A BREACH OF FAITH
On the morning of the climactic day in the brawl over Vietnam memory, with jangled nerves on all sides, when the fate of Frederick Hart’s traditional soldiers would face off against Maya Lin’s abstract wall, the Washington Post did an extraordinary thing. Having been reasonably evenhanded in its coverage of the controversy up until this point, the paper turned over three pages of its Style section to gadfly Tom Wolfe to fulminate over “The Tribute to Jane Fonda” that the Lin design was to him. With florid, overheated prose, and a few bon mots, Wolfe’s interminable, over-the-top essay was replete with long, ponderous passages about the contempt of the contemporary art elite for the “bourgeois” creations of the classical past. The essay, which chronicled how the Vietnam Veterans Memorial went awry, embraced the Webb/Carhart/Perot position, including Perot’s silly poll about veteran attitudes, and put forward examples of what he regarded as other failed efforts at public art. Why, other than vanity, Wolfe felt compelled to inject himself into this fraught debate, at this time, is a mystery, as is why the Washington Post decided to accord him a measure of credibility on the issue. The essay was inflammatory and rekindled passions, possibly making compromise even harder.
Tom Wolfe’s essay was mainly about Tom Wolfe and his theories about the poverty of modern art, taken from his book called The Painted Word (1975). The disaster of Lin’s “banal” design—he would later call it “skill-proof”—was the fault of the competition’s jury, Wolfe supposed. Its members were tired old men, creators of boring, unadorned glass boxes, who celebrated public artworks that “baffled” and “annoyed” the public, who hailed from a “world as bizarre and totally removed from the rest of American life as anything any soldier had ever run into in Vietnam.” (How Wolfe would know this is a puzzlement, since he came of age during the Korean War, when, while others fought, he was in Yale graduate school preoccupied with his thesis on the Red baiting of American writers.) According to him, the mission of the cognoscenti was to bring abstract modernist works out of the galleries and into the streets. He regarded the eight jurors of the Vietnam competition as among the “Mullahs of Modernism,” by which he meant not only wrong-headed but orthodox and inflexible.
With its anticlassical bent, the art establishment had lost interest in human anatomy, Wolfe averred. The mullahs felt that to draw or sculpt the human body would “retard imagination,” and they did not want their students to be bothered and burdened by the “dead hand of the past.” To sculpt realistic works of the human body was bourgeois, but to sculpt a realistic figure of a heroic soldier was the most bourgeois thing of all to do. In a later essay, Wolfe would quote playwright Tom Stoppard from his play Artist Descending a Staircase, “Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.”
Meanwhile, according to Wolfe, all the forlorn and unappreciated Vietnam veteran ever wanted out of this memorial was to remove the accusing finger of shame that unfairly blamed the warrior rather than the decision maker or the malingerer or the protester for the worst defeat in American history. Glibly, he asserted that “the unspeakable and inconfessional (sic) goal of the New Left on the campuses had been to transform the shame of the fearful into the guilt of the courageous.” This was an original thought. In this construct, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and their Washington warriors were absent from the passion of the protester.
Portlandia (1985), by Raymond John Kaskey, Portland, Oregon
In Frederick Hart, Wolfe had found his rebel against this disastrous and tyrannical vogue of modernism. Here was a figurative artist of consummate technical skill who saw the human body as God-given. Hart’s hardscrabble early life, Wolfe thought, was akin to that of Giotto di Bondone in the thirteenth century who, like Hart, had been discovered at a tender age. If Giorgio Vasari, the author of the seminal Renaissance book, Lives of the Artists, were still living, Wolfe suggested, Frederick Hart would have an honored place in his collection. Wolfe proclaimed Hart to be the avatar of a movement to restore a concept of classical beauty to modern works and to reverse this most “ludicrous” collapse of good taste in the history of American art. Through him the beauty of the human form would be rediscovered. He would be joined by three other notable sculptors with realistic masterworks: Raymond Kaskey (Portlandia in Portland, Oregon), Eric Parks (Elvis in Memphis), and Audrey Flack (a grouping of four Classical goddesses called Civitas in Rock Hill, South Carolina). Through them the Giotto tradition of fine art would make a comeback.
Within hours, these weighty, self-absorbed musings were quickly forgotten, as the pivotal hearing of the Commission of Fine Arts convened. But Wolfe would not give up the cause. He became Hart’s friend and chief booster, later declaring him to be America’s most popular sculptor whom the critics, in their ignorance and arrogance, consistently ignored.
—
Over the proceedings hovered the mood of A. E. Housman’s poem:
Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.
Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.
The US Commission of Fine Arts convened at 12:37 p.m. on October 13 and settled in for a long afternoon in the pivotal showdown. Because of the intense press interest in a possible ceasefire in the Art War, the proceedings were held in the cavernous, two-story Cash Room in the US Treasury Building next to the White House. Dating back to 1869, the Victorian-era room featured three enormous brass chandeliers, large, light-blue marble panels, and elaborate floral grill work over the radiators. Even if the event would deal with recent history, the grandeur of the nineteenth-century décor might well have pleased the aesthete who was the commission’s worldly, old-fashioned chairman, J. Carter Brown.
The witness list featured five lead-off speakers. Frederick Hart was accorded the honor of speaking in this first group, bracketed by Jim Webb, Jan Scruggs, and the two architects, Kent Cooper and Joseph Brown. Twenty-nine speakers for the additions followed, and then ten against, including Maya Lin herself. When the opponents finished making their case, the commissioners would vote, and Carter Brown would announce their decision.
Since the purpose of the meeting was to consider compromise, Hart was diplomatic and respectful, eloquent and brief in his presentation. He described his creation as both unity and contrast to the wall. He wished to preserve the austerity of Maya Lin’s design with a grouping of realistic soldiers that would be understated and removed some distance from the wall, so that it did not “intrude or obstruct” or “compete or dominate.” His soldiers would be quite small, slightly larger than life-size. There would be an artistic tension between the elements where one would echo the other. His figures would project youth and innocence and vulnerability, and they would be clothed in combat garb and armed with the weapons of war. He repeated his metaphor of the wall as an ocean.
Menace was quickly evident. The first speaker for the additions, Deputy Secretary of Interior Donald Hodel, speaking for his boss, James Watt, led off with a threat. The secretary had been under considerable pressure to disapprove the original design totally, to modify it radically, or insist that the design process be started all over again. A fragile compromise had been reached. But the Department of the Interior would allow the dedication of the memorial to go forward, even before the statue and the flagpole were in place, only if the design refinements were approved by the commission. “To permit dedication of the memorial to proceed if the flag and sculpture have not yet been approved would be to break faith with all who have negotiated in good faith.”
In their testimony the architects, Cooper and Joseph Brown, presented a plan to place the sculpture and the flagpole at a tree line of red maples and sweet gums about sixty yards from the vertex of the wall. These elements would form an “entrance experience.” At this juncture, the two estimable professionals acted as a team in service of the compromise, even though their relationship had been anything but harmonious.
Cooper defined the question with which they had wrangled in the previous weeks. Could aesthetics be separated from message? What defined “non-political” and what satisfied “appropriate patriotic content”? To this point Cooper spoke forcefully. “Aesthetics in itself is an important component message and cannot be separated out.” Where to place the flag then? It was “a powerful symbolic element” in itself and should not be placed within the composition “without extreme care.”
The architects had found this problem of location especially vexing. If the flagpole was seen anywhere within the panoramic sweep of the horizontal wall, it would completely destroy the mood of contemplation that Maya Lin intended. If the flagpole were placed at the apex of the wall, as Webb and company insisted, the horizontal thrust of the wall would be “resolved” upward as a distraction, said Cooper. If it were placed behind or to the side, it would convey the impression of a golf hole. The architects were leaving the problem to the commission to settle.
There followed a parade of witnesses for the additions that included the now-familiar rant from Tom Carhart and an appearance by the two generals, Price and Davison. Most of the witnesses hailed from military service organizations that espoused support for the additions in the flat tones of corporate spokesmen. Conspicuously absent from the group was H. Ross Perot. But his influence was felt, and he was not finished. Congressman Donald Bailey, who had been a constant thorn in the side of the entire enterprise, was on hand. A decorated veteran of the 101st Airborne Division, he was one of the few Vietnam veterans in Congress. As it happened, he was on the verge of electoral defeat after his Pennsylvania district had been gerrymandered into the larger district of Congressional titan John Murtha. But the memorial would be Bailey’s swan song, and now, among all supporting testimonies, his raw authenticity was the most moving.
“One question that still clouds the entire issue, that question whether or not [the veterans] fought for a proper reason … That is what carries the message of an insult… Allow us, please,” he pleaded, “to carry a message of honor and respect and recognition for the reasons why that war was fought. … When your face is dirty and a friend is dead, and you haven’t bathed in a long time, and you are hungry, and you are surrounded, and you don’t know if you are going to live or die, there is an issue of pride that keeps you pursuing what you believe in.”
Maya Lin led off the opposition with a forceful defense of her accomplishment. She appealed to the “artistic conscience of the Nation,” whatever persuasiveness that might have in the face of the powerful political forces arrayed against her. She spoke of her creation as a “living park,” symbolic of life that left the visitor the freedom of contemplation. It was not a memorial to politics or war or controversy. She scorned the proposal that would harm her work “visually by the abrupt verticality of a flagpole or conceptually by a sculpture that forces a specific interpretation.”
But the thrust of her testimony dealt mainly with the incongruity of the two works. What was being proposed was not one memorial but two. “To make a ‘unified totality’ out of two different works of art fails,” she said. Worse: “These ‘intrusions’ which treat the original work of art as no more than an architectural backdrop reflect an insensitivity to the original design’s subtle spatial eloquence.” Under the proposal her wall would become nothing more than a “retaining wall.” The sculpture and the flagpole desecrated the artistic integrity of her concept. “It violates a basic principle of design in trying to juxtapose incongruous elements.”
The most extensive testimony in opposition to the additions, however, was delivered by Paul Spreiregen, the patriarch of the original competition. While he had no role in this advanced stage of the memorial’s development, he came now to express his passionate alarm at the damage that had been done to his beloved contest by relatively few outspoken veterans and to defend the integrity and authenticity of the process that had chosen Lin’s design.
It is a design, he told the commission, “which operates fully only when it is unencumbered.”
In his lengthy discourse that was by turns eloquent and ponderous—the proposed additions were “an insult to the aesthetic spiritual sensibility of Americans”—Spreiregen was at his most effective when he asked the commission to imagine Arlington National Cemetery if in each grouping for America’s past wars there was a larger-than-life statuary of soldiers in historical combat garb or imagine if at the base of the Washington Monument there was a large statue of a fife player and a drummer boy or imagine the Lincoln Memorial with brigades of Union soldiers traipsing through the trees around the Reflecting Pool. That, he said, would occasion a mediocre joke, worthy only of Saturday Night Live.
“A great work of art doesn’t tell you what to think, it makes you think,” he said.
After the witnesses finished, the commission recessed to visit the site. When it reconvened, Carter Brown spoke for all the members. His ambivalence about the compromise was clear enough. Picking up on Spreiregen’s metaphor, he too imagined the horror of a statue of Washington crossing the Delaware being placed at the foot of the Washington Monument, or a replica of a rocking chair next to the eternal flame at Kennedy’s gravesite. On the one hand, a flagpole was a wonderful idea, and at the same time, a dangerous precedent, for he did not approve of flags proliferating throughout the National Mall. And he gave a bland endorsement of Hart’s maquette: the muddy faces and simple clothing of the soldiers were promising as far as they went, he allowed, but the commission reserved the right to approve the final product. At this point Hart’s figures scarcely looked like a great work of art in the making. The two works of art, Carter Brown said, were as different as opera and country music.
But the shocking aspect of the proposed additions, at least to their opponents, had to do with location. The commissioners agreed that the flagpole and the statuary should be moved far back from the wall to form an “entrance experience” to the memorial.
With that, the commission’s proceedings were concluded.
It would be said later, most significantly by Carter Brown himself, that Frederick Hart’s deferential, accommodating tone at the hearing and his willingness to separate his soldiers at some distance from the wall had saved the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. That is not how the detractors saw it. They cried foul betrayal, and this time, it was they who had been outmaneuvered.
—
It was time to exhale, it seemed. A truce in the Art War had been declared. The “refinements” had been certified, if not exactly validated, and the peacemakers, especially J. Carter Brown, congratulated themselves on their navigation through a bitter, nasty fight. U.S. News and World Report carried the headline: PEACE AT LAST. “The last battle of the Vietnam War ended on October 13,” said the magazine. The last major hurdle was cleared for the memorial to be dedicated in three weeks. Late the following evening, Nightline with Ted Koppel devoted its entire telecast to the compromise. It became another installment of the Lin/Perot/Scruggs triangle with Maya Lin in Boston, Ross Perot in Dallas, and Jan Scruggs in Washington. Had the show been given a title, it might have been: “Burying the Hatchet?” Koppel began with a mention of the astonishing fact that for the dedication of the great Vietnam Veterans Memorial, its designer had not even been invited to the gala. Why was that? At first, he directed the question to the wrong person.
“It could arise from a certain amount of compromise that has gone down,” Lin answered blandly.
“Would you like to be there?”
“I would very much like to be there.”
Moving around the triangle, Koppel asked Scruggs, the Great Compromiser of the piece, if the agreement was satisfactory.
“We’re very happy with the approval of the flag and the statue,” he answered. Everyone liked the statue. “We’re certainly hoping Ms. Lin will join the team again.”
“When did she jump off?” Koppel asked.
“I guess when we were essentially maneuvered into a position in which we had to make a compromise over her design.” This was a concession.
Then to Perot. Was he satisfied?
“Well, if the veterans like the memorial and the compromise, as far as I’m concerned it is [okay],” he replied. “Our nation lost its will for the war, and yet didn’t have the courage to stop it; so, we left them on the battlefield, we left the men in the prisoner-of-war camps. … We brought these men home not as heroes, as they should have been brought home, but we neglected them and abused them after we brought them home.” The Vietnam veteran deserved a great memorial.
Cut to Scruggs: “The veterans need this memorial, and I don’t mind putting up with a little more baloney to get the job done.”
When the caviling was nearly over, Koppel gave Lin the chance to elevate the discourse. What, he asked, did she think the veterans would feel in three weeks when they actually saw the finished memorial?
“I think for each and every individual they will feel a different thing,” she replied. “There will be a sense of sadness, a sense of sacrifice, a sense of loss; but also, a sense of life, a sense of a park, a sense of the memory—if you’re a veteran returning, you will see yourself reflected within the names of friends, friends will be linked together in time, and it will be very moving. And I would hope each individual who comes and visits that site will come out of it a little bit more at peace, a little bit more resolved, in a sense, within himself.”
Several days later the Washington Post ran a long excerpt of Carter Brown’s final, decisive statement at the October 13 meeting, immediately after the commissioners had returned from the memorial site. “One can visualize what the final effect will be,” he had said. “It is extraordinarily moving. I think the litany of names [of Americans dead in Vietnam] is enough to bring enormous emotions to everyone’s heart, emotions of pride and of honor in the sacrifices that have been made in serving this country.” The ground upon which the memorial rested was prime real estate, and that alone spoke to the country’s pride in the people who were being memorialized. It was true that the commission had vetoed the proposal to put Hart’s statues on the knoll directly above the axis of the wall. “If the sculpture is allowed to shiver naked out there in the field, to be an episodic element that is not integrated,” he said, “[the elements] will not combine to have the critical mass and impact that those elements deserve.”
The commissioners, said the chairman, wanted to be part of the healing.
Not so fast.
The political backlash to the commission’s aesthetic decision about positioning began immediately. Art and Politics were conjoined as never before in American history. Within two days of the proceedings, three senators and four congressmen delivered a letter of protest to Secretary Watt, expressing strong opposition to the commission’s decision to place the additions “outside the memorial wall area” and insisting on the “integration” of the statue and the flagpole within the span of the wall itself. Integration was the new code word for an intimate, contiguous arrangement of all three disparate elements. The lawmakers urged the secretary not to allow the memorial’s dedication until the location of the modifications was settled “in conformance” with the compromise reached with the veterans. Unstated was the fact that conformance referred to the meeting with Ross Perot and his posse the previous March in which there was a show of hands from his supporters.
It was left to Robert Lawrence, the president of the American Institute of Architects, to stand up for the artistic side. In a letter of support to Carter Brown five days later, Lawrence praised the commission for “rejecting the ‘compromise’ plan” proposed by Secretary Watt. “By recommending a complete separation of the disparate design elements the commission has preserved the integrity of Maya Lin’s award-winning design,” Lawrence wrote. “An admirable balance has thus been struck between a recognition of service and comradeship as well as an acknowledgment of sacrifice.”
But the artistic world was not entirely of one mind about swallowing the horror of the additions. In the just-published November issue of a professional journal called Design Action, there was this comment: “Maya Lin’s idea is no longer hers. It has a life of its own. Now broader interests have been brought to bear on that life, ignoring her and her supporters. Her idea still has enormous strength and clarity. It can easily survive the additions proposed. Indeed, they may give it a richness it needs.”
The Washington political process was now operating at full steam. J. Carter Brown’s card was the official decision of his duly constituted commission; Secretary Watt’s card was his authority to cancel the dedication on Veterans Day with all the consequences that might portend; Jim Webb and Tom Carhart had convinced official Washington that they spoke for all veterans as they worked effectively behind the scenes; and Jan Scruggs & Company had seen their memorial realized but stood in the strong countervailing winds, just hoping that the storm would not further damage and tarnish their dream.
On October 19 Brown and Watt met. Brown held to the commission’s decision for an “entrance experience” but fudged on the exact, final location of the additions, while he reassured Watt that the sculpture and flagpole would indeed “complement” the wall and not be “shunted off out of view” in the trees. Moreover, he offered the carrot that for the dedication ceremony a temporary, removable flagpole could be raised above the wall. Watt, in turn, promised to continue working with the commission toward an acceptable solution. A few days after that, Brown met as well with Webb, and no doubt, reaffirmed in soft, dulcet, but firm tones that his commission had received its mandate from Congress in 1910. It was then given the sole authority to advise and consent to artists’ selection, to judge the quality and appropriateness of their models, and to determine the location of all statues, fountains, and monuments in the public spaces of the nation’s capital. No patched-together ad hoc meeting in a congressional conference room had any such authority whatever.
On November 4, Webb, Carhart, and Congressman Bailey called a press conference to make their last stand. Having come very close to scuttling Maya Lin’s design altogether, and now having succeeded in imposing the refinements on the composition, they greeted the commission’s decision as a betrayal. Bailey came armed with threats. He would urge President Reagan to command, by fiat, the location of the additions in close proximity to the wall. If that didn’t work, he promised to spearhead a congressional resolution to legislate proximity. And if those measures failed, and the wall stood alone as built, he would support an effort to find an alternate site on the Mall for a second Vietnam memorial.
“We fear that the black wall will be left on the field,” Carhart added wanly. “We’ve been driven off the field in a breach of faith.”
The press conference was their last gasp, for their objections were soon to be swamped by much more profound events. Still, Webb made the most of his final bow. This eighteen-month brawl was not just about a wall. “Like Moby Dick,” he said, “this is more than a story about a whale.” It was about art and history, but also about politics. He was someone who knew something about all three, he said, for he was “an artist of the written word.” As such he knew a bit about metaphors, about choosing “symbolic events to tell a story larger than your plot or canvas or figures.” Public art about a political event like Vietnam was unavoidably political, he said. Even Plato had said so, when he wrote “art is politics.” But Lin’s design was not even art; it was merely two walls stuck together whose effect was “incomplete, negative, nihilistic, sad.” When one visits the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial, one was supposed to be uplifted. Lin’s place, by contrast, was not a place for celebration, but only a place “to go and be depressed.”
He took his swipes and a few cheap shots. He couldn’t resist invoking Maya Lin’s overgenerous grade in Professor Burr’s architecture course at Yale. Of the open competition that chose Lin, Paul Spreiregen was its “Svengali.” Spreiregen was right to say that there were no sculptures in Arlington National Cemetery, but so too there were, until now, no tombs on the National Mall. He heaped contempt on that splinter group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War that had supported Maya Lin. And as for J. Carter Brown and his remark about the Hart statues being placed prominently out in the open, “shivering nakedly in the cold,” these were “blowsy words.” The true purpose of the Hart statues was to change the metaphor and remove the nihilism of the wall.
His last hurrah was well-crafted and powerful. He had fought a good fight, and his advocacy for the bravery and heroism of the American soldier in a difficult time would be well-remembered. He had lost this battle, he acknowledged; it was a fight that was won by the high priests of American culture. But his forceful efforts would propel him to an appointment as the assistant secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs two years later, then as secretary of the Navy, to his election as a United States senator from Virginia in 2006. In that vigorous senatorial campaign, he toured the state with his Vietnamese-American wife, Hong Le, at his side and in the combat boots of his son, Jimmy, who served in Iraq in the Marines. It was a tribute, he would say, to “all the people sent into harm’s way.” Finally, though briefly, he was a Democratic candidate for president in 2015.
Ironically, years later, Maya Lin would find some common ground with Webb’s discourse on the political nature of memorials. “The choice to make an apolitical memorial was in itself political to those who felt only a positive statement about the war would make up for the earlier anti-war days,” she wrote. “It was extremely naïve of me to think that I could produce a neutral statement that would not become politically controversial simply because it chose not take sides.”