Letter to President Reagan from Walter Westphall

Westphall was offended that no other Vietnam Memorial was officially recognized, prior to the one in Washington D.C. Westphall wrote, "The wrong already done to existing Vietnam War memorials and to their founders by Jan C. Scruggs...is enormous. Please do not add to that wrong by pretending, or letting anyone else pretend, that the Washing Memorial is the first Vietnam memorial, or that it is somehow more significant than memorials which predate it by as many as fourteen years. Only the exceedingly arrogant and biased observer will pretend that existing memorials do not exist or that they are somehow unimportant."