SECDEF Austin’s Woke Destruction of Reconciliation Memorial

By Lt. Col. Edwin L. Kennedy, Jr, US Army ret
and Ms Lunnelle Sigel

Of all the woke agenda advanced by the Biden-Harris Defense Department, arguably the worst was the removal of the Reconciliation Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

In a little covered event, a massive crane was driven into Arlington National Cemetery at the end of Hanukkah and the process of dismantling a historic memorial, the brainchild of US President William McKinley (the last president to serve in the Civil War), from Section 16 was accomplished.

The Memorial signified the final reconciliation between the North and South after our nation’s bloodiest military conflict. In fact, it resulted in more deaths than all other conflicts combined.

It was supported by presidents of both parties including Theodore Roosevelt, Howard Taft (who dedicated the cornerstone) and Woodrow Wilson, who dedicated the installed Memorial on 4 June 1914 with numerous notables including the commander of Union Army veterans.

The entire process of memorial removal was completed by Christmas Eve 2023 with the massive bronze sculpture trucked away for an uncertain future.

During the process the heavy equipment rolled back and forth over the grave site of not only the Jewish veteran who was laid to rest at its base upon his death during WWI, but others as well.

If hauling down a monument to veterans in cemetery isn’t bad enough, this particular Memorial was actually the headstone for the sculptor, Moses Ezekiel. His brother got special approval to inter his brother at its base and it is has always been considered the headstone by the family.

But wait there’s more, the woke SECDEF blamed the whole thing on Congress who established the famed “Naming Commission”, a.k.a. “Blaming Commission”, whose entire mission was to divide Americans by resurrecting long-settled sectional differences, with their pièce de resistance being the Memorial’s removal. Notwithstanding that the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act specifically excluded grave markers.

And if that wasn’t enough, legal experts point out that because the Memorial was in a National Register Historic District, prior to the “final agency action” of ordering removal, SECDEF Austin and Army Secretary Wormuth should have complied with the National Historic Preservation Act, and the National Environmental Protection Act, to obtain public input.

In fact, a lawsuit is pending in Federal court now, citing these two failures of the DOD to comply with these laws. The DOD’s answer so far is ‘it doesn’t matter now, it’s been taken down’, so the case is “moot”.

Americans, and particularly veterans and their families instinctively know this is just plain wrong, and many are hoping and praying that President Trump will right this wrong by restoring “Reconciliation” to her rightful place at Arlington, in a careful and respectful way.

Many have signed a petition to do just that and many others are writing letters to the President-elect and others who have access to him. The petition site is: www.TrumpEOPetition.us and a draft Executive Order is available at www.TrumpEO.us.

President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of Defense and decorated Marine officer, Jim Webb, a Democrat, in a Wall Street Journal Op Ed, prior to the Memorial’s removal wrote in 2023:

“In 1992, as a private citizen and veteran of the Vietnam War, I was seeking to begin a process of reconciliation with our former enemy and hosted a delegation of Vietnamese officials in Washington. One of my objectives was to encourage Hanoi finally to make peace with the South Vietnamese veterans who had fought against the North and who after the war were labeled traitors, denied any official recognition as veterans, and hundreds of thousands were imprisoned in reeducation camps.

To make my point I brought them to the Confederate Memorial. Pointing across the Potomac River from Arlington National Cemetery toward the Lincoln Memorial, I told them the story of how America healed its wounds from our own Civil War. The Potomac River was like the Ben Hai River, which divided North and South Vietnam. On the far side was our North, and here in Virginia was our South. After several bitter decades we came together, symbolized by the memorial.

If it is taken apart and removed, leaving behind a concrete slab, the burial marker of its creator, and a small circle of graves, it would send a different message, one of a deteriorating society willing to erase the generosity of its past, in favor of bitterness and misunderstanding conjured up by those who do not understand the history they seem bent on destroying.”

But the Biden-Harris administration DOD didn’t listen. Their agenda was division, not unity. I look forward to a new day in America where Reconciliation can be restored and we can, again, respect our American veterans…all of them.”