The Board of the Kennedy Center voted, nearly to a man, to close the house at once. Safety was the stated ground, and it was not a flourish. Plaster had already fallen from the Grand Foyer; steel and concrete have been rotting in the damp for years; the trustees were told that continued occupancy invited injury. They shut the main building “forthwith,” kept a sliver of programming at the Reach and off-site, and declared the place ready for reconstruction. That is what a trustee does when the building itself has become the hazard. The country that once built monuments to last now finds itself arguing over whether a leaking memorial may be closed before someone is killed under it.

The work cannot start until the D.C. Circuit rules on the name the Board approved. Congress named the place for Kennedy in 1964 and wrote the statute so that no other memorial plaque would decorate the façade. A district judge has twice treated that language as a veto on any inscription that mentions the man who raised the money and forced the repairs. The Board has appealed. Until the Circuit speaks, the shovels stay idle. In the interval, seventeen million dollars raised by President Trump sit in the Center’s account so the institution does not drown while the lawyers argue over lettering. It is a peculiar republic that will accept the cash and forbid the acknowledgment.

There remains the nuclear option, the same one applied to the East Wing: take the modernist box down to the slab and raise in its place a neoclassical house worthy of a capital that remembers what it is. The present pile is a period piece of the years after Kennedy, when official taste turned against ornament, against hierarchy, against the idea that a public building should look like a public building. A Golden Age reconstruction would not erase the memorial; it would restore the dignity the memorial was meant to carry. America has done this before. It can do it again, if the courts will permit the country to treat its own monuments as more than litigation exhibits.

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