Too Soon For A Reagan Monument

The Bush administration says it's too soon to decide to put former President Ronald Reagan in the company of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln with a memorial on Washington's National Mall.

The rules forbid it and Reagan is a man who followed the rules, a House committee was told Thursday.

Richard Ring, an official of the National Park Service in the Interior Department, noted at a hearing that it was Reagan who in 1986 signed the Commemorative Works Act that barred any memorials on the Mall until 25 years after a person's death.

"Former President Reagan is a man who follows the rules, and we believe that he is better honored by following the processes set forth," Ring told the House Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Recreation and Public Lands.

He said he was speaking for the Bush administration.

The chairman of the panel, Rep. James Hansen, R-Utah, sponsor of legislation to waive the waiting period, said it was arbitrary and Reagan was "a very special case" because of his Alzheimer's disease.

"I believe most Americans walking the National Mall, to better understand our history, would not object to a memorial honoring one of the most influential and historical figures of the 20th century," he said.

Hansen's bill would set up a Ronald Reagan Memorial Commission that no later than February, 2003, would recommend a site and design for a Reagan memorial between the Lincoln Memorial and the U.S. Capitol Building.

The idea is part of a concerted effort to memorialize the former president for his contributions in bringing an end to the Cold War and reviving the national spirit in the 1980s.

Grover Norquist, chairman of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, testified at the hearing that Reagan "deserves this memorial on America's Mall because he represented America."

Norquist's group is also working to have Reagan's portrait replace that of Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill and to create at least one significant landmark to the nation's 40th president in all 3,067 counties in the country.

But several Democrats said that, regardless of one's feelings toward Reagan, it was a mistake to rush to erect another memorial on the already overcrowded Mall.

"Our generation is gobbling up all the space on the Mall," said Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia's delegate to the House. "Quite simply, the Mall is in crisis."

Ring said the 1986 law was enacted after what some called the "monumental chaos" after the building of the popular Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982.

It came into play in 1987 when Congress rejected a proposal for a memorial to Martin Luther King because the 25-year period had not yet lapsed.

The King memorial has since been approved, as has a World War II memorial and another to black patriots in the Revolutionary War. The Koren War Veterans Memorial was dedicated in 1995 and a memorial to Franklin Roosevelt, along the Tidal Basin, in 1997.

Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., the ranking Democrat on the Resources Committee, said the issue had nothing to do with Reagan, and the concerns would be the same if there was a bill to put a monument on the Mall "to one of America's most loved characters, Mickey Mouse."

Veterans of World War II had to wait 55 years to win approval for a monument, he said. "Why should the process be different for Ronald Reagan?"

Others at the hearing also mentioned that just last week a $4 billion nuclear aircraft carrier was named after Reagan, that former President Bill Clinton signed into law a bill that named Washington's National Airport after Reagan and that Reagan's name was on a massive new federal office building in Washington.

Ring said the Interior Department also would prefer that Congress defer action on two other bills before the committee, one to study ways to commemorate the Cold War and another, sponsored by House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., authorizing Interior to acquire Reagan's boyhood home in Dixon, Ill., in order to establish a national historic site.

He said the National Park Service wants to reduce its backlog of maintenance needs before embarking on new projects.