With the blessing, the crowd spilled out into the narrow streets, where three-year-old John-John snapped off the famous salute to his father, and Sgt. Tom Setterberg guided Big Boy into position to lead the president’s caisson across the river.78 There nervous Secret Service men made their last-minute checks at Arlington. One agent scrambled down into Kennedy’s grave to look for bombs and had to be pulled out by a soldier.79 Another checked for booby traps among the flowers Mrs. Kennedy’s friends brought for the grave. All fretted over the eternal flame, which remained an object of suspicion. Grudgingly the Secret Service yielded, but only if the Army promised to drench the pine boughs around the torch with two buckets of water before it was lit.80
The funeral cortege inched toward Arlington, taking forty-five minutes to cover the three-mile march.81 As the first columns approached and the national drama moved toward its dénouement, Army Sgt. William Malcolm watched from the hillside above the president’s grave and felt an uncharacteristic twinge of stage fright.
“We could look out over the Memorial Gate and see them coming,” said Malcolm, the officer in charge of the seven-man firing party that would provide the last salute for Kennedy.“I was shaking with fright, the way I shook when I came for my first funeral here. That was in January 1961 and I have attended some four thousand funerals since. I had not been frightened since my first funeral, but was with this one.”82
Malcolm was not the only one feeling jittery that afternoon. Army Sgt. Keith Clark, assigned to play Taps for the president, had been standing on the hill since just after noon, feeling the chill seep into his bones as the hours ticked away. There was trouble brewing in the color guard, which had marched before the caisson all weekend, led by Army Platoon Sgt. James R. “Pete” Holder, who proudly carried the American flag, flanked by a marine and an airman. “By the time we reached the graveside,” Holder recalled, “the Air Force guard complained that he could not stand up any longer, and he was going to pass out. I reassured him that he would be okay and cursed him, calling him a S.O.B. to get his adrenaline flowing, and make him mad enough to stay on his feet. He did not fall out, but it was close.”83 Black Jack continued to act up, jerking and jouncing across Memorial Bridge and threatening to break his weary handler, Pfc. Art Carlson. “I had to make a choice,” Carlson recalled, “good posture or keep in step with the drumbeat. I chose keeping in step … I was getting desperately tired, especially my right arm, but knew that if that horse got away from me I would be walking … around a radar station in Greenland before the week was out.” Carlson held on for Arlington, where the arrival on home turf seemed to calm both horse and man.84 Black Jack became an overnight sensation and a beloved character from the Kennedy funeral, but the beast was not universally admired by his coworkers. “I wanted to take him, sight unseen, to a very … secluded place and hit that sonofabitch with a very big board right over the head,” admitted Sergeant Setterberg, sorely tried by the horse’s antics.85
At precisely two forty-two p.m., the caisson rolled to a halt in the cemetery, where the Air Force pipers launched into “Mist-Covered Mountain” and filed over the hills in a slow, majestic march. Lieutenant Bird and his casket team took the president from the wagon and marched him to the grave, easing his casket to rest on supports there. Squadrons of F-105 fighter jets streaked over the hill in the missing man formation, followed by the low-flying 707 Kennedy had known as Air Force One, which dipped its wings in final salute.86
The firing party, deployed above the president’s grave, stiffened at Sergeant Malcolm’s command, raised their M-1 rifles to port arms in one fluid motion, and swung into position for firing, executing a perfect three-round volley. The salute startled an infant, who shrieked disconsolately.87
The baby continued screeching as Sgt. Keith Clark stood to attention, pointed his bugle toward Kennedy’s grave, and began to sound Taps. The song rang true until Clark hit the sixth note, which broke horribly. Everyone heard it. Some thought that Clark’s broken note had been intentional, meant to emphasize the distress the nation felt, but it was nothing of the sort. Clark later said he had missed the note under pressure because his lips were numb and he had been deafened by muzzle blasts from the firing party, which had been uncharacteristically—and unwisely—placed directly behind him instead of off to the side88 to give television cameras a better view.89 Despite the cracked note, Clark finished Taps in good form, with the last crystalline tones lingering over the cemetery. A long moment of silence, and the Marine Band struck up the Navy Hymn, the signal for Bird’s men to begin folding the flag.90
Without a wrinkle, the flag crisply passed down the line of eight men, resolved into a perfect blue triangle in the white-gloved hands of Specialist Mayfield. Clutching the ensign to his heart, Mayfield stepped smartly across the turf to John Metzler, who took the flag and held it while Cardinal Cushing blessed the eternal flame, still inert in its evergreen bed. When Cushing was done, Mrs. Kennedy stepped forward to accept the flag from Metzler, who offered it with these words: “Mrs. Kennedy, this flag is presented to you in the name of a most mournful nation.” He felt a catch in his throat. “Please accept it.” She took the ensign, her eyes filling with tears behind the black veil. “She did not speak,” Metzler said. “I do not believe that she could at that moment.”91
Army Maj. Stanley Converse stepped forward with a lighted taper, which he handed to Mrs. Kennedy with an admission: “This is the saddest moment of my life,” he told her.92 She touched the taper to the torch. The flame burned bright. The crowd stood silent. All of a sudden, there was nothing left to do. Metzler led Mrs. Kennedy and the family down to their waiting cars, which purred off in the late afternoon light, heading back across the river.93
When they were on the way, Metzler plodded up the hill, where visitors continued milling around the grave. “Practically all of the dignitaries were either filing by or just standing and looking at the casket as though in a trance,” Metzler said. “Ever so slowly they began to move off as though they were reluctant to leave … The first sergeant of the Special Forces … stood quietly by the head of the grave, removed his hat and placed it on the frame of the eternal flame. He saluted and departed.” Others spontaneously followed suit, leaving hats and medals by the grave.94
Workers prepared to lower Kennedy’s casket into the earth. Metzler asked the remaining television crews to stop filming. They ignored him. So he ordered his groundsmen to halt work. Then he placed a call to the engineer at Fort Myer, who shut off electricity to Arlington at three thirty-four p.m. that day.95 “Without power they packed their gear and departed,” Metzler said.96
Crowds gone, light failing, Metzler watched his workmen slide Kennedy’s casket into the ground, seal it in a vault, and cover it with the good earth of Arlington. The men erected a white picket fence around the plot to keep visitors from trampling it; inside the paling, they heaped the ground with flowers from well-wishers, tidied up the area, latched the gate, and called it a day. “Our task of burying the President was finished,” said Metzler, who retired to his home in the cemetery that night with a sense of satisfaction—and with no inkling of the profound change the president’s death was about to visit upon Arlington.97
The first sign that things would be different came on the morning after Kennedy’s funeral. When the cemetery gates swung open that day, thousands of visitors poured up through the hills to pay their respects, a pattern which would repeat itself in the weeks and months ahead. Before Kennedy’s funeral, about two million people visited Arlington annually; in the year after it, the number swelled to seven million. Citizens swarmed over the site—to sing hymns, to pray, to conduct obscure religious rites. One woman brought a bottle of holy water, shook it over the eternal flame, and watched in horror as the cap flew off and doused the fire. A soldier from the Old Guard, standing nearby, whipped out his Zippo, restarted the flame, and reassured the visitor. “There, Ma’am,” he said. “And I won’t tell if you won’t tell.”98
Day after day
, mourners left mountains of flowers and trinkets, which had to be carried away by the truckload. Most came just to stand and stare at the simple grave before moving on. A few seemed to forget where they were, sitting on nearby headstones, picnicking, making too much noise, and complaining when they were admonished for it.99 The never-ending stream of visitors tramped past the president’s tomb at the rate of three thousand an hour, forming long lines down the hill from Lee’s mansion. The crowds grew on weekends, when fifty thousand citizens routinely came to visit the new national landmark in the year following Kennedy’s death.100
He had helped to put Arlington on the map again, transforming the place as events of the past had done—like Robert E. Lee’s departure in 1861, the establishment of Freedman’s Village in 1863, the creation of the national cemetery in 1864, the first Decoration Day in 1868, the return of the dead from the Spanish-American War in 1899, and the succession of all the wars since, each of which added new graves, new monuments, new traditions, and new layers of meaning to the nation’s cemetery. After President Kennedy joined the ranks there, nothing would be the same.
The combination of foot traffic and autumn rains transformed the ground around the president’s plot into a quagmire. Workers threw up stanchions to create waiting lanes and walkways, which were layered with tons of gravel. The gravel began to disappear, piece by piece, into pockets and handbags for souvenirs. More stone was trucked in; more vanished.101 The Old Guard deployed sentinels to provide some semblance of order during regular cemetery hours, establishing a temporary command post and shelter for its soldiers in a school bus commandeered from Fort Myer.102
“Nobody was prepared for the increase in visitors,” said John C. Metzler Jr., who took his father’s old job as superintendent of Arlington in 1991. “Everything was trampled. There was no planning for traffic or crowd control. It took a few years to sort it out.”103
Seeing that a permanent, well-planned gravesite was called for, the Kennedy family and Arlington officials began work on a new gravesite almost as soon as the president had been settled at Arlington. The new parcel, designed by architect John Carl Warnecke of Washington, covered a 3.2-acre plot incorporating a terrace carved from the hillside, with curving walkways and ample room for visitors. Located a few yards downhill from the original grave, the new site preserved the view the president had admired, on the axis between the Lee mansion and the Lincoln Memorial. Excerpts from Kennedy’s speeches were chiseled into low-lying walls around the grave, which was outfitted with a new, re-engineered eternal flame. Fed by a permanent natural gas supply, the new torch was set in a five-foot disk of stone, framed by massive paving blocks of Cape Cod granite and equipped with a constantly renewed electrical spark to keep the fire burning through wind and rain. Work on the new site began in 1965 and was finished in July 1967 at a cost of $2.5 million; most of the money came from federal appropriations, but the Kennedy family contributed $632,000 toward the project. As construction neared completion, the president was quietly exhumed after cemetery hours and installed in his new resting place. There he joined two of his infant children, who had been reinterred previously from Boston and Newport, Rhode Island. His brother Robert, assassinated in 1968, came to rest on the terrace that year, his grave marked by a simple white cross.104
As years passed, the flood of tourists diminished but the Kennedy grave remained a magnet for pilgrims, drawing almost four million visitors annually—more than the Tomb of the Unknowns, the Robert E. Lee Memorial, or other popular sites at Arlington. Like other landmarks, the Kennedy tomb occasionally attracted the deeply troubled: a veteran who fatally stabbed himself while horrified onlookers watched in 1972; thieves who made off with the cross from Robert Kennedy’s grave in 1981; an immigrant who drifted into the locked cemetery on a rainy night, fell into the eternal flame, and suffered a fatal heart attack in 1982; vandals who tried to dig up one of the paving stones from the terrace in 1997 but abandoned the venture when they realized that the rock, weighing 500 pounds, was too heavy a trophy.105 These were the exceptions; most visitors came in peace, pausing for reflection under the maturing locusts, hollies, and cherries sheltering the president’s tomb before wandering off to explore other parts of Arlington.
Just as Kennedy inspired a new generation while he was alive, he also influenced thousands of Americans by his example in death. At the time of Kennedy’s funeral, about four thousand people were buried at Arlington each year; afterward, demands for interment jumped to seven thousand annually.106 Like the burials of Gen. Montgomery Meigs and distinguished Civil War officers in the previous century, Kennedy’s widely watched funeral made Arlington a prestigious venue for final honors. The sudden increase in burial requests meant that Arlington would be full by 1988, with no space for new interments unless the cemetery tightened burial restrictions. After 1966, therefore, new interments were limited to those who died on active duty, retired with a disability or twenty years of service, or won high military honors—rules that still apply at Arlington. At the same time, Arlington planned for a columbarium to hold cremated remains and preserve space for traditional in-ground burials.107 The cemetery proceeded to develop two hundred acres of land from South Post of Fort Myer, which would provide space for new burials well into the twenty-first century.108
“Kennedy’s funeral prompted these changes,” said John C. Metzler Jr. “It was a milestone, one of the most significant events in our history.”109
That milestone not only shaped Arlington’s development but also transformed the lives of many who participated in that memorable weekend of pageantry and loss.
For Capt. Michael Groves, twenty-seven, a popular officer who commanded the Honor Guard Company at Fort Myer, the stress of planning and staffing Kennedy’s funeral proved too great a burden. Ten days after the president’s interment, Groves collapsed at his dinner table, dying of a heart attack. Comrades from the Old Guard, already saddened by Kennedy’s death, were stunned by the sudden loss of Groves, a respected young soldier who had betrayed no sign of ill health.110 “We’d lost a popular President,” said Pfc. William W. Morris, “but Mike Groves was one of us, a great leader, and a friend to many in the company.” With other members of the Old Guard, Morris pressed his best uniform that December, polished his medals to a high sheen, and solemnly carried his young captain to the grave, in Section 30 of Arlington, long before such a funeral seemed reasonable.111
For John C. Metzler Jr., who had been a sixteen-year-old watching his father preside over President Kennedy’s funeral, the occasion reinforced his decision to join the Army and serve in Vietnam. When he returned from overseas, Metzler went to work for the Veterans Administration, moved back to the superintendent’s lodge, and oversaw another Kennedy funeral at Arlington—this time for Jacqueline, who was buried beside her husband in 1994. “Never in a thousand years did I imagine that I would come back to finish what my father started in 1963,” said Metzler, standing on the hill above the grave.112
The fractious Black Jack continued his career as a riderless horse, serving with characteristic flair at services for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, President Herbert Hoover, and President Lyndon B. Johnson before retiring in 1973. The horse lived to the ripe old age of twenty-nine, dying in 1976. Comrades from the Old Guard buried him with honors on the broad turf of Summerall Field at Fort Myer, not far from the stables; his grave is marked by a bronze tablet and a horseshoe-shaped hedge.113
President Kennedy’s death marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. In Vietnam, the escalating war would draw more American troops into the struggle, including some of the best officers from the Old Guard. Among those who eagerly joined the fight was fresh-faced, patriotic 1st Lt. Sam Bird, who had so ably headed the casket team for Kennedy’s funeral. Promoted to captain, Bird led a combat company in fierce fighting until 1967, when his helicopter came under heavy enemy fire. Several rounds hit Bird, including one that blew away a quarter of his skull. By some miracle, Bird survived the brain injury, living
another seventeen years. He was greatly diminished but still proud of the way his men had performed for President Kennedy in November 1963.114
13
THE LAST UNKNOWN
MEMORIAL DAY OF 1984 BROKE hazy over washington, with low gray clouds and weeping skies evoking the oppressive atmosphere familiar to so many who had served in Vietnam. “Mekong weather,” recalled one veteran among the two hundred fifty thousand well-wishers who crowded the capital’s streets to watch a flag-covered caisson make the familiar, measured journey down from Capitol Hill and across the river to Arlington for a state funeral.1
After more than a decade of uncertainty and bitterness, the nation was finally honoring the Unknown of the Vietnam War—the long, star-crossed conflict that continued to stir argument for years after the last U.S. troops had withdrawn from Southeast Asia. Some three thousand guests had taken their seats on the marble benches of the Arlington amphitheater, where President Ronald Reagan strode to the podium, squared his shoulders, and launched into an overdue tribute to the Vietnam Unknown and those who had served with him.2
On Hallowed Ground Page 28