Gramm Spars With Vets

Stepping into a conflict to promote former Republican presidents, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) has instead become Public Enemy No. 1 to some in the Vietnam War veterans community.

For the past month, Gramm has been the lead opponent to a bill authorizing the construction of a visitors center at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a move that has resulted in a leading veteran of that war to attack the Senator in vitriolic terms for his lack of military service.

Gramm is incensed with a provision in the bill, inserted by Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), that would establish a "reserve area" on the National Mall.

It would effectively prohibit any future memorials or "commemorative works" from being built on the Mall after this visitors center is finished near the Vietnam memorial.

Gramm said he has no beef with the visitors center, but he wants two of his GOPheroes, former Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, to have their own memorials on the Mall some day. "We’re considering a memorial to Eisenhower, and I want to build a memorial some day to Ronald Reagan," the retiring Gramm said last week. "Those two are high on my agenda."

If the visitors center bill is approved with the "reserve area" on the Mall, Gramm will never get to see his heroes honored with monuments in that critical location. "As long as that provision’s in there, I’m going to be opposed," he said.

Jan Scruggs, president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund Inc., has led the counterattack to Gramm, peppering Senate offices with phone calls and sending out e-mail "calls to action" urging fellow Vietnam vets to harangue Gramm.

Scruggs, who thinks a visitors center would give children a better understanding of the war, doesn’t believe Gramm’s explanation regarding memorials to Eisenhower and Reagan. And he’s not afraid to go into personal attacks to get his point across.

As he put it in an e-mail to fellow vets, Scruggs wrote: "Everyone in Washington knows that stopping a patriotic visitor center at ‘The Wall’ for American kids is a bad issue for Gramm, a man with five draft deferments to avoid combat in Vietnam. Only Gramm does not realize this."

In an interview, Scruggs said that Gramm — who received deferments while he was in undergraduate and doctoral studies in the 1960s — only recently took up the cause of building Eisenhower and Reagan memorials, long after he first opposed the memorial’s visitors center.

"Had he served in Vietnam, Ican’t imagine he would be doing this," Scruggs said.

Gramm and his staff dismiss Scruggs’ attacks as a misguided attempt into shaming him to give up his opposition to the bill. "He has tried to make this personal, and I’m not going to take that bait," the Texan said.

Don Stewart, Gramm’s spokesman, said the Senator had concerns with the bill in the fall of 2000 — when the prohibition of future memorials on the Mall was not in the bill — because he wanted the visitors center to be privately funded. In 2001, the bill was amended to make it a privately funded venture.

But last month the "reserve area" clause was added to the bill, setting off Gramm and other Republicans, including Sen. Ted Stevens (Alaska), the ranking member on Appropriations who inserted legislation in a spending bill beginning the study of an Eisenhower memorial. An effort to pass the bill by unanimous consent before Memorial Day, in time for the annual Rolling Thunder celebrations at the wall, was derailed.

As a result, Gramm’s office is now getting at least a handful of calls a day from angry veterans who want the visitors center built.

Stewart said Gramm staffers patiently explain his position on the bill, and that most are accepting of that. "Once we explain the situation to them, 99 percent of them understand," he said.

But one Democratic aide noted that there are already too many memorials on the Mall, and that even the Vietnam Memorial visitor’s center could lead to more construction: "What do you tell the Korean War veterans when they want a visitors’ center? What do you tell the World War IIveterans when they want a visitors’ center?"

Scruggs and Gramm had a chance encounter last Monday in New York on a Delta Shuttle flight back to D.C. (Ironically enough, Scruggs says he was in New York meeting with NBC anchor Tom Brokaw in an effort to get the "Greatest Generation" author to do a story on the legislation).

Later that night, Scruggs sent out another e-mail to supporters, revealing that he and Gramm were stopped for a random security search alongside one another. After revealing his identity to the Senator, Scruggs wrote that he asked Gramm whether the fight was over.

"Gramm looked at me and said, ‘As far as I am concerned it never happened,’" Scruggs wrote Monday night. "These were his precise words. Senator Gramm will bring this all to an end, likely by close of business tomorrow and move the bill out of the Senate."

After checking with the Senator, however, Stewart said that the conversation did not transpire that way. The spokesman said that Scruggs apologized for the statements he has made about the Senator.

Gramm replied, "Forget about it. So far as I’m concerned it’s as if it never happened."

The bill did not get passed last week, and Stewart noted that the Senator "still has concerns with the legislation."

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