Ken Graham: FROM THE PUBLISHER

During the first half of this month I got to take my first real vacation from being publisher of The Times. I traveled to Virginia to attend a reunion of my mother’s extended family (and sit on the beach for five days).

On my way, I stopped in Washington D.C. to spend three days as a tourist. It’s something all Americans should do, and it seemed like a large proportion of them were there the same time I was.

I did all of my sightseeing in and around the National Mall, which is a two-mile-long strip of ground that runs from the Potomac River on the west to the Capital building on the east.

This is, of course, the largest and most important concentration of American history anywhere. The White House, houses of Congress and Supreme Court are all here, though the White House is so well protected you can barely see it.

Most of the Smithsonian Museums are located here. And yes, there are several of them, including American Art, Portrait Gallery, Natural History, Air and Space, and the Smithsonian Castle. The National Zoo is nearby, though I didn’t go there.

(Here’s an interesting fact I learned: The Smithsonian Institution was originally funded by a gift in the early 1800s from a wealthy Brit named James Smithson, who was fascinated by the U.S. but never came here.)

On the mall there are memorials to veterans from World War II, The Korean War and the Vietnam War. For a kid who grew up in the 60s and 70s, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was especially moving. It’s a 250-foot-long wall containing the names of 58,307 American service people (all but eight were men) lost or missing from that war.

The National Achives and the Library of Congress are here. There’s also a very moving Holocaust Museum, which contains exhibits about many examples of genocide in the world, along with its main feature, the extermination of Jews during World War II.

The Washington Monument sits in middle of all this, and there are also memorials to Lincoln, Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, as well as smaller ones to other American historical figures.

Besides all the historical stuff, the National Mall has many other fascinating features:

A bunch of it is being renovated, including the Capital dome and a big stretch of lawn and walkways in the museum area. Two of the museums were closed for renovation. I suspect that some form of construction will always be going on, no matter when you visit.

The streets along the mall are lined with tour buses – dozens and dozens of them. I saw many of those buses dislodge large groups of schoolchildren. Each child within each group – and the adults accompanying them – wore matching brightly colored T-shirts, inscribed with information about the group. The shirts were important, of course. If a child removed his shirt, he’d be absorbed into the horde of tourists and probably lost forever.

The streets were also lined with food trucks. The ones specializing in ice cream were especially busy.

On the first day of my visit, I walked most of the length of the mall to see the Lincoln Memorial, which sits at the west end, next to the river. The steps in front of the Lincoln Memorial are where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. The day I was there, a rally was being held on those steps in support of atheism. It was called the Reason Rally.

I wandered past the atheists and climbed the steps into the memorial, which was probably my favorite place in Washington. Lincoln’s statue is very large, but it sits within a Greek-style temple that is enormous.

Construction on the memorial began exactly 100 years ago, after many decades of stop-and-start planning. It was completed and dedicated in 1922.

On the walls inside the temple are large inscriptions of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address, which was given shortly before he was assassinated in 1865.

With the din of the Reason Rally echoing outside, I read the final paragraph of Lincoln’s second inaugural address:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”