I should have clarified that AddNewItem both creates the item (and pointer) and adds it to the scene. Thus, the code that kept track of the pointer is now inside of AddNewItem::redo(). Of course, the pointer is useless there, and goes out of scope after AddNewItem::redo().

Are you suggesting that I should create a null pointer to the item and pass it to AddNewItem's constructor, and have AddNewItem::redo() create the item and assign it to the previously null pointer?