Buried: Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia
Thirty-fifth President - 1961-1963
Born: May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts
Died: 2:00 p.m. on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas
Age at death: 46
Cause of death: Shot by assassin
Final words: Reputed to have said, “My God, I’ve
been hit.”
Admission to Arlington National Cemetery: Free
John F. Kennedy was the first president born in the twentieth century. He was also the first Roman Catholic to hold that office. He defeated Vice President Richard Nixon to become the thirty-fifth president of the United States.
Kennedy held that office for just over a thousand days. His administration increased the military advisors in Southeast Asia and faced off with Communist regimes in Cuba, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. At home, Kennedy began work on a legislative program addressing civil rights.
On November 21, 1963, Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson traveled to Texas on a political salvage mission. After stops in San Antonio and Houston, the party flew to Dallas, where the president was to speak at the Trade Mart. His motorcade made its way from Love Field through downtown Dallas. As it passed the Texas School Book Depository, shots rang out.
An eternal flame burns above the simple plaque bearing John F. Kennedy’s dates of birth and death
The president was struck twice: once in the neck and once in the back of the head. Texas Governor John Connally, riding in front of Kennedy, was also wounded. The car carrying the two wounded men was quickly diverted to Parkland Memorial Hospital.
Efforts to save the president were futile. John F. Kennedy, age forty-six, was pronounced dead at 2:00 p.m. Jacqueline Kennedy, her pink suit stained with her husband’s blood, placed her wedding band on his finger. In the waiting area, attention shifted to the new president, Lyndon Johnson.
A few hours later, Johnson was sworn in by Judge Sarah Hughes aboard Air Force One with John Kennedy’s coffin in the back of the plane. That afternoon, not far from the Book Depository, Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit was shot and killed when he approached a suspect near the assassination scene. The suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, was captured thirty minutes later.
In Washington, the White House staff acted swiftly. They consulted history books hoping to recreate the majesty of Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 state funeral. Kennedy’s young widow directed much of the operation. The East Room was bordered in black crepe and decorated with leaves taken from Andrew Jackson’s magnolia trees on the South Lawn.
On Sunday, November 24, as Oswald was being transferred from the Dallas city prison to the county jail, Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner, shot the alleged assassin in the abdomen. NBC beamed live images of the shooting to millions of Americans. Oswald died ninety minutes later. The slain president’s family, accompanying JFK’s coffin from the White House to the Capitol, was unaware of the latest turn of events.
Waiting in a line that stretched for more than three miles, 250,000 people passed by Kennedy’s flag-draped coffin lying in state in the Capitol rotunda. A military guard stood watch over the catafalque, a red, white, and blue wreath from President Johnson resting at its base. Monday morning, nine men from the five armed services carried the casket down the Capitol steps. A military band played “Hail to the Chief,” the navy hymn, and Chopin’s funeral march as the caisson made its way to the Executive Mansion, where the family, along with hundreds of dignitaries, began a procession to the funeral.
More than a thousand invited guests were packed into St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Richard Cardinal Cushing, who had officiated at Kennedy’s wedding, performed the requiem mass. Bishop Philip Hannan read scriptural passages and portions of Kennedy’s inaugural address.
After the service, the caisson began its journey to Arlington National Cemetery, to a site selected by Mrs. Kennedy overlooking the city. “Black Jack,” a riderless horse with boots reversed in its stirrups in honor of a fallen leader, followed behind. John F. Kennedy, Jr., celebrating his third birthday that morning, saluted his father’s passing casket. At a graveside service, fifty jets, followed by Air Force One, flew overhead. The widow joined brothers-in-law Robert and Edward Kennedy in lighting the grave’s eternal flame.
Jacqueline Kennedy became the first president’s widow to receive a staff and Secret Service protection. She was buried alongside her husband when she died in 1994.
On September 24, 1964, the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy submitted its final report. The investigative panel, known as the Warren Commission after its chairman, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Many still believe that a larger conspiracy was at work but no conclusive evidence has been found.
Touring John F. Kennedy’s Tomb at Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington National Cemetery is open daily, 365 days a year. Hours are from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. from April through September and 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. from October through March. Admission to the cemetery is free.
Arlington National Cemetery is located across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., at the north end of the Memorial Bridge. The bridge is accessible from Constitution Avenue or Twenty-third Street N.W. near the Lincoln Memorial. The cemetery can also be reached by Metrorail at the Arlington Cemetery stop on the blue line.
Cars are not allowed on the cemetery grounds except by special permission. Paid parking is available near the Visitors Center. Tourmobile offers motorized tours of the cemetery for a fee; Kennedy’s gravesite is one of the tour’s scheduled stops.
Maps of the cemetery are available at the Visitors Center. To reach Kennedy’s grave from the cemetery’s main entrance (Memorial Drive), take Roosevelt Drive to Weeks Drive. Signs clearly mark Kennedy’s grave.
For additional information
Superintendent
Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington, VA 22211
Visitor Center Phone: (703) 607-8000
www.arlingtoncemetery.org
“For anyone who lived through those four shattering days in November 1963, memory conjures a flawless pageant of grief…”
—Richard Norton Smith
Over the years Americans have witnessed with heartbreaking frequency Kennedy funerals. For anyone who lived through those four shattering days in November 1963, memory conjures a flawless pageant of grief, brilliantly choreographed by a young widow. The horse-drawn caisson and riderless horse, the eternal flame, even JFK’s interment in Arlington National Cemetery: all were her doing. But the past, as always, informs the present, and with her love of history, it was hardly surprising that Jacqueline Kennedy should turn to the White House Historical Association and its guidebook—both largely her work—with its engraving of the funeral of that nineteenth-century martyr, Abraham Lincoln.
Incredibly, Mrs. Kennedy found time to send condolences to the widow of the Dallas policeman, J.D. Tippit, who was Lee Harvey Oswald’s other victim. She held out for St. Matthew’s Cathedral and not the massive Shrine of the Immaculate Conception as the site of her husband’s funeral. Determined to walk the eight blocks from the White House to St. Matthew’s, nothing and no one could change her mind. At first, it was widely assumed that JFK would be laid to rest in his native Massachusetts, in the Brookline cemetery where, a few months earlier, he had buried his infant son Patrick. The Navy was even holding a destroyer in readiness to transport the presidential casket.
Robert F. Kennedy’s cross lies on the slope near his brother’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery. In September 2009, Edward M. Kennedy was interred nearby.
Political activist Allard Lowenstein is buried near JFK’s grave
Not until Saturday, the twenty-third, a day of incessant downpours and numbing grief, was Kennedy’s final resting place decided. While the so-called Irish Mafia pushed for Brookline, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara thought the Boston area “too parochial.” Visiting Arlington National Cemetery, McNamara was captivated by the slope in front of the Lee-Custis Mansion whose stately pillars crowned Arlington’s summit. Robert Kennedy was soon converted, as was Jean Kennedy Smith. Returning to the White House that afternoon, she blurted out, “Oh Jackie, we found the most wonderful place!”
Mrs. Kennedy immediately left for Arlington where she, too, fell under its spell. Before evening, work had begun on the gravesite, located on a direct axis with the Lincoln Memorial. By then McNamara had encountered a young college student who worked at the Lee Mansion and who recalled an earlier visit to the site by President Kennedy during which JFK had called the view from the hilltop the most beautiful sight in Washington. It was the ultimate confirmation of McNamara’s hunch.
—RNS