Eisenhower memorial running behind schedule

WASHINGTON — The hope of Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas was that a memorial near the National Mall to the state’s favorite son, Dwight Eisenhower, would be ready for the 75th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Nazioccupied France, which Eisenhower had led on DDay.

But getting the memorial done by June 6, 2019, will be tough, even though Congress and the White House are squarely behind the project.

President Donald Trump put money for the memorial in his 2018 budget proposal this week. Congress provided funds in a spending bill this month.

But Washington bureaucracy has many layers, and new snags could delay the project.

Roberts, chairman of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, now hopes the memorial to the supreme allied commander and 34th president will be at least partly complete by 2019.

“Here’s a man who saved Western democracy and Europe in World War II and gave us eight years of peace and prosperity here at home,” Roberts said in an interview this week. “There should have been a memorial for him a long time ago.”

But even the muscle of the legislative and executive branches of government isn’t enough.

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts raised fresh concerns last week about one of the most fought-over aspects of the memorial’s design: tall stainless steel mesh screens that depict the scenes from Normandy, where Eisenhower led the D-Day invasion in 1944.

Commissioners worried that the public might not be able to understand exactly what it’s seeing. They didn’t reject the design but asked the Eisenhower Memorial Commission to see more.

The memorial commission is now waiting for the arts body to explain in greater detail what it wants to see.

Supporters of the memorial have another sense of urgency: Only 620,000 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II were still living in 2016, and supporters want to complete the Eisenhower memorial before those who served under him are all gone.

“There should have been a memorial for him a long time ago.” — Sen. PatRoberts, R-Kansas