James Oberstar: “I would argue also that the person who had most to do with National Airport was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was…”

“I would argue also that the person who had most to do with National Airport was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was present at the groundbreaking, who was the driving force behind the construction of that airport, who laid the cornerstone for this building; who proposed a big ceremony to dedicate the newly completed airport, but who, on recommendation of his Secretary of Commerce and on his own gut instincts, said, as the darkening clouds of war are gathering, it is not a time, an appropriate time to have a celebration, and chose not to. He was the first President, Franklin Roosevelt, to fly across the Atlantic. He convened the international conference that guides aviation trade agreements today, the Chicago conference in 1944, in which we negotiate trade rights in aviation among all nations of the world. He had more to do with aviation, I submit, than President Reagan did, and more to do with this airport, but never have we suggested, in the words of my good friend, adding a name, which is really changing a name, of an airport to add Franklin D. Roosevelt. In fact, Franklin Roosevelt wanted for himself only the smallest monument, not larger than the size of a desk, a piece of stone some place in Washington. That is all he ever asked for. He did not ask to have a political billboard greeting people in his name as they came to the Nation's capital. That is what is at stake here.”