A Rendezvous with Density.

• Author: Moses, Michael Valdez

The FDR Memorial and the Clinton Era

During the waning days of his much-besmirched presidency, as he frantically hustled about the globe in a desperate attempt to fix his "legacy," William Jefferson Clinton found time to dedicate a new and controversial statue of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Placed at the entrance to the FDR Memorial, the statue portrays Roosevelt seated in what is unambiguously a wheelchair, thus inaugurating a mode of political remembrance ostensibly free of false idealization. Or such is the statuary conceit.

Clinton, ever the self-promoter, has long sought to link his presidency with that of FDR. In May 1997, Clinton presided at the opening of the memorial to FDR, a monument happily consonant with the self-image cultivated by both Bill and Hillary during their own years in the White House. Should any visitor fail to make the connection between the two presidents, the floor-to-ceiling granite plaque that graces the foyer of the Information Center of the memorial features the name of WILLIAM J. CLINTON prominently etched just below that of FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT.

Clinton's dedication is above and in larger characters than the names of the FDR Memorial Congressional Committee members, architect Lawrence Halprin (who worked on the project for more than 20 years), private donors, and the citizens of the United States on whose behalf Congress so generously allocated funds.

To be sure, when architect Halprin first drafted his design in the mid-1970s, he could not have anticipated how faithfully his work would embody the animating spirit of the Clinton years. But such is genius that by representing the past it may peer into the future.

Bordering the Tidal Basin, the memorial occupies seven and a half acres, considerably more than is devoted to any other memorial on the Mall. Consisting chiefly of a series of massive granite walls that support a landscaped and mounded earthwork, the monument is constructed partly below ground. As a result, the FDR memorial is easy to miss, and from some vantage points invisible.

Nonetheless, the memorial to FDR fittingly embodies Bill Clinton's Orwellian pronouncement that the "era of big government is over." Enormous Carnelian granite blocks--31,239 of them--form a series of walls 12 feet high that constitute its chief architectural feature. One of the most massive and sprawling structures on the Mall, its gargantuan dimensions are cunningly crafted to escape notice. Eschewing the formality and grandiose neoclassicism of the Washington Monument and the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, the modernist-inflected FDR Memorial unobtrusively melds into its "natural" setting.

The land on which the memorial stands is in fact composed of mud dredged from the Tidal Basin in the late 19th century. The unstable topography, still settling, could not support the structure's massive weight, so a reinforced concrete deck over 900 steel pilings driven 100 feet into the ground was built as a foundation. In his commemorative account, The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Halprin assures us that despite its vast expanse and ambitious engineering, the memorial "feels as if it's part of the earth."

In short, the memorial casually symbolizes federal bloat at the end of the century. An elephantine governmental structure that took more than 50 years to be realized (the first resolution to build a memorial to FDR was introduced into Congress in 1946), the monument is discretely disguised such that it appears to have always been an integral, even natural feature of our American landscape.

The FDR Memorial consists...