Read On Hallowed Ground Online
Authors: Robert M Poole
On Hallowed Ground (31 page)
McKinley, a native of Ohio, was brought to Arlington at his wife’s request to honor his service in Korea. Grave diggers excavated
a special place for him in Section 31, just uphill from the cemetery’s main entrance on Memorial Drive; following guidelines
from the Atomic Energy Commission, they dug down to ten feet, more than a yard deeper than the regulation depth at Arlington,
and lined the grave’s interior with a foot of cement. On January 25, the day of McKinley’s burial, family members were kept
twenty feet away from the grave. His eight-minute service went quickly. When it was done and Taps was sounded, a truck brought
more cement, which was poured into the grave before it was filled with earth. A few days later, the commander of the Military
District of Washington issued a dire warning to the cemetery superintendent.
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“It is desired that the following remarks be placed on the permanent record DA [Department of the Army] Form 2122, Record
of Interment,” an assistant adjutant general wrote on January 31. “Victim of nuclear accident. Body is contaminated with long-life
radio-active isotopes. Under no circumstance will the body be moved from this location without prior approval of the AEC [Atomic
Energy Commission] in consultation with this headquarters.”
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Covered with thick turf and softened by the decades, the tomb looks much like any other at Arlington today, but the warning
remains on file in the superintendent’s office.
PAUL FUQUA, A young national park service ranger and college student, was just settling in for his evening routine at the
Lee mansion. It was about four thirty p.m. on March 3, 1963, and the crowds were dispersing for the day. He pulled up to a
desk in the conservatory overlooking Mrs. Lee’s garden and opened a book, relishing the prospect of some quiet time.
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Then the moment was shattered. A bald man in a suit dashed into the mansion, shouting: “The president is coming! The president
is coming!” before racing out among the tombstones. “Great,” Fuqua thought, closing his book and slowly rising to his feet.
“I am going to spend the next three hours chasing this demented little guy through the cemetery so I can run him down and
turn him in.”
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Fuqua followed the man outside, turned a corner, and ran into the most familiar face in America. “Mind if we look around?”
President John F. Kennedy asked Fuqua, who straightened his Smokey Bear hat and came to his senses. “No, of course not,” he
said. “I’d be happy to show you through the house.”
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Thus began President Kennedy’s first—and only—tour of the mansion, up the stairs and through the bedroom where Robert E. Lee
had written his letter of resignation, through the parlor that had rung with laughter in happier times, and finally up the
narrow back stairs into the attic, where Fuqua pointed out the mortised beams and a little rectangular peephole that had allowed
Union soldiers to keep an eye on the river below.
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“He tried the peephole,” Fuqua recalled more than four decades later. “He was like a big kid looking through it—he thought
it was really nifty. As a history buff, he knew all about Lee’s place. He knew all about the Civil War. He was quite conversant
with the Meigs story and all that.”
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Dusk was approaching as Fuqua wrapped up the tour. The party—consisting of Kennedy, his friend the newspaper correspondent
Charles Bartlett, and the bald fellow, whom Fuqua took to be an advance man or Secret Service agent—moved outside for a look
at the grounds. It was an exquisite Sunday in late winter, with the sun slanting low through bare trees, over the beige hills,
and across the river to the Lincoln Memorial, cast in pale evening light.
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“We stood over there,” Fuqua said, walking to a point where the lawn begins to drop away from the crest of the hill, “and
I explained how Memorial Bridge was built to link the Lincoln Memorial with the Lee mansion, symbolizing the reunification
of the nation, and President Kennedy thought that was the neatest thing in the world! He really liked the idea. We were just
looking across the river and talking quietly as we are now,” Fuqua said.
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Kennedy drank in the scene. “I could stay here forever,” he said.
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His words hung in the air until the sound of tires crunching on gravel announced that it was time for the president to go.
Kennedy said his thanks and disappeared into a limousine.“And that was that,” Fuqua said.
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Eight months later, on November 23, 1963, President Kennedy lay dead in the White House while his family, friends, and aides
made hurried plans for a state funeral—the first since President Eisenhower had officiated at Arlington ceremonies for the
Unknowns of World War II and Korea in 1958.
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Kennedy’s friends were still discussing whether to bury the president in Boston or Arlington on that dreary Saturday morning as hundreds of disbelieving citizens, not knowing where else to go, huddled
under dripping umbrellas by the White House gates. Inside, an honor guard stood vigil around the president’s casket in the
candlelit East Room.
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Just down the hall, Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver took charge of funeral planning, sifting through thousands of
suggestions and translating Jacqueline Kennedy’s wishes into action.
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In the uncertain hours after the president’s assassination, Mrs. Kennedy had developed some very specific ideas for his funeral—to
walk behind her husband’s caisson, to adopt President Lincoln’s funeral as a model, and to march JFK’s casket to the Capitol
with no music, only muffled drums marking time.
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But as of Saturday morning, she had still expressed no preference for a burial site. The most likely one, a family plot in
Brookline, Massachusetts, was favored by Kenny O’Donnell, Larry O’Brien, and other insiders with strong ties to Boston.
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Indeed, it was the place Kennedy himself expected to go; he had mentioned it on that afternoon at Arlington, where the subject
of burials had arisen naturally. “Guess I’ll have to go back to Boston,” Kennedy had told Bartlett then.
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Military planners also had Boston in mind on the day of Kennedy’s death, when they made provisional arrangements to ship the president’s body from Washington north by destroyer, by air, or by train, depending on the family’s wishes.
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But as funeral plans took shape, Kennedy’s secretary of defense, Robert S. McNamara, jumped in with a surprise suggestion,
proposing Arlington as a suitable alternative, given the cemetery’s national prominence and the president’s appreciation for
the old Lee estate.
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The suggestion did not endear McNamara to O’Donnell and fellow members of the so-called Boston mafia, but others from Kennedy’s inner circle embraced the Arlington idea. Bartlett was among them. “Bob McNamara was bold
enough … to suggest to the family where the President should be buried,” he recalled. “As soon as I heard Bob say this,
why then of course I jumped in … and … said it was a beautiful place and it was something he loved and was part of
the heritage he loved.”
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Bartlett reinforced McNamara’s proposal, but the question remained unsettled that Saturday, like a myriad of shifting details:
Gray horses or black ones for the caisson platoon?
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Was there time to invite foreign leaders to Washington? Could the military band at the Capitol play “Hail to the Chief ” in solemn adagio instead of regular time?
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Was the Washington mass to be held at St. Matthew’s Cathedral or the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception? And for burial, was it Boston or Arlington, Arlington or Boston? This last choice proved to be the most vexing of all, according to historian William Manchester, who credited the Arlington- Boston debate as a source of lingering friction between proponents for each site.
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History was on the side of Boston: In the ninety-nine years of Arlington’s existence as a national cemetery at the time of Kennedy’s death, the only president
entombed there was William Howard Taft, buried in 1930 barely a month after his retirement as chief justice of the Supreme
Court.
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No sitting president had ever been interred at Arlington. Almost every other one had gone home for final honors.
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While this discussion ran its course, John C. Metzler, Arlington’s superintendent, slid into his car and began to prowl the
rain-slicked roads of the cemetery about nine a.m. on Saturday. Like most others, Metzler assumed that the president was destined
for Boston. But just in case Arlington won out, he wanted to be prepared; indeed, when the superintendent reviewed the standing plans
for a presidential funeral, a document constantly updated by the Military District of Washington, he discovered that those plans called for him to prepare a list of prospective burial sites for the chief executive. “I
toured the cemetery … closely observing all the possible locations for a President’s burial,” Metzler recalled. “I finally
decided that only one location was worthy of consideration but two others should be mentioned and considered by the family.”
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Metzler finished his survey, returning to his office with three choices marked on a map. The first two had naval associations,
in acknowledgment of Kennedy’s wartime service: one, on the southern edge of Arlington by Dewey Circle, was near the grave of Rear Adm. Robert E. Peary, the Arctic explorer, while the second was to the west of the amphitheater, on the high ground near the U.S.S.
Maine
Memorial; the third had no naval connection but was the most prominent, situated just downhill from the Lee mansion overlooking the Lincoln Memorial and all of Washington—the very view Kennedy had enjoyed with Paul Fuqua and Charles Bartlett a few months before.
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Metzler was ready with these suggestions when the call came from the White House about ten thirty a.m. that Saturday: Attorney
General Robert Kennedy was on his way to screen prospective burial sites with his sisters Eunice Shriver and Patricia Lawford,
McNamara, and a contingent of aides. Metzler met them at the gates and the group drove around the cemetery in a downpour,
getting out of their cars and sloshing through the hills to inspect the places on Metzler’s list. They backtracked for a second
look at the site near the Lee mansion, where they walked around and around, gazing back and forth at the old house, the river,
and the gray city swirling in and out of the mists below. “Without any commitment they departed,” Metzler said.
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Back at the White House, Robert Kennedy gave the former First Lady a favorable report for Arlington, backed up by his sisters.
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Mrs. Kennedy, whose sense of the historic moment was stronger than any tribal ties she felt toward Boston, was inclined to bury her husband at Arlington “so that he would belong to the nation.”
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But she wanted to see the place for herself. So with Bobby Kennedy and a growing retinue of aides and friends, she was driven
back across the river, where Metzler waited to greet the party about three thirty p.m. Since the attorney general had already
written off the sites at Dewey Circle and the
Maine
Memorial, Metzler led the group toward the mansion.
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They emerged from their cars and watched as Mrs. Kennedy, standing under a black cloud of umbrellas, stared silently at the
slope where her husband would be buried. She did not budge for fifteen minutes. Then she nodded approval. William Walton,
a family friend and artist with a good eye for proportions, stepped out from under the bank of umbrellas, climbed the hill,
and pointed to the spot where the grave should go. All watched as Metzler pounded a stake into the soggy ground. The superintendent
was told to prepare for a Monday funeral. The family drifted away.
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Metzler planned to summon his workers for duty the next day, a Sunday. A thick mat of fallen leaves had to be cleared from
the site, security cordons laid out, mats spread over the wet earth, a press stand erected, and a presidential grave prepared.
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McNamara returned to Arlington on Sunday morning with a crew of engineers who surveyed the president’s six-hundred-square-foot
plot. Their measurements showed that Metzler’s stake was a mere six inches off the true axis running from the Lee mansion
to the Lincoln Memorial; the marker was adjusted and twelve granite posts were set to establish boundaries.
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Given Arlington’s tangled real estate history, both McNamara and Bobby Kennedy took great pains to avoid future property
disputes between the Army, which still controlled Arlington National Cemetery, and the National Park Service, which held the
mansion and twenty-eight acres surrounding it.
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The attorney general dispatched Justice Department lawyers to search the title to his brother’s gravesite, which showed that
the plot was situated entirely on Army property.
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President Kennedy could rest in peace there.
With his burial site resolved, other funeral details fell into place. Kennedy would be conveyed from the White House to Capitol
Hill on Sunday to lie in state in the Rotunda, as President Lincoln and other honored leaders had done. On Monday, he would
be marched to the White House for a brief ceremony at the north portico before traveling to St. Matthew’s Cathedral for a
requiem mass; then he would make the traditional journey through the streets of Washington, past the Lincoln Memorial, over Memorial Bridge, and finally up the hill to Arlington.
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Following tradition, each leg of the president’s passage would be made by caisson, the old fashioned, horse-drawn artillery
wagon that had once carried ammunition to the battlefront and returned with war dead. Two such caissons, both of World War
I vintage, had been salvaged for full honors ceremonies at Arlington. Stationed at Fort Myer, members of the Army’s 3rd Infantry
Regiment, also known as the Old Guard, operated the caissons and maintained a stable of some forty horses for funeral duty.
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After vacillating over whether to use matched grays or black horses for the president’s caisson, Mrs. Kennedy declared in
favor of grays on Saturday afternoon.
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This sent Sgt. Tom Setterberg and other members of the Old Guard caisson platoon into high gear—pressing their dress blues,
cleaning tack, polishing brass, picking hooves, and preparing to lead their commander in chief on one glorious last ride.
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Setterberg, designated leader of the platoon’s White Horse Section, would ride Big Boy, a massive gray gelding who walked
in front, unattached to the six matched horses pulling the caisson in harness: Count Chris and Skyline in the lead, followed
by swing horses Blue and Blue Dare, and wheel horses Cap and Cloudburst. Setterberg would use Big Boy to guide other horses
out of the familiar cemetery grounds and into the capital, where gathering crowds, snapping flags, and flashing cameras threatened
to spook the animals.
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The caisson would be followed by Black Jack, a spirited black gelding, age sixteen, designated as the riderless horse. Named
for the famed World War I general, Black Jack was outfitted with riding boots reversed in the stirrups, a traditional symbol
for a departed warrior facing no more battles. It was an honor accorded to former presidents, officers of colonel’s rank or
higher, and commissioned officers from one of the mounted services. Black Jack, who could be as strong-headed as his namesake,
gained his own degree of fame during the weekend of Kennedy’s funeral, dancing across millions of television screens, barely
under control.
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