Do not believe the old axiom that dead men tell no tales. In truth, they comprise a virtual Spoon River of self-revelation. Not long before he died, Herbert Hoover chose a burial site on a gentle knoll in his boyhood home of West Branch, Iowa. Hoover gave instructions that nothing was to be built or planted that might obstruct the view between his final resting place and the tiny, 14- by 20-foot white frame cottage where his life began in August 1874. The old man wished to draw the visitor’s attention to the two-room dwelling, its dimensions identical to those of the modern American living room. What Hoover really wanted to celebrate was the American dream, as embodied in the life of an Iowa blacksmith’s son who would feed a billion people in fifty-seven countries, and serve one, mostly unhappy, term in the White House.
Even more reticent than the Quaker orphan from West Branch was his sphinxlike predecessor, Calvin Coolidge. No friend to pomp, Coolidge once observed that “it is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know he is not a great man.” Consistent with this philosophy, he scornfully rejected the offer of a wealthy friend to build him and his family a gleaming marble mausoleum near the old homestead in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Today the nation’s thirtieth president lies beneath a plain granite headstone, alongside five generations of Coolidges, including the mother and son whose early deaths cast a permanent shadow across this shy, sentimental Yankee.
It was to Plymouth that I talked my parents into driving me in the summer of 1962, a few months before my ninth birthday. There, beneath the looming purple mass of Salt Ash Mountain, we discovered a toy village of six houses, a number unchanged since Coolidge was born at the back of his father’s country store on the Fourth of July 1872. From this modest beginning grew a hobby that would strike others as only slightly less ghoulish than graverobbing. Classmates celebrated the Celtics and Bruins, deconstructed the lyrics of Lennon and McCartney, pulled trout out of local streams, or pasted stamps in a book. Some collected baseball cards. I collected deceased presidents. Dead men talking.
As a youngster of annoying precocity, I was entrusted with planning responsibilities for each summer’s family vacation, thereby exposing my siblings to these and countless other gravesites, battlefields, and historic homes. My fellow passengers in this station wagon hell, immune to the thrill of the chase that motivates any true collector, took what consolation they could in each night’s motel pool. The pursuit of underground history, so to speak, is not for the faint of heart, as we discovered one evening at the corner of Witherspoon and Wiggins Streets in Princeton, New Jersey. Twilight was falling; to prevent being locked in for the night, the family car was parked astride the cemetery gates.
In life a three hundred pound mountain of a man, in death Grover Cleveland is anything but conspicuous. Tracking my quarry by headlight beams, ten minutes went by. Fifteen. Twenty. Adding to the surreal tone of the hunt, who should I come upon but—Aaron Burr? As an unreconstructed Hamiltonian, I was tempted to do an impromptu jig on the old reprobate, but time was growing short, the night was growing dark and everyone in the car was growing nervous lest we be arrested for trespassing. Eventually a kind, if dubious, groundskeeper appeared, flashlight in hand, to point out the modest stone marker and urn that adorns the Cleveland plot.
Those who haunt cemeteries can sometimes put their own mortality at risk. As the nation’s first dark horse presidential candidate in 1844, James K. Polk sparked little fer vor (“James K. Who?” sneered rival Whigs who rallied to Henry Clay). Polk is still easily overlooked; on a broiling August afternoon in 1976, I contracted sunstroke while scouring a treeless expanse of lawn surrounding the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville in search of the president who added more real estate to the United States than any other. Sic transit gloria.
Another youthful summer was spent in Ohio, a state which, as the self-proclaimed Mother of Presidents, is also the mother lode of presidential gravesites. By and large, chief executives from the Buckeye State demonstrate an inverse ratio between accomplishment in life and the lavishness with which that life is memorialized. (Of course, who would remember Cheops were it not for his pyramid?)
Consider Warren Gamaliel Harding. Nothing so became Harding’s life as his leaving it. His messy death in a San Francisco hotel room in August 1923 led to journalistic speculation that his wife, Florence, had poisoned him. In the years since, a scholarly consensus has formed around the belief that she didn’t, but should have. Today the Hardings rest unquietly on the outskirts of Marion, Ohio, condemned to an intimacy largely avoided in life, thanks to the generosity of countless schoolchildren who donated their pennies to construct a great hollow drum of white Georgia marble. Not far away is the famed front porch where Harding in 1920 proclaimed his desire for normalcy, and Mrs. Harding shooed away local mistresses whose desires ran in other channels.
Still another occupational hazard, a disappointed officeseeker, ended James Garfield’s brief term in the summer of 1881. Angered over Garfield’s refusal to give him the Paris consulship, Charles J. Guiteau shot the president in a Washington, D.C., railroad station. Guiteau had another motive for his crime: a frustrated author hoping to spur sales of his book, he anticipated today’s tabloid culture, wherein notoriety is the surest ticket to a gig with Larry King (even if modern criminals generally wait until after committing an outrage to take the agent’s call.)
In the feverishly inventive Gilded Age, even a mortally wounded president could inspire technological advance—in Garfield’s case, the world’s first indoor air conditioning system. Amid the stifling heat of a Washington, D.C., summer, a group of Navy engineers was summoned to the White House. Improvising a blower to force air cooled by six tons of ice through a heat vent in the president’s sick room, they succeeded in lowering the temperature twenty degrees.
The patient remained snappish, hardly surprising given his diet of oatmeal and lime water. Told that the Indian warrior Sitting Bull was starving in captivity, Garfield snorted, “Let him starve.” On second thought, a still more wicked alternative suggested itself. “Oh no,” said Garfield, “send him my oatmeal.”
Equally unrepentant, if decidedly more convivial, was Zachary Taylor, who declared on his deathbed, “I have no regret, but am sorry that I am about to leave my friends.” It will come as no surprise that the same nineteenth century that reveled in gloom took a morbid interest in last words. Everyone recalls John Adams’ poignantly inaccurate declaration of July 4, 1826, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” Less well known is Jefferson’s political testament to his countrymen, contained in a letter published that very day in Washington’s National Intelligencer. Gracefully declining an invitation by citizens of the capital to attend ceremonies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson reiterated his lifelong faith in the rights of man, and an optimism vouchsafed by “the light of science.” To the end, he believed it a self-evident truth “that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
Professing indifference over his ancestry, Jefferson took a much different view of posterity. The inscription he composed for his own granite obelisk listed authorship of the Declaration of Independence and Virginia’s Statute for Religious Freedom, and his founding of the University of Virginia, to the exclusion of his service as the nation’s third president. Andrew Jackson used characteristically blunter language to propel his parting shot. Asked if he had any regrets, the fiery Jackson replied, “Yes. I didn’t shoot Henry Clay, and I didn’t hang John C. Calhoun.” More tenderly, Jackson admonished his family and servants, black and white, to keep the Sabbath faithfully. His last recorded words: “We will all meet in Heaven” (where, presumably, he didn’t expect to encounter either Clay or Calhoun).
Jackson’s great political rival, John Quincy Adams, lingered two days after a stroke felled him on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on February 21, 1848. Adams did meet Clay, his onetime secretary of state, with whom he enjoyed a brief, emotional reunion. “This is the end of the earth, but I am content,” he is supposed to have remarked as breath ran out. It is a claim disputed by recent biographer, Paul Nagel, who points out, truthfully enough, that John Quincy Adams was never content. William McKinley, whose initial thought on being shot was for his assailant (“don’t let them hurt him”), expired early in the morning of September 14, 1901, after calling for prayer and murmuring, “Goodbye, goodbye all. It is God’s way. His will, not ours, be done.” The earnest Grover Cleveland did not depart this life before reassuring history, “I have tried so hard to do right.” At the last, a sightless Woodrow Wilson, the very picture of Scottish chill and Presbyterian rectitude, gasped a single word—“Edith!”—the name of his wife and White House protector.
It is no small irony that nineteenth-century presidents, for whom the Constitution existed as a limiting, not an enabling, charter, should have their graves marked by great piles of marble and stained glass, while their allegedly imperial counterparts of the modern era are entombed more modestly. Such is the contrast between Victorians who loved nothing better than a good prolonged cry, and the prosaic emotions of our ironic, if not cynical, age. A century ago, presidents were more remote but also more revered. To be sure, millions of Americans retain indelible memories of the untimely passings of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, but that was before twenty-four-hour-a-day exposure magnified the imperfections of our leaders.
Ever since George Washington was laid to rest “with the greatest good order and regularity” in December 1799, Americans have honored their deceased presidents with varying degrees of pomp and ceremony. As the first incumbent to die in office, William Henry Harrison was accorded a period of mourning scarcely shorter than his month-long tenure. By contrast, John Tyler’s death in 1862 prompted a single paragraph notice, several days after the event, in Washington’s newspapers. Such neglect may have been occasioned by Tyler’s decision to throw in his lot with the Confederacy, in whose Congress he was serving at the time of his passing. In fact, well into the twentieth century, presidential funerals were essentially family affairs. Flamboyant in life, even Theodore Roosevelt went to his grave in a small cemetery near his beloved Sagamore Hill with admirable restraint. At his wife’s request Woodrow Wilson was interred in the unfinished Washington Cathedral in February 1924, following a private service in the dead man’s S Street home. The first president of the modern era to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda was William Howard Taft, and then for only ninety minutes prior to his burial at Arlington National Cemetery.
When Calvin Coolidge died three years later at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, the ceremonies were appropriately minimalist. The strains of Handel’s Xerxes filled a downtown church named for the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards. President Hoover attended, as did Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the president-elect. Local stores remained open, their owners asserting, truthfully enough, that Cal would have wanted it that way. Washington limited itself to a memorial session of Congress. The wishes of the deceased carried less weight in 1945. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s preference for a simple East Room service, with no embalming or lying in state, yielded to more elaborate pageantry consistent with his singular place in public affection and the history of his times. Hundreds of thousands of grieving citizens watched the president’s caisson roll through the streets of Washington en route to Union Station. From there a funeral train carried FDR home to Hyde Park. A quarter century later Dwight Eisenhower became the last American president to ride the rails to his resting place, and the first to have his state funeral at Washington National Cathedral. Although the cathedral never realized its original objective as an American Westminster Abbey, it has become the de facto Church of the Presidents, at least for the ceremonial planners of the Military District of Washington. Since Ike, the great Rose Window and soaring Gothic arches crowning Mount Saint Albans have twice provided a backdrop to presidential obsequies (Reagan in 2004 and Ford in 2007).
It is no accident that most recent presidents have chosen entombment at their presidential libraries, which are often located in settings that shaped their individual characters and outlook. Thus Harry Truman was buried a stone’s throw from the office he frequented after leaving Washington (Truman especially enjoyed conducting tours of the library for visiting schoolchildren). His gravestone, inscribed with the seals of Jackson County, Missouri, the United States Senate, and the presidency, reads like a Who’s Who entry, listing not only every office Truman held, but the dates of his marriage and the birth of his daughter. Andrew Johnson, with no library to commemorate his stormy tenure, insisted on being buried in an American flag, his head resting upon a copy of the Constitution whose wartime transformation he stubbornly refused to concede. Presidents, no less than historians, like to have the last word.
Then there was Lyndon B. Johnson, who chose burial in a family cemetery on the banks of his cherished Pedernales River, “where folks know when you’re sick and care when you die.” Two decades after Johnson received homage beneath the dome of the Capitol he had dominated as Senate majority leader and president, Richard Nixon passed up the formal commemoration of a capital city in which he had never felt at home. Emulating the example of his hero, Charles de Gaulle, Nixon opted for a less official, more heartfelt tribute in Yorba Linda, California—his Colombey-les-deux-Eglises. The town of his birth was also the site of his presidential library. As important, it epitomized the Silent Majority to whom Nixon had appealed during his time in the White House, and who turned out by the thousands to bid him farewell. In the interest of full disclosure: as one who had a hand in drafting Robert Dole’s eulogy for Nixon, delivered on April 27, 1994, I will go to my grave convinced that Richard Nixon hoped to influence the 1996 presidential race from his. Should this really come as a surprise? An uncalculating Nixon, after all, is akin to a demure Madonna, nuance on talk radio, or a Unitarian pope.
In point of fact, Dole had been among the eulogists at Pat Nixon’s funeral the previous June, as was California governor Pete Wilson. Both men were Nixonian favorites. Ten months later the audience was vastly larger as Dole and Wilson reprised their speaking parts, joined this time by President Clinton and Henry Kissinger. Approximately thirty-three million Americans watched Nixon’s late afternoon burial in the lengthening shadow of his boyhood home. They saw a side of Bob Dole few would have predicted—except Nixon himself. For he knew that Dole’s feelings lay just below the surface, much closer than his hardboiled public image suggested. As evidence, he had only to flash back to the lawn of the Russell County Courthouse in August 1976. Following his unexpected vice presidential nomination a day earlier, Dole had returned to Russell for what turned out to be a highly emotional homecoming. Looking out at the crowd on the courthouse lawn, he recognized old friends and neighbors whose spontaneous gifts to a post-World War II fund had enabled a badly wounded second lieutenant to undergo repeated surgeries on his shattered right arm and shoulder. As feelings of the moment mingled with gratitude for past kindnesses, Dole teared up.
In designating him one of his Yorba Linda eulogists, Nixon anticipated the sob in Dole’s voice as he struggled to complete his tribute to the central figure in what the senator that day called the Age of Nixon. So authentic a display of grief was touching to all but the Nixon-haters in the vast audience. Moreover, by exhibiting his feelings so openly, Dole was, in effect, humanized in ways no other speech could have done. Which is exactly what Nixon intended, I believe, as he made his own funeral a showcase for his political heirs. Nixon was always a better campaign manager than candidate.
Nixon’s modest headstone reminds onlookers that “the greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.” By going home to Yorba Linda, he joined a tradition as old as George Washington, and carried on by Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Hayes, and FDR, each of whom rests on his ancestral acres. Less rooted, geographically and politically, was William Howard Taft, whose bumbling performance in the White House was redeemed by his later service as Chief Justice of the United States. Far more than the proverbially jolly fat man of most accounts, Taft was a thoughtful, wry observer of a world moving a bit too fast for his tastes. After finishing third in the 1912 election behind Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, Taft said he consoled himself with the knowledge that no other American had ever been elected ex-president so resoundingly.
So mellow a figure would doubtless have chuckled over the complaint voiced by Herbert Hoover, on leaving Taft’s 1930 Washington funeral service. When his turn came, remarked Hoover, he would see to it that mourners were not denied the pleasure of a good cigar.
The waspish Henry Adams asserted that it was easy to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution; all one had to do was trace the line of presidents stretching from Washington to Grant. Less jaded observers agree that the Grants, no less than the Washingtons, have much to teach us about a nation that is nothing if not a work in progress.
As Brian Lamb demonstrates in the pages that follow, there is no better way to personalize the past than through the lives, and deaths, of America’s presidents. But then, I have long believed there is more drama in a graveyard than a textbook. Meanwhile, the true C-SPAN junkie is left to grapple with an existential question beyond any president’s fathoming: Is there cable in Heaven?
A 1983 photo of Richard Norton Smith with former Boston Mayor Kevin White at the King’s Chapel Burial Ground in Boston. They stand behind the gravestone of Massachusetts’s first governor, John Winthrop.
If you like to explore old cemeteries, take heart. You are not alone, as this book demonstrates. C-SPAN’s guide to presidential gravesites is for people like you and me and historians Richard Norton Smith and Douglas Brinkley, who enjoy learning through personal experience and who think that, as historic sites, cemeteries have much to offer.
Why visit presidential graves? They are gateways to American history, helping us learn more about the men who held our nation’s highest office and the times in which they lived. Americans believe our presidents are no greater than the rest of us. Nonetheless, only forty-three of our fellow citizens have made it to the White House and each helped shape the direction of our nation. When we learn about these men, we learn more about our collective selves.
If you’re a curious but inexperienced gravesite tourist, don’t be daunted by cemeteries. Presidential tombs are not morbid. The truth is, these graves aren’t so much about death as they are about personal and political symbolism. In making this tour, I’ve come to realize how much presidents and their families, from our earliest times, understood the public nature of presidential deaths. Obvious care was given to planning most of their funerals and memorials.
Andrew Jackson and his beloved wife, Rachel, were buried under a cupola in the garden alongside their home in Nashville, surrounded by family members and Uncle Alfred, a favored slave. Our seventh president chose to have the title “general” chiseled into his sarcophagus. Thomas Jefferson also chose an epitaph that ignored his service as president. Visiting his iron-fenced grave at Monticello, you’ll find him self-described for posterity as, “Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.”
Some of the presidents’ final words can be as interesting as their epitaphs. William Henry Harrison, who served only one month of his term, seemed to have his place in history in mind while drawing his last breath. “I wish you to understand the true principles of government,” he’s reported to have said. “I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more.” Grover Cleveland, succumbing to heart failure at age seventy-one, said, “I have tried so hard to do right.” James Madison had no time to consider history. Expiring at the breakfast table, he tried to brush aside a niece’s concern for his health, assuring her, “Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear.”
Eight presidents died in office, four of them (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy) at the hands of assassins. Those who survived the White House lived anywhere from three additional months (James K. Polk) to more than thirty-one years (Herbert Hoover). The average age of our chief executives at death was seventy.
Quality of life after the White House varied greatly among the presidents. Many early presidents, like Grant, were virtually penniless. Worried about his family’s financial future, the old general worked furiously on his memoirs while gravely ill with throat cancer. Thomas Jefferson sold his extensive book collection to the Library of Congress to support his life at Monticello. Harry Truman, our thirty-third president and a man of modest means, finally put presidential financial security to rest by successfully lobbying for a presidential pension.
Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb? is full of facts like these about the post-White House years of our presidents, their deaths, and their funerals. We also tell you how to visit each presidential gravesite, taking you to small towns and to several of America’s largest cities. As you progress, you’ll see ornate memorials from the Gilded Age and a few tucked-away plots in lesser known burial grounds.
The idea of gravesites as lessons in history was suggested to me by Richard Norton Smith, George Washington biographer and the former executive director of several presidential libraries. His foreword tells of his own childhood, spent visiting presidential graves with his sympathetic family in tow, and how this grew into a career as a historian. During a television interview about history, Richard commented to me that to truly understand something, one ought to try it for oneself.
Another historian who encouraged my experiential learning is Douglas Brinkley, who wrote the after word for our book. Doug’s an historian and Jimmy Carter biographer, and, at Rice University, has been known to pile his students onto a vehicle dubbed “The Majic Bus,” to visit significant American cultural and historic sites. Doug is the kind of teacher who understands that personal experiences contribute to learning in ways that reading and lectures alone cannot.
Encouraged by the expeditions of these two historians, I began my own presidential gravesite tour in 1995, visiting and photographing thirty-six presidential graves and the libraries of the living former presidents over the next eighteen months. My journey began at Arlington National Cemetery, where two presidents are buried—John F. Kennedy and William Howard Taft, the only president to also serve as Chief Justice. Next was Washington’s National Cathedral, where Woodrow Wilson lies beneath the stone floors of the church, in the style of the great European cathedrals. With a small touch of symbolism, I also ended my tour in the Washington area, visiting George Washington’s burial site at Mount Vernon on a cold and quiet New Year’s Day 1997.
Visiting the thirty-two other presidential gravesites in short order led to its share of adventures. In my initial days of grave-hopping, I planned a Hudson Valley swing, a triple-hitter, hoping to conquer the gravesites of Chester A. Arthur, Martin Van Buren, and Franklin Roosevelt in a single weekend. Arriving at the Albany airport on a Friday afternoon, I set out in a rental car for Albany Rural Cemetery where President Arthur is buried, only to find that the gates had closed at 5:00 p.m. I’d come too far to miss it. Spying no one, I decided to climb the cemetery’s stone fence. Thankfully, I was able to find the grave, pay my respects, and snap a few photos without getting caught.
Readers of our book won’t have to break any cemetery rules. Grant’s Tomb gives detailed directions and visiting hours for every presidential gravesite. Those planning longer trips will find the memorials grouped by state in the appendix.
You will also find that many of the cemeteries on our presidential tour are filled with other interesting persons. In Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery, James Garfield has tycoon John D. Rockefeller, Ohio political boss Mark Hanna, and Lincoln assistant John Hay as his eternal neighbors. A stone’s throw from Benjamin Harrison’s grave in Indianapolis’ Crown Hill Cemetery are three vice presidential resting sites—those of Thomas Hendricks (Grover Cleveland), Charles Fairbanks (Theodore Roosevelt), and Thomas Riley Marshall (Woodrow Wilson). A little additional exploration in these and other cemeteries will likely lead you to discoveries of your own.
Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb? was an outgrowth of C-SPAN’s 1999 television series, American Presidents: Life Portraits. During this nine-month series, our cameras visited the birthplaces, gravesites, libraries, and family homes of the forty-one men who had then served as our country’s chief executives. Hours of video about each president has been archived on our web site, www.c-span.org, along with biographical and historic details about each president and links to other sites.
Like our television series, this book was a collective effort by a number of people at C-SPAN. Carol Hellwig, now a former member of our executive staff, was the book’s primary researcher and writer. With my tour and photos as her base, Carol spent months combing documents in the Library of Congress, reading presidential anthologies, and phoning cemeteries. Weeks of writing presidential death scenes, Carol reports, turned her into a uniquely interesting dinner table conversationalist.
Carol had assistance from Anne Bentzel and Molly Murchie, and from interns Megan FitzPatrick and Henrik Acklen. Lea Anne Long had two important roles in this project—arranging travel to each cemetery and organizing nearly one hundred rolls of film documenting the gravesites, created in a time before digital cameras were ubiquitous.
Our executive assistant, Amy Spolrich, helped with photo editing for this new edition.
Marty Dominguez was the overall coordinator of this book project, while Ellen Vest was responsible for its look. Initial editing was done by Karen Jarmon. Historical verification came from two sources—Richard Norton Smith, who made contributions to each chapter and checked our facts, and from longtime C-SPAN education consultant Dr. John Splaine. John contributed significantly to many of the historical projects mounted by our network. Susan Swain, our executive vice president, adds her indispensable work on this book to a long list of C-SPAN publications.
Thanks, too, to Peter Osnos, Susan Weinberg, and the rest of the staff at PublicAffairs. Their interest in this project allows this book to make its way to many new readers.
Finally, a word of thanks to the cable industry, especially our board of cable executives—this year, headed by Advance Newhouse Chairman Bob Miron—for their ongoing support of C-SPAN. More than thirty years ago, the cable television industry agreed to fund C-SPAN as a public service. C-SPAN is a not-for-profit company, offering commercial-free public affairs programming that includes daily live coverage of the U.S. Congress, programs about nonfiction books, extensive political coverage, and special series like American Presidents. Our affiliates, both cable and satellite, carry our three networks, C-SPAN, C-SPAN2, and C-SPAN3, as a service to their customers.
Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb? is a lighter look at American history, yet it has a serious intent. We hope our book, full of facts about the final years of our nation’s chief executives, will send you on a journey of discovery that helps you better understand certain aspects of our shared national history.
Brian Lamb
Washington, D.C.
December 2009
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’inevitable hour:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
—Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 1750