On Hallowed Ground (33 page)

“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.”
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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. Traffic 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.”
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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.
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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.
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One of the president’s friends said it was just the sort of New England weather Kennedy loved, along with the martial pageantry.
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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

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.
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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.
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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.
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The funeral cortege inched toward Arlington, taking forty-five minutes to cover the three-mile march.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 side
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to give television cameras a better view.
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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.
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“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.
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