From Lincoln On, a Time of Grieving Has Been One of Reconciling

David Stout, in the NYT (June 11, 2004):

... Abraham Lincoln's funeral in 1865 loosed a flood of grief only a half-year after his very re-election was in doubt."In point of sad sublimity and moral grandeur, the spectacle has been the most impressive ever witnessed in the national capital," The New-York Times observed then.

An older generation of Americans recalls the heartbreak of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's funeral in 1945, just five months after he was elected to his fourth term - by a comfortable majority, to be sure, but also his narrowest.

To a somewhat younger generation, the funeral of John F. Kennedy will always seem like the day before yesterday. Some historians say the shock of his assassination made him in myth what he had not been in life.

Leaders of yesteryear have often been lionized upon their death, sometimes by people who had reason to feel less than warm toward them.

At Dwight D. Eisenhower's funeral in 1969, President Richard M. Nixon praised the former president and general as"a good and gentle and kind man."

Nixon struggled to keep from choking up, according to one account, in extolling Eisenhower as a man from the country's heartland in every sense,"not only from its geographical heart but from its spiritual heart.''

"He exemplified,'' Nixon said,"what millions of parents hoped that their sons would be - strong and courageous and honest and compassionate."

It was almost as if Eisenhower had never hurt Nixon's chances against Kennedy in the 1960 presidential race by seeming lukewarm toward his own vice president, even telling reporters that he might need a week or so to recall any significant contribution Nixon had made in office.

When former President Lyndon B. Johnson died in 1973, an estimated 40,000 people filed through the Capitol Rotunda, where his coffin lay. Near the National City Christian Church, the site of services here, people stood 8 to 10 deep, united in respect as they had not been during the Vietnam War.

President Warren G. Harding was deeply mourned when he died suddenly in 1923. The throngs of grief-stricken included some 10,000 schoolchildren recruited from Washington's playgrounds to strew Pennsylvania Avenue with flowers as the funeral procession moved from the White House to the Capitol.

Nearly 200 people, including a score of marines standing at attention near the White House, were overcome by the 100-degree heat that Aug. 8. In time, Harding's reputation wilted as well.

When Herbert Hoover died in 1964, after the longest post-White House life of any president, his inability to deal with the Great Depression was, for the moment, forgotten. At his funeral, attended by President Johnson, Hoover was honored in a special prayer for his" concerns for the needs of all mankind." The service recalled the European relief efforts he had helped to organize after both world wars.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who on retirement referred to himself with an old barracks refrain that said"old soldiers never die, they just fade away," did not exactly fade away. The huge crowds at his April 1964 funeral heard him extolled for his military genius and the reforms he instituted in postwar Japan - not, of course, for his peacock vanity or for the near insubordination that prompted President Harry S. Truman to relieve him in 1951 as commander of United Nations forces in Korea.

Rivaling the general's funeral in pageantry, and surpassing it in poignancy, was the 1921 service for an ordinary infantryman, the Unknown Soldier of World War I. Exhumed from an American military cemetery in France, his body lay in the Capitol Rotunda, where an estimated 90,000 people filed past his coffin.

"As he was carried past through the banks of humanity that lined Pennsylvania Avenue a solemn, reverent hush held the living walls," a reporter for The Associated Press wrote."Yet there was not so much of sorrow as of high pride in it all, a pride beyond the reach of shouting and the clamor that marks less sacred moments in life."

The crowds, the account went on,"stood in almost holy awe to take their own part in what was theirs, the glory of the American people, honored here in the honors showered on America's nameless son from France."

And when he was entombed at Arlington National Cemetery to honor the many war dead who could not be identified,"the guns roared out again in the national salute.''