Franklin D Roosevelt monument - 9 May 1997

Twenty-five hundred years ago, down in the Persian desert, they unveiled a statue to the conqueror Cyrus the Great. And, last week, in Washington DC, they unveiled one, a little late in the day, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It's a simple and, for several millennia, it has seemed a proper thing to set up a statue to a national hero. And they started doing it as soon as some warrior brought together a rabble of little kingdoms and called them a nation.

But a statue was not always the preferred way of honouring the dead king. The Egyptians made the point of honour the creation of a tomb for the departed one, on the understanding that his soul would be decently and safely housed there and had better not be disturbed by any nosey parker, an archaeologist say, who came afterwards to see what was down there.

When a famous one, a Mr Howard Carter, invaded the tomb of Tutankhamen, to the applause of the Western world, the Egyptians prophesied an early end for him. And his death, very soon afterwards, may or may not have been a coincidence.

But statues have been, right into our time, the favourite form of memorial to a great man; sometimes, but rarely, of a woman. There's a terrific one in Western Kansas of a pioneer wife, just a symbol of thousands, striding along into the roaring west wind, her skirt swirling, her jaw firm.

But of the men, I should guess that throughout the late 18th Century most statues, in Europe certainly, were of men on horseback, reminders of the warrior king as hero, and his main form of military transportation, the horse.

After the American Civil War, and on through the First World War, the immense majority of statues of soldiers were of a man on a horse because it was on a horse that the commanders commanded their men. Why did it suddenly come to an end? In a grim and entirely unpredicted way.

Just about this time of the year, in the spring of 1942, I was a correspondent for a British paper with all the panache and wad of credentials of a war correspondent. And I was visiting the great cavalry post of the United States army at Fort Riley, Kansas. I was there at a bad time. America had been in the war only four months and during that time the Japanese had either conquered or over-run Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma.

They'd captured the Philippines where General MacArthur had first meant to take a stand. But he escaped across the wide open sea to set up headquarters in Australia, and the rearguard was trapped at a place called Bataan. By lunchtime at Fort Riley that day the news had finally come in that General Wainwright and his men were besieged and starving.

After an hour of speculation over this awful news, a young officer said aloud, "I wonder what happened to the horses?" A colonel, a small, wiry man, legs bowed from a lifetime on his beloved horses, said simply, "On Bataan, they ate them". And when I was leaving the base and the colonel was seeing me off, he said almost in shock, "You know something? This is the end of the cavalry. It's the end of the horse".

It was an appalling thought to him, as if an actor had just come out of an operation and discovered he'd lost his legs. A pretty bleak story to have to put together. I decided to file no story from Fort Riley.

I doubt there's been put up an equestrian statue since then. The only horses left in the United States armed forces are a dozen or so living in a single stable in Washington DC. They serve only for presidential funerals. So the horse statue's gone the way of the horse. And along with it has gone, we've only lately found out, any general public agreement about what a given hero's statue should look like.

Statesmen were always shown standing up, clutching in one hand a scroll, presumably of their accumulated wisdom, a 19th-Century tradition that had to end as the old austere statues were bound to change.

But only 30 years ago, there was a dreadful dust-up over a statue to be erected outside Sir Edwin Lutyen's impressive Georgian pile, the British Embassy in Washington. It was designed and came out as an heroic statue of Winston Churchill. Some busybody noticed that the great man held, in his left hand, a half-smoked cigar. No other accessory to a likeness of Mr Churchill could have been more suitable. But there was a big to-do. People said it was a tribute to the humanity of the leader or a defamation.

The sculptor, who finally had enough of these snipings, revealed that he'd looked at, in the interest of nothing but the truth, over 300 photographs of Churchill and in 278 of them, there was his trusted cigar. Eventually the cigar was kept, and there it is. And, as always with these public uproars, once the thing is done, nobody makes a squeak of protest.

Now we have a new uproar, in the same place. In Washington DC, President Clinton last week unveiled, as I say, a statue of Churchill's companion hero of the Second War, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is the highlight of a seven-acre plot given over to celebrating FDR not only with a statue but with artefacts or symbols of his life and appeal. There, for instance, is a model of his little dog, his Scottie, Fala. And an image of a man bent over, listening to a table radio – an announcement to most tourists, and a reminder to the old ones, that Roosevelt was the first president with the gift of using the radio with masterful simplicity and guile as a persuasive, or propaganda, weapon. A gift that simply drove the Republicans nuts.

The main statue shows Roosevelt seated, in what looks like a simple armchair. If you look carefully, you'll see that the legs have tiny wheels. And this looks as if the sculptor or the committee or whoever had the final say was scared of the prospect of a wheelchair controversy. Sure enough, it came roaring up the moment after the main statue was unveiled. In no time, groups of the disabled, paralysed veterans, just-injured old folks, objected. Roosevelt was a paraplegic, was he not? Well then, why wasn't he shown as one and be open to the admiration of everyone as an inspiration to the disabled?

It's interesting that it's only since a big four-hour documentary on FDR was shown last year which contained, for the first time, a host of movies nobody outside the family had ever seen. FDR propelling his wheelchair, talking from it, moving around in it and seen, in that Infantile Paralysis Centre in Georgia he founded, in the swimming pool, seeing, below the massive upper body, the thin, wasted legs dangling in the water like tendrils. Only since then has the general public been actively aware of Roosevelt as a cripple.

It was astonishing, a miracle of restraint on the part of the press which could not possibly happen today, that, in all that time, no newsreel cameramen ever shot or showed a picture of Roosevelt limping clumsily up a ramp, or moving in or out of his wheelchair.

So now there are people who say that to have a statue with him in his wheelchair would pay tribute to the man's incredible courage in staying in office and very much in command through the 12 momentous years of his presidency. There's another school that says first, Roosevelt, himself, wanted a plain stone, with his name and dates. That he cooperated throughout his presidency with hiding his disability, that he probably could not have been elected president if everybody knew, from the start, and saw his crippled figure.

One debater, one writer alone, so far as I know, the columnist Charles Krauthammer has put his finger on the crux of these competing arguments. "The point", he says, "is not what some imaginary FDR would want. The point is which of these competing ideals, the restraint of the historical FDR versus the self-revelation and display of today's politicians, do we most want to honour? What a balm is Roosevelt's attitude of defiant and dignified denial."

I have to say that this is a mighty persuasive argument to me. But it's one that no current politician dare uphold. The cry of the disabled cannot be publicly flouted or ignored, and President Clinton got the Senate to concur, without a vote, to have another statue with FDR in a wheelchair. The house is certain to go along. Not to do so would be as bad as voting against Mother or Santa Claus.

But the whole brouhaha should be a warning to all future sculptors and memorialists, in whatever medium. The Vietnam War Memorial is a simple, huge rectangle, a thin slab of black marble, with all the names of the dead inscribed. It is immense, and immensely moving. But the protests soon came thundering in. And by now, there's an addition, a group of soldiers and nurses, of several races, of course. The Korean War Memorial shows veteran heroes plainly defined as white soldiers, black soldier, Korean soldiers and American-Indian soldiers. And after another wave of protest, there was an addition too, a women's Korean War Memorial, in another place.

It makes me think, with a tug at the heartstrings, of Mr Jefferson. When the founding fathers were busy in Philadelphia creating the Constitution, Jefferson was busy pottering around Paris making notes on what the new nation must have and especially what it mustn't have. He jotted down, "Titles of nobility.

"One thing a fine Republic could do without, a very great vanity" he wrote. Another thing he noticed, too often bruising his eyes and his Republican sensibilities, big, pompous things, over-idolising this man or that, public statues. "Let us not have", he wrote, "any public statues. A very great and pompous frivolity".

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