Nearly everyone here was seeing the President’s grave for the first time. They found the setting unexpectedly lovely. Eunice Shriver, who had been at the Cape when it had been chosen, looked over the bandsmen’s heads and thought how, if her brother could stand up, he would point past the sparkling instruments and shout “Look at those flowers!” Hubert Humphrey was behind Jacqueline Kennedy. “We went to the burial ground area of the President,” the Senator observed afterward. “And how beautiful the site that was selected! I fail to find the words to adequately express it. But it seems to me as if he stands as a constant sentinel over the nation’s capital. The President’s grave is like an outpost for observation of the capital city.” Humphrey had seen the fly-by, and envisioned it as a crew “paying its last respects to the captain of the ship.” He “couldn’t help but think again and again—why did this happen? Why, oh why in America did we have to experience such evil, such hate, such lawlessness, such violence?” Yet the peaceful, sunlit tableau before him was a reminder of how far away Dallas was. He marveled that the scene could be so beautiful, so tranquil—“and yet so final. Then,” he added, “we saw our President laid to rest.”
The cadets went through their silent drill, their rifle butts reversed in mourning for Ireland’s martyrs, and marched off past the floral blanket to the muted lilt of a cadence counted in Gaelic; Cardinal Cushing stepped to the edge of the pine boughs around the torch and began the commitment. It turned out to be another Cushing surprise. The clergy was expecting the traditional “Blessing of the Body and Burial.” Father Thomas McGraw, Arlington’s Catholic chaplain, had buried more members of the Church than any of the august prelates here, and could chant the opening “Non intres in iudicium cum servo tuo, Domine”—“O Lord, do not bring Your servant to trial”—without benefit of the missal. He awaited it, and heard instead the rasping voice pray, “O God, through whose mercy the souls of the faithful find rest, be pleased to bless this grave and… the body we bury herein, that of our beloved Jack Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, that his soul may rejoice in Thee with all the saints, through Christ the Lord. Amen.” Once more His Eminence had impulsively abandoned Latin and was delivering the blessing in English, with the agreeable consequence that much of it was familiar to Protestants on the slope and in the listening nation. Only the translation varied slightly as he intoned, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believeth in Me, although he be dead, shall live, and everyone who liveth and believeth in Me, shall not die forever.” For the last time the Cardinal asked that the President be granted eternal rest and perpetual light. He led all who could hear him in the Lord’s Prayer; then he broke off and stepped back.
“Pre-sent Arms!”
In McClellan Circle Captain Gay’s battery fired its twenty-one-gun salute. The troops were brought to order arms for the benediction, the casket team tilted up the field of stars while the Cardinal sprinkled holy water on the coffin. Once more he stepped back, and the order to present arms was repeated. Lieutenant Bird, standing opposite the casket from the family, had been staring right into the Attorney General’s eyes. Now he saw Robert Kennedy’s head turn. Bob, Jackie, and Ted were holding a whispered consultation. Metzler murmured anxiously to Bob, “Honors are still being sounded.” “Honors” means little to laymen, but in a military funeral they are the entire sequence of artillery, riflery, and music which pays homage to the departed. Presidential honors are complex anyhow, but these, for the first Catholic President, were further complicated by the need to consecrate this specific plot of ground in the name of the Church. The benediction, in short, had become part of the sequence. And the one inviolable rule about honors is that once they have begun they cannot be interrupted. They had to run their course, from the first shot in McClellan Circle to the last trumpet note here. An interruption was precisely what the three Kennedys had had in mind. They wanted to interpolate their reading before taps. It was impossible. Ted whispered to Jackie, “I don’t think I should do it now, do you?” She whispered back, “No, no, you should, too.”
“Firing party—fire three volleys!”
At the rim of the hill Sergeant William Malcolm barked: “Ready!” A squad from the Old Guard executed a half-right face, whacked the ground with the butts of their M-1’s, and came to port arms. Malcolm ordered: “Aim!” The rifles came up together at a 45-degree angle. Then: “Fire!” The neat crack resounded across the copses and dells of Arlington as it had, for this squad, in four thousand funerals before. This time there was a difference, however. Twice more the sergeant snapped, “Aim…fire!” and after the third volley, as the squad stiffened at present arms, an infant in the crowd began to cry like a banshee. Everyone on the crest heard the wail except Sergeant Keith Clark, whose eardrums felt ruptured. Clark’s lips were numb, too; he had been standing in that same cold spot for nearly three hours. Nevertheless he was on now. In funerals, he believed, the trumpeter should play only for the widow, and pointing the bell of his bugle at Mrs. Kennedy he began the somber melody which had been proverbial on American military posts since General Daniel Butterfield composed it for the Army of the Potomac a century before: “Day is done. Gone the sun.…” And there Clark, after four years of playing taps daily, lost the first note of his career. It cracked; it was like a catch in your voice, or a swiftly stifled sob.
He finished sweetly, the troops thumped to parade rest, and Jack Metzler nodded at the Marine Band. Nothing happened. Agitated, he nodded again, and then again, violently, before the drum major’s baton arched up for the slowest—eighty beats—of all the Navy hymn renditions. Now Lieutenant Bird’s turn had come. His team had disregarded all the shouted commands. The eight men stood, four facing four, their white-gloved fingers tight on the VA flag they had placed over the coffin in the corridor outside Bethesda’s morgue. Fingers provided the cue to what they did with bunting over graves; signals between them were transmitted by tension on the banner’s hem. The Lieutenant gave a sign to Sergeant James Felder. Felder tugged hard and they were off, their arms moving like whips, folding the colors in a triangle as the cloth sped across the casket top, away from General de Gaulle and toward Cardinal Cushing. At the head of the coffin the last man clutched the triangle to his chest; it was passed from breast to breast, and then Sp/4 Douglas Mayfield executed a sharp right face, handed it to Metzler and saluted. As his forefinger touched the bill of his cap a pool camera in the press stand caught the young Californian full-face; 105 million Americans saw his lips tremble and his eyes brim.
The Marines were supposed to play one chorus of “Eternal Father.” They played three while the superintendent waited with the flag and Cardinal Cushing pondered the torch before him. He was one of the few people around the grave who had known of its existence beforehand; during his final briefing that morning an Army officer had told him that as “chaplain” he would be expected to bless it. The Cardinal had been somewhat nonplused. He knew nothing about eternal flames and doubted there was a special prayer for them. After hasty ecclesiastical research the archbishop’s office had reported that His Eminence was absolutely right. Very well, Cushing replied; he would make one up. Actually, improvisation didn’t go that far. He settled for the Church’s blessing “Ad Omnia”—that is, a blessing for everything which doesn’t already have a blessing of its own—and when the band finally said Amen to the hymn, he chanted it over the torch, the pine boughs, and the copper tubing.
Major Converse, the engineer officer whose pockets were bulging with matches and cigarette lighters, ignited his taper. The major was understandably jumpy. He fully appreciated what would happen if the make-shift light failed. To his dismay he saw that he and his flaming stick would have to wait; Jack Metzler and the Cardinal were approaching Jacqueline Kennedy. The superintendent reached her first. Sidling up he said brokenly, “Mrs. Kennedy, this flag is presented to you in the name of a most mournful nation.” He didn’t want to give it to her. He could see the puffiness of her lids under the veil, and he knew
that for wives this was the most difficult part of the burial service. But that was only because it was the climax. He had to go on. Holding out the colors he finished in a whisper, “Please accept it.” He faded back and left her alone with that dreadful, quite unique loneliness of widows at the grave—the bright triangle of blue, white, and red startling against the solid black of the suit she had first worn when her husband announced his Presidential candidacy, the five-pointed stars huge in her small hands, and on her veiled face a wide, puzzled look, the brow half arched and the lips parted as though about to ask, Is this all I have of him? “With her eyes filling with tears,” Metzler wrote afterward, “she quietly clutched the flag and momentarily held it close to her. She did not speak. I do not believe she could at that moment.”
Her resilience was still there, however, and she displayed it when the Cardinal came up. Last evening Shriver had told him that the President’s brothers would quote from his speeches in the cemetery. Cushing hadn’t liked the idea—“It’ll sound like politics,” he had said; “you’ll be tying a rope around his coffin”—but that wasn’t his affair. Both the religious and military services were over. If the Attorney General and the Senator were to speak, it would have to be now, and he was here to lead Ted to the head of the grave and introduce him. But the Kennedys had finally resolved the issue of recitations among themselves. According to Jacqueline Kennedy, “I think it was during taps or just after that Teddy, Bobby, and I looked at each other and the same thought was in all our eyes—and Teddy shook his head as if to say ‘No,’ and Bobby and I nodded—and as I was the one nearest the Cardinal, when he turned to me I said, ‘No, Your Eminence.’ ” Cushing, bewildered, again moved to take Ted by the arm, and Mrs. Kennedy repeated firmly, “I said no, Your Eminence.”
His Eminence understood now. He withdrew and embraced Mrs. Joseph Kennedy. “Good-bye, my dear,” he whispered. “God be with you.” Meantime Major Converse had stepped into his place. “This is the saddest moment of my life,” he said to Jacqueline Kennedy, and she looked up into his long, tense face and believed it. He handed her the taper and led her to the branches of evergreen. Leaning over them, she touched the blazing tip against the nub of the torch, and it sprang to life. She handed the rod to Bob. He repeated the gesture and turned toward his mother, holding it out. Rose Kennedy didn’t see him. She hadn’t known about the eternal flame. Her head was bowed in silent prayer, so he swung the other way and gave it to Ted. Ted hadn’t expected to join them, but he too grazed the rod against the shimmering yellow-blue gout of fire. The engineers waited to see whether the new President would come forward. He couldn’t. He was on the wrong side of the coffin, boxed in by bodyguards, and the Major took the taper from Ted and extinguished it. The little ceremony was over.
Indeed, everything was over—the burial service, the state funeral, the strangely congruous blend of Old World mysticism and American tradition, the parade of uniforms and vestments, of judges and secret agents, of princes and prelates and anonymous, nondescript citizens who had surged across the bridge in the wake of the marching columns because they couldn’t bear to be left behind. The presence of the mob had been anticipated; in the past twenty-four hours the Military District of Washington had learned a great deal about the appeal of President Kennedy, and to prevent disorder General Wehle had issued an order: “No condolences will be received by next of kin at graveside.” Of course, it was unenforceable. The Cardinal had already consoled the President’s mother, Bishop Hannan was moving toward his widow, the new First Lady was waiting by Jacqueline Kennedy’s car, and turning from the pine boughs Robert Kennedy murmured to his sister-in-law, “Say good-bye to General Taylor. He did so much for Jack.”
Cradling the flag under her left arm, she strained up to press her cheek against the General’s, and there is a vivid photograph of the scene, in which America’s first soldier is inclining his bare head toward her. The white gloves of the other Chiefs and aides are flying toward their own caps, to doff them. They are at attention, yet the most erect and militant figure there, despite his anomalous tails, is Robert Kennedy. At the time Taylor thought her incoherent, but that was because her voice was low and his hearing defective. “Jack loved you so much,” she told him. Both Bishop Hannan and Mrs. Johnson were astonished that she could be articulate with them. The Bishop leaned over and said, “God bless you, you are doing wonderfully well.” Having participated in many funerals, he expected no response, but she said, “Thank you very much for the eulogy. It was splendid.” She walked down the hill holding Bob Kennedy’s hand, and they were about to enter their car when she saw Lady Bird, with seventeen-year-old Johnny Connally at her elbow. The boy had a letter for the widow from his mother; she took it and gently inquired about his father’s condition.
In the car Mrs. Kennedy and the two brothers talked of the funeral—of how splendid it had been—and as the procession of returning cars came off the Washington side of the bridge and turned left, Robert Kennedy ordered the chauffeur of their car to leave the line and circle the Lincoln Memorial from the right. That way they could see the statue. He told the driver to draw over in front of it, and they did, as thousands of tourists do each day. From the back seat President Kennedy’s widow and the two heirs of his political legacy inclined their heads leftward to look up between the columns at Daniel Chester French’s nineteen-foot-high figure of the sad, strong, brooding President Lincoln, the marble chin tilted in thought. After a while Bob tapped the chauffeur. They drove on without having spoken.
“The end of the service at Arlington,” Mac Bundy wrote, “was like the fall of a curtain, or the snapping of taut strings.” Undeniably the break seemed abrupt to those who left at once, and they included most of the principals. Bundy hurried to the executive mansion to intercept Charles de Gaulle. Buses carted off the honor platoons; Sergeant Keith Clark plodded gloomily back to Fort Myer, where he tried to turn in his bugle, and where Black Jack, submissive, was led to his stable. Harry Truman and his daughter gave the Eisenhowers a drink for the road at Blair House. Speaker McCormack, feeling it “terribly important” that he “be available at such a time,” spent the remainder of the afternoon in his office and was given his first insight into that cold purgatory which is the lot of the man next in line of succession to the Presidency; no one even telephoned him. Cardinal Cushing had to catch a plane right after the service. The instant the new President had left the cemetery—it would have been an inexcusable breach of decorum for a prince of the Church to precede the leader of the state—Archbishop O’Boyle and Bishop Hannan hustled the Cardinal to Washington National. His red robes flapping, he bounded out of the car and into the terminal. His way was briefly blocked by a man who flung his arms around his neck and said, “I was proud of you today, Cardinal Spellman.” His Eminence replied gravely, “Glad to be of service any time.”
For those who lingered on the hillside, the graveside tableau dissolved more slowly. Just as the Marine Band hadn’t wanted to stop playing the Navy hymn, so, afterward, were thousands loath to concede that they had said farewell to John Kennedy. Even Bundy, before he departed the cemetery, had noticed how Dean Rusk, leading the Cabinet past the grave, seemed “held by the tie of his affection and loyalty, the one so well understood, the other so foggily hidden.… He stood for what seemed a long time and may have been even a half a minute—alone with the man he was leaving.” Jack Metzler observed that “practically all of the dignitaries were either filing by or just standing and looking at the casket as though in a trance. Ever so slowly they began to move off as though they were reluctant to leave.”
The same unwillingness was discernible in the military. After the foreigners left, Lieutenant Bird marched his casket team down the slope and ordered an about-face and a last salute of the coffin. That was not part of the ceremony, he explained afterward, but “we had been with him so long and loved him so much that we just wanted to do it.” Metzler escorted the last of the eminent guests to Hatfield Gate and returned to find that th
e Special Forces, on their own, had posted a guard of four men at the corners of the plot. When they had to leave, the Engineers pleaded for permission to relieve them. Sometime between 4:15 and 4:45 P.M. one of the guerrilla fighters, Sergeant Major Frank Ruddy, returned alone. Two years earlier the President had revoked an order banning their green berets. Now Ruddy saluted, took off his own and laid it on the pine boughs. “He gave us the beret,” Ruddy said later, “and we thought it fitting to give one back to him.”
Beneath the slope the indomitable public knelt, hats in hand. They were waiting here patiently as they had waited last night on that other hill outside the rotunda, and later, when Metzler permitted it, they shuffled up from Sheridan Drive, circling the plot and moving back down as newcomers lengthened the line below. Standard procedure required Arlington guards to start closing the cemetery’s eight gates at quarter of five. It was tried today, but the crush of grieving figures was too great; for another hour and a half they plodded round and round in the thickening gloom.
By then Metzler had disposed of the invisible public. He hadn’t foreseen that problem at all; after the Kennedys’ departure, he had thought, the networks would turn elsewhere. Not so; they, too, were reluctant to leave, and in the press stand the pool cameras ground on, swinging from the torch to Lee Mansion to the shafts of sunlight filtering through the trees and lengthening shadows behind the other graves of Arlington. The networks were renitent to going, too. And they were holding their national audience, most of which was still watching its screens at 3:31 P.M., nearly a quarter-hour after the Kennedys had left, when the lowering device began to bear the coffin down. (As it disappeared David Brinkley was saying, “The act which killed the President was spawned out of bigotry and extremism, but it has had the opposite effect of drawing people together.…”) At this point Metzler became concerned. He wanted to seal the vault, fill the grave, erect a picket fence around the plot, and dress the ground around the evergreen boughs with flowers. Expecting him to do it in front of a hundred million rubbernecks was too much, he heatedly told Colonel Miller. Miller agreed. He went to the Army’s information chief and the NBC and CBS technicians, arguing that “these things aren’t for public view.” NBC’s director agreed. He had been telling his New York office exactly that, without luck. “You try,” he said, offering the Colonel his earphones. Miller had just started to when Metzler decided talk was pointless. He saw the red lights still shining on the cameras and summoned his post engineer. “Pull the juice,” he said grimly. “Yank the plug.” And that is precisely what was done. One moment the great audience was watching the liquid undulations of the eternal flame; a moment later all electrical power in the cemetery was cut off, and the screens went blank.
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