Living and working in Washington, D.C., was special. As a young VP of News 40 years ago, one of my favorite things to do was visit the Vietnam and Lincoln Memorials at night. I would take a visiting job candidate there after dinner. We’d walk over to the Vietnam Memorial Wall first. It seemed that no matter what time of day, people were always there. Letters from loved ones, flowers, or memorabilia with meaning known only to two people would sit along the wall’s base.
Walking up to the magnificent Frederick Hart bronze dedicated to the Vietnam veterans who came home is a cinematic moment in the dim light. The Memorial Wall, designed by Maya Lin, looks like a wound in the earth. For decades after the war in Southeast Asia, the Wall has symbolized American sacrifices and the wound that divided Americans.
It’s an easy walk from the Wall to the Lincoln Memorial, up the stairs. The view across the National Mall is magnificent. To the right sits the Jefferson Memorial. To the left, the night lights make it clear why the Reflecting Pool sits between the Lincoln and Washington Memorials. The Capitol sits bathed in soft light beyond the Washington obelisk.*
After spending a few moments taking in the incredible sights of the United States, each candidate wanted to come to work in D.C.
This past Memorial Day weekend helped me recall those memories, along with something troubling.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson noted this week that a proposed triumphal arch, backed by President Donald Trump, would be located near the Arlington Memorial Bridge and would sit on the Lincoln Memorial’s back side.
The proposal for its placement is wrong.
The arch would obstruct the sight lines to the Lincoln Memorial from the Arlington Memorial Bridge as one approaches the District, the monument to the president who held the nation together. Instead, the arch would frame Arlington House, the former home of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Slaves built Arlington House for a man who took up arms against the United States to preserve the belief that human beings should be able to own, buy, and sell other men, women, and children.
That’s not a neutral line of sight.
That’s a statement.
You don’t need to be an architect to see it. You just need to ask a simple question: What is being elevated, and what is being set aside?
Because this isn’t about aesthetics.
It’s about narrative.
And narrative, as every journalist knows, is where power resides.
Arlington National Cemetery itself was never accidental. It was a decision. A cold, deliberate, and clear-eyed one.
Union leaders, including Edwin Stanton and Montgomery Meigs, converted Lee’s estate into a burial ground for Union soldiers.
Part necessity. Part message.
The land of rebellion would become the final resting place for those who died to defeat it.
They buried the dead near the house, close enough to ensure Lee could never again live there comfortably. By war’s end, more than 16,000 Union soldiers lay there.
That was not vengeance.
It was a memory, fixed in the earth.
On May 30, 1868, at the first formal Memorial Day, James A. Garfield stood among those graves and dispelled any illusion about what it all meant.
These were not symbols. Not abstractions. Not props for the ceremony.
They were the cost of holding a nation together as it tore itself apart.
That is what Memorial Day calls on us to confront.
When a structure designed to celebrate triumph is introduced into that space, when it literally reframes what the eye sees and what the mind remembers, we are not dealing with a matter of taste.
We are watching an argument unfold.
An argument about what deserves prominence in the American story and what can be quietly moved to the margins.
Because when the man who preserved the Union is visually diminished and the home of the man who fought to destroy it is elevated, something more than stone and steel is being arranged.
It is an attempt to reshape our collective memory.
As journalists know, editing is never neutral.
It reveals priorities. It exposes intent. It tells you, with absolute clarity, what someone considers most important.
Memorial Day is not about triumph. It is about sacrifice.
It is not about spectacle. It is about consequence.
And when we lose that distinction, start dressing loss as victory, or shift the frame to make the uncomfortable parts of our history easier to confront, we are not honoring the dead.
We are rewriting what they died for.
That’s not a mistake.
That’s a choice.
*Author’s note: The monument honoring the women who served in Vietnam had not yet been built when I lived in Washington. I hope to see it someday.