Dr. Cathy Atria

I am the project manager who put American flag blue on the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. At two o'clock this afternoon the President is going to stand in front of my work and ask the country to look at it. He announced it on Sunday, stepping off Air Force One in Iowa. He wanted to hold the event there "just to show how beautiful it is." Then: "We might hold it tomorrow or something." The White House confirmed it a few hours later. Most of my instructions this year have arrived that way. A sentence, then a date, then the date moves up. A reflecting pool is 2,028 feet of shallow water with one job: hold still and tell the truth about whatever stands at its edge. Ovid describes one in the Metamorphoses, a pool "whose smooth surface neither bird nor beast nor falling bough ever ruffled." A beautiful young man leaned over it and fell in love with the face looking back. The prophet Tiresias had predicted he would live a long life "if he ne'er know himself." Ours was finished in 1923 so that a whole nation could. For a century it showed the Washington Monument, the sky, and every American who stood at the edge and saw themselves upside down. It was the one thing in Washington that never told anyone what they wanted to hear. Every developer has one job that went right. His was the Wollman Skating Rink. In 1986, after New York had spent six years and $12 million failing to rebuild it, he wrote to Mayor Koch that the work "essentially involves the pouring of a concrete slab over coolant piping" and "should take no more than four months' time." He brought it in $750,000 under budget. On June 13 of this year, his eightieth birthday, he posted about "saving the Wollman Skating Rink in Central Park," which he dated "Long before I fixed The Reflecting Pool." That was when I understood the job. I was not restoring a monument. I was pouring his rink again, forty years later, on top of Lincoln. In April he said our work would take one week and "cost about a million and a half dollars." He named the technique in The Art of the Deal. "I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration," he wrote, "and a very effective form of promotion." The same book says Trump Tower's atrium gave him "the equivalent of a sixty-eight-story building." The tower has fifty-eight floors. In May he told reporters the pool was "taller than any building in the world if you lay it on its side." Fact-checkers ranked it fourth. I have laid it on its side in my mind many nights. It is still shorter than his description of it. He said, the New York Times reported, that he chose my company because we "had worked on the swimming pools at his golf club in Sterling, Virginia." We had not. We had never held a federal contract. The design came through the manager of his golf club in Bedminster, who had "no formal training in engineering or architecture" and went shopping for a coating at a trade show in Las Vegas. He found what Fortune called "a truck-bed coating company." When the first architect on the White House ballroom raised the fire exits, the Washington Post reported, the President told him, "I am the code." On the pool, nobody had to say it. On May 7 he was driven across my coating in an SUV. The basin was empty. For once the pool had nothing to reflect back at him, and he stepped out and said of the job, "nobody's ever seen anything like it." He announced the color: "It's called American flag blue, and so, you can't do better than that." Three days earlier he had promised, "This will last for at least 50 years and you'll never have a leak." That afternoon he said, "guaranteed no leak." I had the quotes laminated. They are the only part of the project that has held. Then the price rose, which the water had not yet managed. Interior disclosed $13.1 million, and the Times reported that $7 million of it came from national park entrance fees. If you paid at the gate of a national park this year, you own a square yard of the bottom. A government analyst set my margins, 20 percent overhead and 20 percent profit, against a normal 6 to 12, and recorded that "the contracting officer determined that due to the risk of the project, the inflated overhead and profit percentages of 20% were reasonable." The paperwork wrote down "inflated" and approved it. He knows the word. In 2023 a New York judge found he had valued his Trump Tower apartment at 30,000 square feet when it was about 11,000. He called the defense's version of things "a fantasy world, not the real world." An appeals court threw out the half-billion-dollar penalty and left the finding of fraud standing. The appeals continue. The apartment has not grown. Forbes now counts more than $19 million for the pool. He had estimated "less than $20 million." We came in under budget, because the budget was whatever he said last. We filled it on June 5. He posted that critics were calling it "a paint job." "This was not a paint job," he wrote, but "highly sophisticated material, industrial strength," applied by people "from the Great State of Oklahoma, where I won 77 out of 77 Counties, THREE TIMES." The polyurea does not know who won Oklahoma. It peeled anyway. The algae came within a week. In Ovid there is a nymph named Echo, cursed so that she "does repeat the last phrases of a speech and returns the words she hears." She works in communications at Interior now. The department called the algae "part of the normal startup process" and the President "an expert builder who has fixed the Reflecting Pool for good." Workers poured in hydrogen peroxide and vacuumed the bottom by hand. In October the President said, "We have almost no inflation." Inflation is 3.7 percent. In this administration everything green is part of the normal startup process. Then he found the vandals. "Who would do such a thing?" he wrote. "Years in jail!" He grieved for "our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll." Police arrested David Hearn, 67, a three-time Olympian in canoe slalom, for grabbing what he called "the already peeling piece." He was indicted for a felony. Then the President's own Justice Department told a court that "the rush to complete the project led to hasty and botched work," with peeling "even in the middle of the pool, where a vandal would not likely attempt to peel the lining." Prosecutors dropped the case. A judge dismissed it for good. The President said he disagreed "100%." "There may have been some contractor difficulty," he wrote, "but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!" I am the contractor difficulty. I know how the story ends for people like me, because USA Today counted it in 2016: "At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens," a dishwasher in Florida, a glass company in New Jersey, painters. He explained the policy then. "Let's say that they do a job that's not good, or a job that they didn't finish, or a job that was way late. I'll deduct from their contract, absolutely." I have done all three. I am waiting for the deduction. He has always known what to do with a thing that will not cooperate. In 1980 his company jackhammered the Art Deco friezes off the Bonwit Teller building, friezes that had been promised to the Metropolitan Museum. A spokesman named John Baron explained that "the merit of these stones was not great enough to justify the effort to save them." Last year the ballroom was going to be "near it but not touching it." Then the East Wing was gone. Everything he builds starts near the original and ends up standing where it used to be. On October 23 he posted that the pool "hasn't worked properly since 1922, but will now." He is half right. Its floor was laid on drained marsh with no support structure beneath it, and by 2010 it had sunk about a foot. The crew before us drove more than 2,100 timber pilings into the clay. We painted the top. A great deal of what he has built stands on the same soil. The Taj Mahal opened in April 1990, billed as the Eighth Wonder of the World, and filed for bankruptcy fifteen months later. He has said he "used the laws of this country" to "do a great job for my company." Six bankruptcies. Fifty-eight floors. American flag blue. Lincoln is the only president who ever held a patent. In 1849 he invented "adjustable buoyant air chambers" to lift a steamboat over "bars, or through shallow water, without discharging their cargoes." It was never manufactured. The country has been trying ever since to get its cargo across shallow water without throwing it overboard. This year it was sold the shallow water, guaranteed for fifty years. In 1963 Martin Luther King stood above this pool and said America had written a bad check that "has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'" Ask the painters. He said we would not be satisfied "until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." He was describing water that moves. We built water that holds still and looks expensive. This afternoon the President will stand at the edge of the water and look at what he made. Ovid says Narcissus understood only at the very end. "Oh, I am he!" he cried. "What I desire, I have; the very abundance of my riches beggars me." Up the steps, Lincoln will be gazing east down the length of the pool, as he has for 104 years. In 1838 Lincoln said, "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher." I have been the finisher. I put on the final coat. Tomorrow the country votes. Some of you will walk past the pool on the way. Look down. It shows whoever is standing at the edge. We spent $19 million trying to talk it out of that. He guaranteed it for fifty years. No leak. Everything leaks. It only takes enough people standing at the edge, looking down at the same time.