Panel Approves Plan to Close Walter Reed Army Hospital

08/25/2005

By DAVID S. CLOUD and CHRISTINE HAUSER
NY Times
Published: August 25, 2005

ARLINGTON, Va., Aug. 25 - The independent commission reviewing a Defense Department plan to shut or shrink hundreds of military bases nationwide voted this morning to close the historic Walter Reed Army Medical Center, as it continued its deliberations on the Pentagon’s blueprint for changes at more than 800 facilities in 50 states.

The Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, meeting yesterday in a hotel ballroom less than a mile from the Pentagon, endorsed most of the military’s recommendations.

The Pentagon plans had called for the closing of the medical center and the construction of a $1 billion national military center with the same name on the campus of the naval medical center in Bethesda, Md., about seven miles from the present Walter Reed.

Panel members noted that the cost of retrofitting the 96-year old medical center would be higher than those of building a new facility. They voted 8 to nothing in support of the Pentagon’s recommendation, with one abstention.

Named for Maj. Walter Reed, an Army surgeon who led the researchers who discovered that yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes, the center admitted its first patient in 1909, when it could accommodate fewer than 100 patients. Now, the 113-acre installation has some 5,500 rooms. It has treated presidents and other politicians, Supreme Court justices, several generals, King Hussein of Jordan and the exiled shah of Iran. It has also treated thousands of rank-and-file military people, including some recently wounded in Iraq.

Gen. John J. Pershing died at Walter Reed in 1948. Gen. Douglas MacArthur died there in 1964, and Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1969.

The grounds of Walter Reed are home to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, whose exhibits include the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln and fragments of Lincoln’s skull, and the bones of the amputated leg of Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles, a Union commander who lost the limb at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.

The Pentagon’s plan to eliminate jobs in Washington and nearby Arlington as part of its blueprint would have a severe impact on the economy and intellectual resources of the region, lawmakers told military officials last month.

Washington is scheduled to lose more than 6,000 jobs, about 5,600 of them with the closing of Walter Reed, where hundreds of thousands of American soldiers have been treated. As a result, Bethesda, another Washington suburb, is expected to gain nearly 2,000 jobs, many of them coming from the medical center. Some personnel and operations would move to a community hospital at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.

The commission resumed deliberations this morning with proposals on training and education facilities, and then it is scheduled to move on to the subject of Air Force bases. Contentious debates are expected today and Friday on plans to close the Air Force installations and shift squadrons around the country.

On Wednesday, the commission voted against closing the oldest American submarine base, in Groton, Conn., and the historic Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Me., its most significant deviations from the Defense Department recommendations. The nine-member group, officially named the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, endorsed most of the recommendations, however.

The reprieves for the Connecticut and Maine facilities were met with elation in the surrounding communities, which stood to lose more than 10,000 jobs, and in the affected Congressional delegations, which had lobbied fiercely to convince commissioners that the Defense Department was overestimating savings from closing the facilities and underestimating their military value.

“We gave the commission facts,” said Representative Rob Simmons, a Connecticut Republican whose district includes the base. “We went from criterion to criterion to criterion and proved them wrong at every point.”

The commission’s chairman, Anthony J. Principi, said the Pentagon’s recommendations on the two installations were overturned because of uncertainty about whether the Navy, which is shrinking, will need to grow in response to China’s naval buildup, as well as concern about losing expertise at both places.

“Once you close those two national resources, you cannot recreate them, you cannot reopen them,” he said in a brief interview after the commission’s daylong proceedings. “I felt it was too much of a risk.”

Closing of the New London submarine base in Groton was opposed by former President Jimmy Carter, a former Navy submariner, as well as a dozen retired admirals. It would have resulted in 8,000 civilian and military jobs being lost or moved to Georgia and Virginia, where the Navy planned to shift the base’s submarines. Closing the Portsmouth shipyard would have cost New Hampshire and Maine 4,000 jobs, the Pentagon estimated.