Bruce Cole replies:

So Alfred Geduldig is upset by my criticism of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission. I’m hardly surprised. None of my fellow commissioners has drunk the Gehry Kool-Aid more eagerly and deeply and consistently than he. One might speculate that, as a fifteen-year member of this Commission, he may feel some embarrassment for the heavy responsibility he bears in allowing this important decision to become a fiasco and a national shame. At the very least, his discomfiture seems to have affected his memory.

He is quite wrong to assert that David Eisenhower did not resign from the Commission over the Gehry design. Perhaps he missed David’s letter of March 18, 2012 endorsing his family’s “efforts to gain a thorough review of the currently proposed design, including a redesign” [my emphasis]. Al also seems ignorant of the letter written on October 18, 2012 by General John Eisenhower, Ike’s son and David’s father, stating “we as a family cannot support the Eisenhower Memorial as it is currently designed—in concept, scope, or scale.” There is not the slightest ambiguity here. If the Commission proceeds with the Gehry design (which received no construction funds in the current Federal budget), it will do so in complete disregard of the family’s well-founded objections.

I regret to have to point out, too, that Al’s sole qualification for his appointment to the Eisenhower Memorial Commission by President Bill Clinton fifteen years ago was his loyal financial support of the Democratic Party. And yet, as the shrillest member of this insular group of commissioners, he, and not the legions of well-informed art and architecture critics around the country and the world, knows what’s best. How could I possibly match his insight? Well, I do know this much: The blinkered and autocratic process by which the Commission has attempted to dictate how to memorialize one of our greatest Americans is something that would never have passed muster with Ike. It shows contempt for the democracy and the people whom he so valiantly defended. And that is why I and so many others oppose it.

To read the original letter, please click here.