Freedom Museum Is Headed for Showdown at Ground Zero
The museum's decision to stand firm would force the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and Gov. George E. Pataki to make a tough choice. They could either infuriate hundreds of impassioned relatives of those who died, or alienate influential cultural, academic and business figures, as well as family members who support the center.
Today the Freedom Center will submit a 27-page report, which was shown in advance to The New York Times by museum executives.
By turns adamant and conciliatory, the report acknowledges that a crucial part of the center's mission must be to tell the stories of the "heroes of Sept. 11."
Casting itself as a living memorial along the lines of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the planned Gettysburg National Battlefield Museum, the center pledged that its board would ensure that it hew to a mission of including the "heroes of Sept. 11" in its accounts of the history of freedom, sponsoring educational and cultural programs "to advance freedom's cause," and offering visitors opportunities to volunteer "on behalf of freedom within their own communities."
Natan Sharansky, a former dissident and political prisoner in the Soviet Union and a former government minister in Israel, is one of five new board members the Freedom Center will name in the report. The others are Sara J. Bloomfield, the director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum; Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University; Richard Norton Smith, the former director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, who is now executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum; and Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International.