With the Albert Einstein Memorial statue in the background, members of the U.S. Army dressed in Revolutionary War uniforms march along Constitution Avenue during a military parade on June 14 in Washington, D.C. Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images
By Talya Zax
June 16, 2025
Robert Berks, the sculptor who crafted the Albert Einstein Memorial in Washington, D.C., taught himself art by leaving school at lunchtime to copy the greats on display at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. A solitary Jew in an Irish Catholic Boston neighborhood, Berks, who grew up during the Depression, lived out his own version of the American dream — a version in which freedom, confidence and exposure to beauty could catapult a boy from the settlement house to the National Mall.
On Saturday, Berks’ take on Albert Einstein — a four-ton, 12-foot-tall bronze figure that was unveiled in 1979 — presided over part of the route of President Donald Trump’s much-critiqued military parade. The photos are a bit surreal: There’s the gigantic, rumpled Einstein, his hands full of marked-up mathematical papers, and his eyes cast down in contemplation of a squadron of United States soldiers marching past in full Revolutionary War regalia.
Here is another version of the American dream. You can be an immigrant, who warned that “as long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the law prevail.” You can make such an impact on your adopted country that the government will build a memorial to your civic wisdom in the heart of the capital — a memorial on which that very quote about civil liberty and tolerance will be engraved.
And then, 70 years after your death, that memorial can gaze — with an appearance of some bemusement — at a procession of tanks, armored trucks and stern-faced troops, held on the president’s birthday, which some commentators will compare to an infamous birthday parade held by the very dictator whose authoritarian regime you fled in Europe.
There are some stark ironies here. Einstein was a famous pacifist, making it hard to see his statue looming over a highly unusual display of American military might without feeling that the subtext is, well, somewhat obvious. And while it makes sense that a past iteration of the United States chose to celebrate Einstein’s commitment to “equality of all citizens before the law,” in President Trump’s view, that equality can be a threat.
But beyond the clear lessons, there’s a quiet, somber dissonance between the kind of hopefulness embodied in Berks’ statue, and the very different sort of aspirations highlighted by the parade.
Berks based the monument on a small model he created after spending two days with Einstein in 1953. By the time the visit was over, said Berks’ wife, the sculptor had Einstein’s “head in his own head.”
There is something inherently optimistic about imagining another person. To get to know someone, to try to understand them, and then to hold their image in your own mind — to make them as real in your own thoughts as they are in their own — is a kind of investment in curiosity. To do it effectively, you must be able to acknowledge that there is a great deal you do not know.
Berks could have only fit so much of Einstein’s head within his own. As amply supplied with genius as the scientist was, almost no one could. But Berks learned enough of his subject to be able to guess at what it might be like to live with all those unknowable interiorities, and to form some understanding of how that experience might translate to the great man’s external form.
His Einstein is thoughtful, and looks tired. Depicting him as he was only two years before his death, Berks made it easy to see both how the years had worn Einstein down, and how alert he was despite their weight. The bronze comes together in rippling, raw strokes. Here is a man who was never stagnant, and, in memory, never will be.
A military parade is an assertion of might, emblematic of the kind of defensiveness that arises when people with power believe they already know what everyone else thinks. It seeks to answer, with defiance, questions it anticipates from the rest of the world. How strong is this country? This leader?
It is a spectacle about proving something. This country is strong. This leader is strong. Stagnant truths, for a stagnant world, in which only force matters.
As the weekend unfolded, with Trump’s parade attracting sparse crowds while nationwide protests against him drew millions, there was a great deal of talk about “two Americas” — one conservative; one liberal; one adoring of the president; one admonishing him.
But the real contrast, I think, isn’t between protest and parade, or conservative and liberal. It’s between the rough, dynamic surface of the Einstein memorial, and the smooth, flat production that unfolded beneath its troubled gaze.
It’s about the vivid curiosity that pushed a young Berks to spend endless hours copying the masters at the Boston Museum; pushed Einstein to ask and answer questions about our physical reality that had previously seemed out of reach; and pushed the first of those men to capture the second, for all time, in a form that reflected something of the truth of who he was.
And it’s about the ways in which that curiosity makes brute force seem paltry — silly, even — as Einstein’s pondering gaze seems to suggest those Revolutionary War costumed soldiers are. “The stupor of authority,” this Einstein could have been thinking, as the scientist himself once wrote, “is the greatest enemy of truth.”
