WASHINGTON — Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Army’s flagship hospital, where privates to presidents have gone for care, is closing after more than a century.
Hundreds of thousands of the nation’s war wounded from World War I to today have received treatment at Walter Reed, including 18,000 troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
President Dwight Eisenhower died there. So did Gens. John Pershing and Douglas MacArthur.
The storied hospital, which opened in 1909, was scarred by a 2007 scandal about substandard living conditions on its grounds for wounded troops in outpatient care and the red tape they faced.
Two years earlier, a government commission, noting that Walter Reed was showing its age, voted to close the facility and consolidate its operations with the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and a hospital at Fort Belvoir, Va., to save money.
Former and current patients and staff members will say goodbye at a ceremony Wednesday. Most of the moving will occur in August. On Sept. 15, the Army hands over the campus to the new tenants: the State Department and the District of Columbia.
