American Notes MEMORIALS

Franklin D. Roosevelt once said he did not want any memorial to him to be any larger than his Oval Office desk. In fact, an inconspicuous block of marble about that size was erected in front of the National Archives Building in Washington 20 years after he died, in 1945. But as his place in history has grown, so too has the demand for something grander. Next year ground will at last be broken on a "gardenesque" layout of granite walls and waterfalls near the Potomac River.

The procrastination has had less to do with political attitudes toward F.D.R. than with bickering over the size of the monument. The design by San Francisco landscape architect Lawrence Halprin was finally approved by the Commission of Fine Arts, which had accepted a larger version of the concept in 1978. It took a plea last fall by Florida Congressman Claude Pepper, who had been a Senator when F.D.R. was President, to get a $5.8 million appropriation | passed to begin the $47 million project. Terminally ill with cancer, Pepper got out of bed to make his pitch in his last public appearance before he died at 88.