Our trip to Washington DC was a good experience despite my having a broken foot.  Between his chess meetings, John pushed me around the Smithsonian Museums and the monuments in a wheelchair.  I was "blown away" by the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial.

The FDR Memorial is an outdoor memorial with four "rooms" or separated sequential areas, one for each term of his Presidency.  The designer of the memorial focused on FDR's significant ideas-- these were carved on the walls throughout the four rooms at the points in his terms when he said them.  There were so many great ideas.

I liked what the artist did with FDR's "I hate war;  I have seen war" speech in Room Three--  it was carved on the wall but also in the center of that room was a pile of rubble.  The careful observer who walks around that pile trying to understand why it's there will see, "I HATE WAR" carved on three boulders just thrown into the pile's center.

In Room Two, the statues portrayed the reflections of Roosevelt's ideas on others --a statue of a man listening to a Fireside Chat on the radio, poignant statues of hungry men in a breadline, heartbreaking statues of an elderly couple on the porch of a farmhouse in that's being repossessed by the bank for nonpayment of its mortgage.

Room Three held the only statue of FDR, very modest, with his pet dog Fala at his feet.

Room Four contained Eleanor Roosevelt's statue, quite separate from FDR's, portraying her as First U.S. Ambassador to the UN, an appointment made after his death.  (Insightful positioning.)  And in Room Four, the pile of big stones has been "translated" or roughly assembled into a fountain that forms a wall of the structure --the fountain representing (I think) the UN, water as (I think) history's dynamic onward movement, continuation and cleansing --healing waters.

It was spectacular, a well-done memorial that captured FDR the idealist whose life made a positive, highly significant difference.  I was very moved by it.  I hope you get a chance to see it someday.