for at least a month, giving everyone time for reflection? Webb took this to mean that the VVMF itself was reconsidering, and so for a time he held his fire.
Through the late spring in his capacity with the House Veterans Committee, Webb met often with veterans groups, and by his account, the consensus was that Lin’s design was dreadful, only slightly better than no memorial at all. As the month for reflection grew into several months with no word about reconsideration, and as the design sailed through the July meeting of the US Commission of Fine Arts, Webb’s fury grew. He found a kindred soul in another veteran and West Point graduate, Tom Carhart. Carhart had been an infantry platoon leader in Vietnam and had received two Purple Hearts. As it turned out, he had submitted his own design to the memorial contest—a statue of a grieving Army officer holding the body of a slain comrade, eyes lifted skyward toward a medical evacuation helicopter, standing on a base in the shape of a purple heart and waves suggestive of a rice paddy. He did not expect to win the competition, he insisted—it was his first effort ever at sculpture—but he wanted to participate in the process. He despised Lin’s design.
Tom Carhart’s design entry for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition
The final straw for Carhart was the winner herself. When he was first asked about what inscription should go on the wall, he suggested “designed by a gook.” It would not be long before this slur was taken up by a set of like-minded veterans, and the phrase became not just a gook but a “fucking gook.”
In September 1981, the blowback began in earnest with Webb and Carhart leading the charge. But first Webb headed north. In mid-month veterans dedicated a Vietnam War memorial in the Irish working-class neighborhood of South Boston, and Webb was the honored guest. Ironically, the memorial was a stark cenotaph of black granite, the very color that Webb held in such contempt as evocative of shame and defeat. The names of twenty-five Southies—fifteen of them Marines—who had died were etched in white on its curved, black surface and bordered by the seals of the four military services. Below their names was the inscription:
“If you forget my death, then I died in vain.”
While the occasion featured the usual assortment of bands and babies, flags and old men in lawn chairs, there were complaints that the politicians droned on too long. But there were no complaints about combat veteran Webb. He smiled his way through the ceremony, as he was made an honorary member of the South Boston Veterans Brigade and accepted the traditional Irish claddagh ring with hands clasped around a heart. When he took the microphone, he was quick to point out that if the ratio of war dead in South Boston was true of the country as a whole, the national casualty rate would have been three times as high. He took the opportunity to draw attention to the rift between the working-class boys of South Boston who had answered the call and the upper-class Bostonians across the river who had gone to Andover and Harvard and had avoided the unpleasantness altogether. In the four brutal years of the Vietnam buildup, 1965–68, out of nearly five thousand Harvard students, ten died in Vietnam.
Webb spoke eloquently about the Irish boys who had been in his company.
“I can see them now on the ridges and in the pockets of raw earth they had scraped away to make fighting holes,” he said. “We roamed like nomads through villages and mountains; we ripped the earth with our bombs. We stained it with our blood. When we left a part of us stayed forever focused in the stench and dread of combat and at the same time, those who made it back … part of it clings to us forever. It becomes an inseparable part of us, like a burden few of our countrymen seem willing to share. Giving your life in a war is the ultimate, irretrievable gift to your culture. The manner in which we as a people and community express our thanks for that gift is the ultimate judgment of our values.”
A few days later, the conservative magazine National Review weighed in with a withering critique of Lin’s design. It objected to the black color, the listing of the names by date, and even to its V shape, which suggested the reviled peace symbol. The editors fumed: “If the current model has to be built, stick it off in some tidal flat, and let it memorialize Jane Fonda’s contribution to ensuring that our soldiers died in vain.” But the most memorable line was: “Our objection to this Orwellian glop does not issue from any philistine objection to new conceptions in art. It is based on the clear political message of this design.” The phrase “Orwellian glop” stuck.
The next important meeting of the US Commission of Fine Arts loomed on October 13. Carhart let it be known that he and Webb planned to be at the session to raise a little hell. The VVMF’s efforts to dissuade them from attending failed. That there would be no backing down was clear when Webb wrote a formal letter of objection to the commission that he wanted put in the record. It was dated the day before the hearing opened.
Webb’s letter listed three central objections. First, the entire concept suggested a black hole or “cave.” Far from the requirement that the contest entries be apolitical, Lin’s design was implicitly “a very strong nihilistic statement” regarding the war. Second, the design contained no implements of war. “This sort of artistic denial … when so many carry around [the war’s] scars, is one of the purest forms of denigration imaginable.” And third, there had been no Vietnam veterans on the jury.
In a perfect world, Webb wrote, this horrible design would be scrapped and a new competition opened. But this, he acknowledged, would terminate the entire enterprise, and that was not his purpose. And so, he proposed four modifications to the memorial. An American flag should be placed prominently at the apex of the wall (even though in the original competition a flag was discouraged, lest it compete with the circle of flags that surrounded the Washington Monument); an inspiring inscription about the duty and sacrifice of the veteran should be etched boldly on the surface; the memorial should be raised above ground or the stone color changed from black to white; and the listing of names by date of death should be altered or abandoned.
The fat, as the saying goes, was in the fire.
At its decorous offices on Lafayette Park across from the White House, the commission’s deliberations began with Kent Cooper reviewing the status of the project. For construction to stay on schedule, the immediate need was for the commission to approve the stone. Maya Lin had specified polished black granite with no veining, and she had approved a sample from Sweden. Swedish black granite was the finest in the world, Cooper said, and there was no equivalent in the United States. But since Sweden (along with Canada) had been the prime destination for draft evaders, Swedish granite was out. The next best choice was granite from India. (A few months later, when the memorial was debated in Congress, Representative Larry McDonald of Georgia picked up on the Indian granite theme and labeled the wall “the black hole of Calcutta.”)
And then Carhart was recognized. A long, loud, and angry rant followed, and it might not have occurred to him that with his oversized square glasses, brush mustache, slicked-down hair, and bombastic delivery he was presenting the very image of the marginalized and hysterical Vietnam veteran that, to many, had become an unflattering stereotype. He began with Robert E. Lee’s invocation that to be called to service in a time of war was the highest calling of all. He cited Ronald Reagan’s reference to Vietnam as “a noble cause,” a sentiment, he said blithely, that was shared by virtually all Vietnam veterans. He was stunned at the winning design, that “black gash of shame and sorrow,” and found it to be “intentionally insulting” to all who had served. He spoke movingly about being spat on upon his return—like a spear passing through him—and said he was tired of being considered a loser. Lin’s concept made him feel dishonored, and if it was built, it would be seen in the future as commemorating an “ugly, dirty experience of which we are all ashamed.” He would not apologize for his service to America, he said, fist clenched. The commission should reopen the competition and appoint a jury comprising only Vietnam veterans. He hoped for something white and graceful.
As counterpoint, Jan Scruggs, the father of the whole endeavor, was recognized. He pointed out that the detractors were a small group, well-connected perhaps, but scarcely representative of the veteran community at large. By way of contrast, he spoke of the American Legion’s support for the design. The Legion, the largest of all the service organizations, had contributed $1 million to the memorial, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, another major service group, had contributed $180,000. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) also supported Lin’s design. Thousands had seen the model of the memorial at recent veterans’ conventions, and they overwhelmingly accepted it as a beautiful tribute. Given the height of the wall at ten feet, veterans told Scruggs that the design made them feel ten feet tall.
Nevertheless, Carhart’s indignation and overheated rhetoric could not be ignored, and it succeeded in planting a notion that would stick: the black gash of shame and sorrow.
It was left to the chairman, J. Carter Brown, to lower the temperature and restore a sober tone to the proceedings. It was not the purview of the commission to reopen the competition, he said, and its purpose that day was only to approve or reject the granite material. But he also underscored the consensus of the commission that Maya Lin’s design possessed an “extraordinary sense of dignity and nobility” precisely because of its simplicity. It had not evoked any “corny” references that might seem briefly satisfying. He was sure that the design would call up in the visitor’s heart tremendous admiration and gratitude for the sacrifice of soldiers. The trend in building memorials was to get away from “bits of whipped cream” on fancy pedestals. The commission had voted unanimously that this was the kind of memorial that would do honor to the people it memorialized.
Carhart insisted on responding. Not surprisingly, he rose to the bait of “corny” and “whipped cream.” It may be “that the new direction in artistic monuments is correct,” he said, “Rather than bits of whipped cream we will have solemn low-key monuments. … It may be that you are right, that this is the new wave. … But the problem is that you are wrong. There is too much political baggage associated with Vietnam to take a chance on it. There are too many people whose hearts are torn apart. … I will never take my children to the black hole. I will go across the river to the Arlington Cemetery where there are monuments of heroes that I can be proud of, not spat upon.”
Minutes after the hearing ended, the veterans turned on one another viciously. On the steps outside the commission’s offices, Scruggs accosted Carhart, calling him a traitor and asking if they taught disloyalty at West Point. Another memorial organizer, John Wheeler III, called Webb at home and allowed that Carhart must be suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Aspersions were cast on Carhart’s medals. Webb, in turn, was later to make fun of Wheeler’s rearguard tour at a desk job at Long Binh, when because of an Article 15 citation (one step lower than a court-martial) he had not even received an end-of-tour medal. Later, Webb would also scoff at Scruggs’ receipt of an Army commendation medal with V for valor, calling it “the Army’s lowest award for valor.” Webb called Scruggs “pathetic,” and Scruggs called Webb “a cocky platoon leader.”
“As for your comment regarding ‘cocky platoon leaders,’” Webb responded, “I know that you have often publicly expressed your hatred for your officers, but that is your own problem. My men nominated me for every award I received. … If platoon commanders … were cocky in the right way, they saved lives.” (Webb had been awarded the Navy Cross, a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts.)
For now, Webb drew two lessons from the exchange. “If you didn’t support the memorial you were crazy,” and “if you spoke up against it, you could expect a barrage of hateful innuendo.”
Nevertheless, Webb and Carhart could be pleased at the firestorm they had sparked. In the weeks ahead, both published op-ed pieces in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal with Webb fashioning a new slogan. The wall would be “a wailing wall for future anti-draft and anti-nuclear demonstrators,” and then he raised the ante further by likening the memorial to “the ovens at Dachau.” Meanwhile, Carhart, obsessed with his cause célèbre and his vendetta, began to lobby congressmen. In Don Bailey, a Pennsylvania congressman, he found an especially receptive ear. Bailey would soon cause considerable mischief.
In good tried-and-true Washington fashion, and with a whiff of the old red-baiting of the 1950s, the opponents searched for ulterior, anti-war motives among the distinguished jury members. Four of the eight jurors had military experience, and three of them—Clay, Belluschi, and Weese—had served in combat. One had overtly supported the war; others had quietly been against the war but said nothing publicly. Richard Hunt, an African-American sculptor, had participated in civil rights sit-ins, but there was no evidence of anti-war activities.
And then there was juror Garrett Eckbo. A towering figure in the world of landscape architecture whose projects dotted the globe, he had taught at “radical” UC Berkeley, where he had been chairman of the landscape architecture department. One of his most famous former students was superstar Frank Gehry. Detractors focused on Eckbo’s career, which showed that he was drawn emotionally to projects involving low-cost housing and had even designed camps for migrant workers in the Central Valley. Carhart began to circulate the rumor that there had been a “Commie” on the jury.
In a transcript of the 1957 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, Eckbo’s name did, indeed, appear in the an investigation of Communist Party members in the arts, but nothing more than the name. In fact, he had never been a member of the party, but in the 1940s he had been involved in labor union activity against fascism. And then, no doubt to Carhart’s delight, it came out that Eckbo was a signatory to a full-page ad against the Vietnam War that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. And in 1968 he had signed on to something called the “Berkeley Vietnam Commencement,” which stated, “I pledge to support [refusers of military induction] with encouragement, counsel, and financial aid.”
The smear was on. In the debate that followed, Eckbo’s anti-war position would be recast as active support for “the pro–Viet Cong movement from his Berkeley, California sanctuary.”
Simultaneously, Webb floated the rumor that no one by the name of Grady Clay (the chairman of the jury) had served in the US Army before 1947. Thus, Webb publicly implied that Clay had embellished his resume. Clay was quick to refute to this slander. He had, indeed, been an artillery officer in the Italian campaign in World War II and had been wounded in Anzio. Webb was forced to apologize.
Others waded in behind the dissidents. Admiral James Stockdale, one of three American prisoners of war from the Vietnam War period to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, resigned from the Memorial Fund. The Marine Corps League expressed its dismay. And conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan called Lin’s design a mockery. Ross Perot, who in May had told the Fund he was “folding his tent,” now said he grew angrier about the memorial with every passing day. The veterans he talked to regarded the Lin design as an apology, not a memorial, he told the press. He offered to fund a new competition with a jury of only Vietnam veterans. He also announced that he would finance a poll of veterans on their attitudes toward the memorial. Soon enough, Perot would charge financial irregularities in the VVMF and demand an independent audit.
Of all the back-and-forth on the editorial pages during the fall, there were some surprises. Few commentators felt comfortable addressing the issue as a purely aesthetic question, except perhaps the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In a November editorial, the paper wrote, “We could argue aesthetics forever. Beauty speaks softly into each individual’s ear. If you don’t hear, then you don’t, and that which may exist for others is lost to you.” In the Washington Post William Greider eloquently made the point that the war did not include any suitable heroic images that an artist might transform into stone or bronze and therefore the committee had chosen a “neutral and soft-spoken monument.” Ironically, next to Greider’s article were three iconic images: the Vietnamese police chief holding a pistol to the head of a Viet Cong and shooting him dead; the naked Vietnamese girl fleeing an American napalm attack; and the helicopter on the roof of an apartment tower evacuating the last Americans from Saigon at the end.
But perhaps the most surprising article showed that the divide on the memorial did not necessarily fall along liberal-conservative lines. It came from the dean of all conservative commentators, James J. Kilpatrick. A one-time segregationist and editor of the Richmond News Leader, Kilpatrick was a familiar figure in American political culture during the early 1980s. Beyond his syndicated column, “A Conservative View,” he was a weekly fixture on the CBS television program 60 Minutes as the conservative pundit against sharp-tongued liberals Nicholas Von Hoffman and Shana Alexander in a segment called “Point-Counterpoint.” In an October 16 letter to the editor responding to the National Review slam, Kilpatrick wrote, “Far from being an ‘outrage,’ the winning design approaches a level of architectural genius. It promises to be the most moving war memorial ever constructed.” Then in his keen debating style, he set up his straw man.
“You would prefer a piece of ‘suitable sculpture,’ on the model of memorials to Gettysburg or Appomattox. Bosh! Such memorials gather moss in every village square from Mobile to Manchester. Washington is full of suitable sculptures, and with perhaps a half a dozen exceptions they are dreadful. … [They] arouse no emotion whatever. The proposed Vietnam memorial, believe me, will pack an unforgettable wallop.” Three weeks later, Kilpatrick wrote: “This will be the most moving war memorial ever erected.”
Through all of this, Maya Lin tried to hold onto her equanimity. Her journal entry on November 22 revealed her anguish. “Beginning to vanquish the devils. A silly way to put what is within me, but for months it has been getting darker and colder inside. The memorial [design details are] nearing completion, the AIA reception was crazy, a mixture of elation and anorexia nervosa, had forgotten to eat for days, and then the eyes and whispers she’s the one … the little girl, the child, praise and awe, i felt like a prize, yet so small, not me but the competition was on parade, i was just a victim of it, you would be grateful of the compliments only if you knew who was being sincere.”
But the torrent of passionate dispute was becoming overwhelming. The Fund offices were besieged with letters. Why had there been no Vietnam veterans on the jury? What was wrong with an American flagpole at the site? What about the war’s survivors?
The memorial’s organizers were forced into crisis mode. If they could weather the flood of mail and the negative press, opposition in Congress was an entirely different matter. The biggest blow came at the end of 1981 when a powerful congressman, Henry Hyde of Illinois, sent a devastating letter to all his Republican colleagues in the House. It alerted them to the fast-approaching March 1 groundbreaking date for the memorial. This runaway train had to be stopped. He mocked a statement by Paul Spreiregen, the competition administrator, who had said that, “In a city of white memorials rising, this will be a dark memorial receding.” How does a “dark memorial receding” honor the memory of those who served? Hyde wanted to know. He quoted Webb’s line about the “wailing wall” and directed them to Patrick Buchanan’s column that repeated the canard of a “Communist” on the jury. Shame, not honor, was the message of the memorial, and that violated the intent and spirit of the congressional authorizing legislation.
In the early days of the new year, the Illinois Republican sent a letter to President Reagan signed by thirty fellow congressmen demanding that Lin’s design be scrapped and a new selection process undertaken. It asked Reagan to direct his secretary of the Interior, James Watt, the official with authority over the National Mall, to withhold permission to break ground on March 1.
“War memorials may be too important to leave simply to artists and architects,” Hyde would write.
This initiative clearly had the power to scuttle the entire effort of the past three years. Jan Scruggs and the other organizers saw now that they were in big trouble. They had already raised three million dollars out of the seven million that was needed, and suddenly it looked as if the massive effort might all be for naught.
It was time to think about a compromise.