On Hallowed Ground

by Robert M Poole

  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.42 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.43

  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.46

  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.48 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.53 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 int
erment. 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.55

  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.58

  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

  “As good as each member was individually, it was critical that we practice together over and over … since two days before we had never met and didn’t know each other,” Mayfield recalled. “If just one member falters or the team’s timing is off, the flag could be dropped, red and white stripes could be other than straight, and red could be showing in the triangular folded flag where only blue with white stars are supposed to be. We knew that we would be … scrutinized by millions of viewers and we wanted to give the impression that … operating in unison was second nature to us.”64

  By the time the flag folders had reached that benchmark, the clock was ticking toward midnight. But the casket men still had work to do. They filed onto a bus, rode through the empty cemetery, and emerged at Arlington’s amphitheater, where the Tomb of the Unknowns was bathed in ghostly white light. Lieutenant Bird had ordered a practice casket—one of several the Old Guard kept to train recruits at Arlington—to be brought out for his men to carry up and down the long amphitheater stairs. He wanted to simulate the next day’s most daunting challenge: bringing President Kennedy out of the Rotunda and down the Capitol stairs without slipping.65

  “It appeared to me that very little consideration had been given to the tremendous weight of the casket during the planning stages of the funeral,” Bird said.“It required every ounce of strength that all nine of us could muster to move the casket in an appropriate and respectful manner.66 We knew it would be much harder to carry it down because they would lose me on the back as it came down,” Bird recalled.67 That night at Arlington, as Specialist Mayfield took his accustomed position on the front corner of the casket and lifted, he noticed that the practice box was heavier than usual—for good reason: Bird had stuffed it with sandbags to make the burden more realistic. The casket men hoisted their load, slow-marched it down the steps, and seemed to have little trouble. Thinking the box might still be too light, Bird clambered aboard to make it heavier, hanging on to the casket while his men carried him down the stairs. The exhausted team managed with aplomb, so Bird added more weight, this time in the person of a tomb sentinel who had been watching the trials from the sidelines. He joined the lieutenant as casket rider, while the body bearers wobbled beneath them, straining down the long stairs for the last time. With their hands blistered and their backs sore, they finally lost their grip, and Bird called a halt to the proceedings. “We’ve done all we can tonight fellas,” he said. “We’re just not going to make it … Don’t worry about it. We’ll get it in the morning.”68

  Crowds jammed the Rotunda that Sunday night, waiting in long lines to pay their respects to the slain president. A Democratic congressman from Michigan, Rep. Neil Staebler, wandered Capitol Hill at eight p.m. to find mourners patiently waiting to get inside, in ranks four abreast and ten blocks long. When he returned five hours later, thinking that the November chill and the late hour might have thinned the crowds, he was surprised to find that the multitude had grown—now the lines stood twelve abreast for fifteen blocks. “The people just had come to Washington to somehow be near the occasion and express themselves,” Staebler said.69 The masses were still there on Monday when the great bronze doors of the Rotunda heaved shut at nine a.m., leaving 12,000 mourners outside, still waiting for a glimpse of the president’s casket. Officials estimated that some 250,000 passed through the Rotunda on Sunday and Monday.70

  The crowds grew on Monday as Lieutenant Bird’s bleary-eyed casket team filed onto a bus and drove across the river to Capitol Hill. Traff
ic choked the streets. The bus, blaring its horn, could not break through, so Bird and company jumped out and covered the last quarter mile on foot, arriving in time to huddle in a quiet corner of the Rotunda before their next moment in the spotlight.71

  “Bow your heads,” Bird ordered his men. The lieutenant prayed: “Dear God, please give us strength to do this last thing for the President.” Bird opened his eyes and checked his watch. “Let’s move,” he said, leading them toward the Rotunda, where they collected Kennedy’s casket and made for the steps.72 They began to descend as the Coast Guard Band struck up the first chords of “O God of Loveliness.”73 They glided down to the plaza with no hint of trouble, keeping the casket level and making it look effortless. One of them later said it had seemed like a magic carpet ride.74

  For the first time in its history, the whole nation watched a presidential funeral as it took place, the flag-draped caisson rattling through silent, brooding streets, the solemn ranks of warriors marching in strict columns, Black Jack skipping sideways up the White House drive, Mrs. Kennedy, standing tall and perfectly composed, striding out the drive for St. Matthew’s, with Robert and Teddy Kennedy alongside. The Black Watch, in bristling bearskin hats and white spats, set the pace, their pipes wailing “The Brown-Haired Maiden” and “The Barren Rocks of Aden” under skeletal trees on a brilliant autumn day.75 One of the president’s friends said it was just the sort of New England weather Kennedy loved, along with the martial pageantry.76 As noon approached, all lines converged on the sturdy Romanesque hulk of St. Matthew’s, where world leaders, politicians, and family trudged up the steps and packed the pews inside. It was a crowded, disparate audience, including, among others, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gov. George C. Wallace, who settled in for the unyielding, comforting words of departure rendered in Latin, bathed in incense, promising better days.77