DON'T BUILD IT HERE!

By Charles Krauthammer

Does Washington need a World War II memorial? Yes. Its very absence is an oddity of the city's monumental architecture. The Revolutionary War sports grand monuments to Washington and Jefferson. The Civil War is inescapable; no traffic circle in the city is complete without its bronze man on a bronze horse. Even our most recent wars--Korea and Vietnam--are represented, with symmetrically placed memorials flanking the base of the Lincoln Memorial.

The only other major American exertion that is missing is World War I. But that is probably because we haven't quite figured out what that one was about. (Woodrow Wilson had his ideas. We have yet to recover from them.)

The current World War II icon, the Iwo Jima memorial, won't do. For all its majesty, it remains a memorial not to World War II but to one branch of the U.S. military. Its official name, in fact, is the Marine Corps Memorial.

And so last month, Bob Dole stood at the Rainbow Pool on the Washington Mall and, in a most moving address, announced the launch of a $100 million campaign to build a World War II memorial. Right there.

Great speech. Great cause. Wrong spot.

The Mall in Washington is one of the great urban spaces in the world, a two-mile-long line of green anchored by the U.S. Capitol at one end, the Lincoln Memorial at the other, and with the Washington Monument marking the center. On its flanks are groves of trees, clusters of monuments, even museums. But its central vista is an astonishment of economy. Stand at Lincoln's feet and you can see all the way to the Capitol, your gaze interrupted by nothing but the majestic spike of the Washington Monument.

The Rainbow Pool, lying serenely between Lincoln and Washington, is one of the most exquisite points along this pristine vista. A monument of any kind would violate its openness and delicacy. A World War II memorial would crush it.

The very fragility of the site led the American Battle Monuments Commission to demand an unintrusive, topographically friendly design. And it got one: two arches of 25 columns each, facing each other like parentheses around the Rainbow Pool, with large earthen berms sloping to meet the ground behind.

This--a pair of parentheses--to mark the single greatest crusade in American history? To commemorate the largest naval battle ever (Leyte Gulf), the largest amphibious landing ever (Normandy)? To mark the most shocking attack on (Pearl Harbor) and the most shocking attack by (Hiroshima) the U.S.? To memorialize what was not just America's finest hour but, in many ways, America's most important hour, an event whose revolutionary effect on American life and society, on everything from atomic science and aviation to race relations and gender roles, is acutely felt to this day?

A subject so huge requires a site that can accommodate its hugeness. Yet any memorial true to the war would crush the site. And any memorial true to the site would slight the war.

Aware that the design required to accommodate the Rainbow Pool must necessarily betray the scale and grandeur of the war, the planners try to finesse the problem. They provide a large, covered exhibition area--suitable for exploring the larger historical, cultural and, of course, military story of the war--to accompany the memorial, housed partly underground beneath the massive earthen berms.

The finesse compounds the folly. A quasi-museum of this sort is galleries and exhibits. It is gift shops and cafeterias. It is crowds and cars. Why, the tour buses alone would overwhelm the site. That cacophony of commerce and congress, of to-ing and froing, that is the essence of a museum would totally destroy the central axis of the Mall as a place of contemplation and reflection and repose. It would turn the Mall into a mall.

Is there really no better site? Is there no place left in Washington that can accommodate the monumentality of World War II? Sculptor Frederick Hart has suggested an unused patch of land on a very historic sight line, the line beyond the Mall that connects the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington National Cemetery, directly across the Potomac River. The large traffic circle at the foot of the cemetery and commanding the entrance to Washington (across the Memorial Bridge) could well accommodate the size and majesty of World War II. And the surrounding unused land could easily accommodate a museum and the accompanying hubbub.

Just a suggestion. There might be better sites. What is certain, however, is that there are none worse than the one Dole seems set on.

The veterans of World War II whom Dole represents deserve a grand monument worthy of their heroism and sacrifice. Their war turned out quite well, after all. What a pity it would be if their final action turned out to be a landing on the wrong beach.