A Memorial We Probably Won't See

Is there still too much nostalgia among the American left for us to erect this memorial?

The centerpiece of the new World War II Memorial here--set to open formally on Saturday--is called Freedom's Wall. It bears 4,000 gold stars commemorating the 400,000 Americans who lost their lives in the conflict. "Here we mark the price of freedom," says an engraving.

Nearly two miles to the east, on the other side of the Capitol, there soon may rise a memorial that marks the price of tyranny--specifically, the 100 million people said to have died during the Cold War. If a federal planning board approves the site in July, the Victims of Communism Memorial finally may have a home at the intersection of Constitution and Maryland Avenues, NE.

The original idea, hatched about 10 years ago, called for something much grander than a 10-foot statue on a quarter-acre triangle of land. "We wanted to raise $100 million for an entire museum," says Lee Edwards, director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. "The Holocaust Memorial Museum was our model, and it had brought in much more than that. We thought a dollar for every person killed in the Cold War was a reasonable goal."
Like a production estimate in one of the Soviet Union's five-year plans, however, that number turned out to be far too ambitious. The foundation failed to raise a budget of seven figures, let alone nine, even though the memorial received blessings from Congress and President Clinton. "We kept waiting for a billionaire to show up and write us a big check," says Mr. Edwards. "After a while, it became clear this wasn't going to happen."