On Hallowed Ground (32 page)

While the lights burned in the Old Guard stables that Saturday night, a weary Sargent Shriver and presidential counselor Ted
Sorenson drove out to the home of Patrick O’Boyle, archbishop of Washington, to discuss funeral services with him and Cardinal Richard J. Cushing, the Boston archbishop and family friend who would preside at Kennedy’s mass, scheduled for Monday in Washington. Sorenson conveyed Mrs. Kennedy’s wish that the service be kept as plain as possible. “Yes,” Cushing said, grasping the point.
“We’ll leave him as a Jesuit.”
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Such was the goal, but the funeral grew complex as new players arrived on stage, seating charts shifted, and fresh elements
were cranked into the ceremonies. Prince Philip arrived to represent Britain; Emperor Haile Selassie flew in from Ethiopia;
Gen. Charles de Gaulle, from France; President Eamon de Valera, from Ireland; King Baudouin, from Belgium, and scores of other
leaders, each expecting a suitable place in the proceedings. Former presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Harry S. Truman signaled
their intention to attend. Bobby Kennedy, recalling his brother’s fondness for the Green Berets, summoned a delegation of
Special Forces soldiers from Fort Bragg to march beside the president’s caisson.
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Mrs. Kennedy wanted the Old Guard’s Colonial Fife and Drum Corps, dressed in their eighteenth-century knee breeches and tricornered
hats, to participate, along with cadets from the Irish Guard, a silent drill team from the old country, and the Naval Academy
Catholic Choir. Letitia Baldridge, Mrs. Kennedy’s social secretary, tracked down bagpipers from the Black Watch of the Royal
Highland Regiment, which happened to be touring the United States, and diverted nine of the kilted gentlemen to join the funeral
march. More pipers were added at Arlington, where a special Air Force unit was recruited to play at interment services.
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These extra flourishes, which transformed the event into a made-for-television production, multiplied as the weekend progressed.
It proved too much for one White House aide, who stalked off at the height of funeral preparations Saturday afternoon. “I
got teed off and got out,” he grumbled. “Things were getting out of control … I thought at any minute the Flying Wallendas
would be called in.” The aide disappeared, mastered his irritation, and returned to help with the burgeoning arrangements.
⁴⁴

Much to the relief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mrs. Kennedy relented on her ambition to accompany the president’s caisson
on foot through the entire two-day ceremony, from the White House to the Capitol to St. Matthew’s to Arlington. Walking this
six-mile circuit would have taxed the endurance of the military chiefs—all of whom were middle-aged, some of whom were overweight
and out of shape. Their reluctance to make the forced march may have encouraged Mrs. Kennedy to scale it back.
⁴⁵

Whatever the reason, when the president’s body left the Executive Mansion for the Capitol early Sunday afternoon, Mrs. Kennedy
followed by car, with the chiefs piled into limousines behind her. Black Jack led the motorcade, tossing his head and jigging
his way up Pennsylvania Avenue with Pfc. Arthur A. Carlson hanging on to his reins. Silent crowds, ten to fifteen people deep,
lined both sides of the parade route, with some mourners scrambling into trees or onto statues for a better view. It was the
job of Carlson, an Old Guard from the caisson platoon, to lead Black Jack through the funeral rites. The horse, high-strung
under the best of circumstances, had been badly spooked as the procession prepared to leave the White House, where a metal
grate had fallen to the pavement with a clang. “Black Jack went wild,” Carlson recalled. “He stayed agitated for the …
entire funeral.” Carlson struggled to maintain decorum, even after the horse contrived to stomp his escort’s foot. Millions
of television viewers, watching through that heartbreaking weekend, may have identified with the horse, which seemed to recoil
from all that had happened. Carlson held him in check.
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In a time of turmoil, such rituals served an important purpose. “In the eyes of the world we looked pretty shoddy, having
our President assassinated in Dallas,” said Letitia Baldridge, who helped carry out Mrs. Kennedy’s funeral plans. “She wanted
this to be done to absolute perfection exactly as the President would have done for someone he loved very much … I think
the way the funeral was handled, the way everybody acted, suddenly put Americans back up again in the minds of the people
around the world.”
⁴⁷

Nobody worked harder at perfection than the Old Guard, whose members devoted an immoderate amount of time to shining shoes,
polishing medals, and drilling for ceremonial duties at Arlington. They practiced earth-shaking artillery salutes, folded
flags until they could do it in their sleep, and tromped the Virginia hills in marching platoons until the formation moved
as a single organism. Four times a year, they made dry runs for a presidential funeral, hauling weighted caskets up and down
the steps of the National Cathedral in Washington to prepare for the death of President Hoover, President Eisenhower, or President Truman—nobody expected President Kennedy
to go first.
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When they were transported across the river for such ceremonies, the Old Guard made the trip standing—their buses were not
equipped with seats because sitting would wrinkle one’s sharply creased trousers. “We all stood erect,” said 1st Lt. Edward
M. Gripkey, who helped organize President Kennedy’s funeral. “Once dressed in my trousers, I did not sit.”
⁴⁹

The Old Guard was proud of its traditions, taking a dim professional view of comrades who devoted less attention to discipline
and appearance. A few Old Guards, irked that Special Forces soldiers had been airlifted to Washington for the Kennedy funeral, took quiet delight when one of the Green Berets swooned under the unaccustomed strain of duty at
Arlington. “When one of them ‘took a knee’ after standing in position for a long time, the ceremonial troops who saw him go
down smiled as if they were amused at his misfortune,” recalled Capt. Thomas F. Reid, the site officer initially in charge
of planning the president’s interment.
⁵⁰

The Old Guard not only furnished the caisson and horses for Kennedy’s funeral; it also dispatched honor guards to stand watch
over his casket, helped form security cordons for his funeral procession, and assigned one of its most promising young officers,
1st Lt. Samuel R. Bird, to oversee the joint services casket detail, which met their slain commander in chief at Andrews Air
Force Base, stayed with him through the wee hours of Saturday morning, returned him to the White House, and moved him through
the weekend ceremonies in fine military style. When it came time to see him across the river to Arlington, they did that too.
⁵¹

On Sunday, arriving for rituals on Capitol Hill, some members of Bird’s casket detail faced the long flight of stairs to the
Rotunda with a sense of foreboding. Thirty-six shallow steps led from the Capitol Plaza to the Rotunda entrance. A stand of
television cameras bristled at the top of the stairs and the Kennedy family filed into place at the bottom, with Bird’s casket
team in between. The whole world would be watching the nine men assigned to carry a mahogany casket weighing 1,300 pounds—about
the heft of a thoroughbred horse—to the top. “I remember looking at the steep incline and thinking it looked more like a wall
than steps,” said Army Spec. Douglas A. Mayfield, one of three soldiers, two marines, two sailors, one airman, and one coastguardsman
assigned to carry the president’s casket that weekend.
⁵²
With Lieutenant Bird hovering behind, the team eased Kennedy from the caisson and slowly began its ascent. As the casket
detail did so, Bird sensed that the men were having trouble balancing their load. He slipped behind the squad and lifted the
casket from its back corners to relieve the strain, which gave the pallbearers a boost up the stairs. With each step the strain
grew greater as they struggled to keep the casket level and struggled to make it look as if they were not struggling. Those
on the lower end had to hoist the casket shoulder high, while the men in front tried to maintain their grip at waist level.
With Bird close behind, watching for any signs of slippage, the casket bearers inched up the stairs, followed by Mrs. Kennedy
and her two children.
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Down on the plaza, just as the Coast Guard Band sounded the last strains of the Navy Hymn, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,”
the casket detail reached the top, moved out of the bright sunlight, and disappeared into the darkened Rotunda. Under the
dome, they settled Kennedy onto President Lincoln’s catafalque and stepped back. Mrs. Kennedy, dressed in black with a long
veil, emerged from the shadows, clutching the hand of her daughter, Caroline. The pair of them strode forward through the
soaring chamber and knelt before the casket. As Mrs. Kennedy did so, she stretched out one hand to touch the box. She leaned
in to kiss the flag, rose to her feet, and melted into the Rotunda again.
⁵⁴

Across the river at Arlington, soldiers and civilians made preparation for Monday’s interment. John Metzler summoned Clifton
Pollard, his best gravedigger, to work that day. “Sorry to pull you out like this on a Sunday morning,” Metzler told Pollard.
“Oh, don’t say that,” the gravedigger told him. “Why, it’s an honor for me to be here.” With Metzler watching, Pollard climbed
aboard his massive backhoe, revved the diesel engine, and began to bite great chunks of earth from the hill below the Lee
mansion. “That’s nice soil,” said Metzler, inspecting the first shovelful with a practiced eye. “I’d like to save a little
of it.” Some of the earth was taken away to grow new turf for the president’s grave. Pollard, operating his machine with surgical
precision, resumed digging, making a tidy job of it.
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Shortly after Metzler became superintendent of Arlington in 1951, he had moved the cemetery into the automated age, replacing
shovels, in use since the time of James Parks, with new earthmoving machines. It took a man with a shovel most of a day to
dig a proper grave, while an experienced backhoe operator such as Pollard could complete the task in fifteen minutes.
⁵⁶
Given the occasion, Pollard may have taken a bit longer, consulting with Metzler between scoops, at one point offering his
own simple eulogy for Kennedy. “He was a good man,” said Pollard. “Yes, he was,” echoed Metzler. “Now they’re going to come
and put him right here in this grave I’m making up,” said Pollard.
⁵⁷

The gravedigger went back to work, while Metzler wrestled with a challenging new request from Mrs. Kennedy, who wanted an
eternal flame installed at her husband’s grave. She had seen such a memorial in Paris at the Arc de Triomphe, while visiting
the tomb of the
poiluinconnu
with the president in 1961. That experience now inspired her suggestion for Arlington. Her appeal, conveyed to Metzler about
three p.m. on Sunday, allowed precious little time for designing, constructing, installing, and testing the device so that
Mrs. Kennedy could safely light it on Monday afternoon—less than twenty-four hours away.
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What if the flame exploded? What if it failed to light? What if it set an archbishop on fire? “I advised them that such a
construction and installation was beyond my capabilities,” Metzler said,“and their answer was, ‘Yes, we know but somehow get
an eternal flame.’”
⁵⁹
Metzler hung up, pondered the request, and reached for the receiver again. This time he phoned Lt. Col. Bernard G. Carroll,
the post engineer at Fort Myer, to see if his shop could produce the required torch. Carroll thought he might be able to build
the thing. While Carroll considered a workable design, he and Metzler pulled the Yellow Pages from the shelf and began phoning
gas companies in Virginia and Maryland for equipment. The men discovered with a growing sense of anxiety that few businesses
were answering their telephones that Sunday afternoon. Finally a contractor from Rockville, Maryland, took the call, listened
with interest, and offered to help. A tank of propane gas and three hundred feet of quarter-inch copper tubing were soon on
their way to Arlington. Carroll, meanwhile, consulted with fellow engineers for a simple but foolproof design, which combined
one tank of gas, the length of copper tubing, one Hawaiian luau torch, and a custom-built wire basket to hold the burner eighteen
inches off the ground. The apparatus would be neither pretty nor eternal but it might work until something better could be
devised.
⁶⁰

While workers at Arlington dug a trench for the gas line, army engineers welded the basket and torch into a single unit. The
device was delivered to the cemetery by nine p.m. Sunday and set in place at the head of Kennedy’s grave. The gas tank, hidden
in a thicket of bamboo near the Lee mansion, would be operated by an army sergeant, ready to open the valve on a signal from
graveside.
⁶¹
Fresh-cut pine boughs were heaped around the burner to hide the unsightly contrivance. With all elements in place, the patchwork
creation was ready for a test run. The sergeant turned the tap. Gas hissed from a valve by the president’s grave. A burst
of light flared on the dark hillside. The eternal flame was up and running by midnight.
⁶²

Exhausted soldiers from the Old Guard drifted back across the river as Sunday evening lengthened, but nobody got much rest
that night, which was filled with shining shoes, pressing uniforms, poring over funeral plans, and drilling for the next day’s
duty. Just after dinner, Army Spec. Douglas Mayfield and others from the joint service casket team were summoned for flag-folding
practice with Lieutenant Bird. The team was expected to retire the Stars and Stripes from the president’s casket in the traditional,
slow-motion manner, transforming the familiar rectangle into a tight blue triangle. Under Bird’s watchful eye, the eight men
folded and unfolded the flag for hours until the crew was performing flawlessly.
⁶³