Shaun Byrnes and his wife drove from their home in Northern Virginia last week to visit the graves of friends buried in Arlington National Cemetery, as they do periodically.
It is a familiar ritual for United States military veterans such as Byrnes, who was wounded during two tours of duty for the U.S. Navy in the Vietnam War. He also spent 30 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, serving in diplomatic missions to the former USSR and Yugoslavia during the Cold War, and leading the U.S. observer mission in Kosovo in the late 1990s.
He looked from the cemetery — with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Eternal Flame at the grave of President John F. Kennedy — across the Memorial Bridge to the other side of the Potomac River, where he could see the Lincoln Memorial and beyond to the National Mall, bounded by the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol.
“It just hits you — it’s such a splendid view,” Byrnes said in an interview this week.
The view was part of a congressional plan more than a century ago that led to the construction of the Lincoln Memorial and the Memorial Bridge, and to the creation of the National Mall. Central to the plan was the view from what is now known as Arlington House, completed in 1818 by the grandson of Martha Custis Washington in honor of President George Washington and now a memorial to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Lee lived there with his wife, Mary Anna Custis Lee, Washington’s great-granddaughter, before the Civil War turned the estate into a Union Army encampment and a national cemetery for the war dead.
But instead of reconciliation between North and South, the view from Arlington House to the seat of the federal government could become a casualty in an intensifying battle over a 250-foot-high triumphal arch — more than twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial — that President Donald Trump proposes to build across from the entrance to the national cemetery in a traffic circle at the foot of Memorial Bridge.
Trump’s plan — conceived as part of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence — has united Byrnes and two other Vietnam veterans in a federal lawsuit to block construction of the arch without explicit authority from Congress and protect a cemetery where many of their friends were buried after serving their county. An estimated 400,000 veterans and close family members are buried there.
“It would not be an exaggeration to say that Arlington National Cemetery is the most hallowed site in America,” said Calder Loth, a Richmond architectural historian who joined the three veterans in the lawsuit that Public Citizen filed in February in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The Trump administration argues that the lawsuit is premature because the National Park Service has not received a formal proposal, although the president’s conceptual plan has already cleared the U.S. Fine Arts Commission and received preliminary approval by the National Capital Planning Commission, despite overwhelming public opposition.
“Because there is no final decision on arch design, subject, construction timeline or legal justification, Plaintiffs’ claims are clearly unripe for judicial resolution,” the administration argued in March in opposition to a request for a preliminary injunction to block the project.
Trump insists that he does not need Congress’ approval to build the arch because he’s relying on a law it passed in 1925 to build the Memorial Bridge across the Potomac to the cemetery, with two 166-foot-high columns at the southern end of the bridge on Columbia Island. The site is now Memorial Circle, which is part of the District of Columbia, not Virginia. The bridge commission, chaired by then-President Herbert Hoover and including leaders of Congress, rejected the proposed columns as a potential threat to air traffic at what was then Washington-Hoover Airport, at the site of what is now the Pentagon.
But the administration said that although the columns weren’t built, the congressional authorization to build them has not expired.
Opponents of the proposed arch scoff at the administration’s justification for not seeking congressional approval.
“The 1925 statute cannot plausibly be read to confer unlimited authority on the Executive Branch to initiate massive new construction projects in the vicinity of Arlington Memorial Bridge, at whatever cost, indefinitely into the future,” Public Citizen argued in May.
Nicolas Sansone, the lead attorney for Public Citizen in the case, said that numerous federal laws, including the Commemorative Works Act of 1986, make clear that only Congress can authorize construction of the arch on that site.
“Congress is the body that makes those decisions about what gets built and where and for what purpose,” Sansone said in an interview.
The Trump administration argues that the 1925 bridge statute also makes the project exempt from the Commemorative Works Act, but it acknowledges that it would have to clear review by the Park Service, the Federal Aviation Administration — to avoid potentially interfering with air traffic at nearby Reagan National Airport — and potentially other federal agencies if a former environmental review were required.
The purpose of the arch, which Trump first pitched last fall, was to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, but when a network television reporter asked him in October who the arch would be for, Trump replied, “Me.”
His reply rankled the Vietnam veterans who filed the lawsuit and served in high diplomatic posts during the Cold War with the USSR.
“We lived and served in communist countries, so we know what happens with one-man rule,” said Jon Gundersen, who served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and as chargé d’affaires in U.S. embassies in Ukraine and Estonia — then part of the USSR — as well as Iceland and Norway.
The third veteran, Michael Lemmon, served in the Army in Vietnam and as ambassador to Armenia, which was also part of the USSR, as well as political and military affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan.
All three are friends with ties to Virginia. Byrnes, who grew up in Indiana, bought his home in Fairfax in 1979. Gundersen lived in McLean for 30 years (excluding diplomatic postings abroad) before moving to South Carolina. Lemmon, who lives in Washington, D.C., received his undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia after studying first at Old Dominion University.
Loth is a native Virginian who worked for 40 years as architectural historian at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and later served on the state’s Art and Architectural Review Board, which evaluates state construction projects. He also served as adviser in restorations of the Virginia state Capitol, the Executive Mansion and Montpelier, the home of President James Madison in Orange County.
He is not a military veteran, but he said in a statement for the lawsuit, “I believe that the planned arch in Memorial Circle will dominate and potentially obscure the views to and from Arlington House and the bucolic slopes of Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place for thousands and thousands of our veterans.”
“I am concerned that, if the arch is built, Arlington House will no longer be visible from Washington, D.C., destroying a view that has existed for more than 200 years,” he said.
Gundersen said the placement of the Lincoln Memorial directly across from Arlington House “was meant to be a link between North and South.”
If the arch were built, he said, “Looking from Arlington, you don’t see the Lincoln Memorial anymore.”
In an interview, Loth said a more appropriate site for an arch honoring the sesquicentennial would be a site next to Congressional Cemetery in Southeast Washington, which was considered and rejected by the District of Columbia for the bicentennial celebration in 1976.
“I don’t object to something honoring the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,