Dana Taylor

I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA Today's The Excerpt.

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The fight over renaming the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts has led to a reckoning about the meaning attached to presidential memorials and arguments about who we are.

From marble monuments to cultural institutions, what do presidential memorials tell us about not only our past, but our present?

For President's Day, we decided to dig into that.

Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt.

I'm Dana Taylor.

Today is Monday, February 16th, 2026.

I'm now joined by one of the nation's leading voices on memory and memorials, James E. Young, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of English and Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

James, thanks so much for joining me on The Excerpt.

I want to dive into the turmoil surrounding the renaming of the Kennedy Center.

But first, it might help to get an understanding of how presidential memorials come to be.

Are we talking about something set by law or is this a fluid process?

When we look at the timeline for the JFK Memorial, of course, it's tightly tied to his assassination.