Where Are They Buried? (96 page)

John was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, and within three years, more than fifteen million people had trampled the area of his grave. It was decided that a more suitable site should be constructed, and in 1965 he was moved to a new memorial area nearby. The gravesite consists of a circular walkway paved with irregular stones of Cape Cod granite approaching a small terrace. President Kennedy rests in the elevated terrace, his grave marked with a simple marble tablet. At the head of his grave is a circular stone from which an eternal flame burns at its center.

After its president’s assassination, and after its Warren Commission concluded that the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had acted alone, the stunned nation moved slowly forward, albeit with permanent scars. Jackie Kennedy remained in the public eye as John’s widow, and a few years later became involved with Robert F. Kennedy’s own presidential bid. But on June 5, 1968, tragedy struck again when Bobby was killed. At 12:15 a.m., a Jordanian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby three times as he walked through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after a rousing campaign speech. Bobby died 25 hours later and, at 42, was laid to rest a short distance from his brother. His grave at Arlington is marked with a plain white cross.

In October 1968, Jackie became “Jackie O” when she married shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. The marriage seemed rocky, the couple spent almost all of their time apart, and when Jackie became a widow again in 1975, a weight seemed to be lifted from her shoulders. Just before Aristotle’s death, Jackie began working as a book editor, an endeavor she continued for most of the remainder of her life. As Jackie was relentlessly pursued by tabloid photographers, she became a familiar Manhattan sight, camouflaging herself in dark sunglasses and turned-up collar, her signature mane hidden beneath a kerchief. In January 1994 Jackie
made public the information that she was being treated for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and by May had succumbed to the illness. At 64, Jackie was buried next to John at Arlington.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Arlington National Cemetery is located in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington. From any of the major highways, follow the signs to its visitor parking lots.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
John, Jackie, and Bobby are buried together on a knoll just a short distance behind the main gate. There are plenty of signs pointing the way.

FEBRUARY 27, 1917 – JUNE 15, 1993

Sitting in the jump seat in front of the Kennedys on that dark day in Dallas were Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie. Just as the president’s Lincoln, its bubbletop off, approached an underpass near the intersection of Elm, Main, and Commerce streets, Nellie turned to the President and said laughingly, “You can’t say that Dallas isn’t friendly to you today.” As he started to reply, a sharp rifle crack filled the air and a bullet crashed into Kennedy’s head. John Connally turned to see what the commotion was, and a bullet then caught him in the back. It plowed down into his chest, went through a lung, fractured his right wrist, and lodged in his left thigh. Though Kennedy never knew what hit him, Connally remained conscious until he was anesthetized for surgery. He made a full recovery and later, egocentrically speculated that he was the assassin’s real target.

Connally left the governor’s post in 1969 and in 1973, after Spiro Agnew resigned, declared himself a Republican in order to gain an appointment to the newly vacated vice-presidential seat from his friend, Richard M. Nixon. But after a firestorm of protest, the plan was nixed and Connally slinked back to Texas. As it turns out, he may have been more perfectly suited to partner with Nixon than anyone ever guessed; in 1975 he was tried and acquitted in a milk-price bribery scandal, in 1977 he entered into a shady bank partnership with two Arab sheiks, and, after he got a bit too acquisitive during Texas’ dizzying oil and real-estate heyday, Connally declared bankruptcy in 1987.

At 76, Connally died of pulmonary fibrosis and was buried at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin, Texas.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-35, take Exit 234B and turn east onto 7th Street. After a half-mile, turn left onto Navasota Street and the cemetery is a short distance ahead on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Connally’s elaborate, tall, black monument is easy to find in the stately Republic Hill section.

OCTOBER 18, 1939 – NOVEMBER 24, 1963

It seems apparent that Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building. Beyond that, however, everything about him is up for grabs. Every conceivable possibility and impossibility concerning his life, whereabouts, motives, connections, and identity has been endlessly debated and examined by an army of government investigators, millions of truth-seeking citizens, and God knows how many conspiracy buffs—some of them flat-out nuts, others just passionate about the truth.

Despite the conclusions of the Warren Report, it
is
very difficult, after even a cursory review of the facts, to accept that Oswald alone killed Kennedy. Every imaginable scenario for complicity and blame has been put forward, and it seems certain that it will never be known exactly what happened and who was, or was not, involved.

There does seem to be very good reason why many are convinced there was at least one accomplice. If Oswald was the lone gunman, sound and film as well as ballistic evidence dictate one or another sequence of events, but, in either of these sequences, unexplainable problems persist: Forensics do not support either sequence of events promoted by “lone gunman” proponents. Supporters of one particular “lone gunman” camp believe that Oswald fired three shots. But if that were true, one of those bullets must have inflicted seven wounds in two bodies—some nearly at right angles to one another—according to ballistic evidence. And, after those gymnastics, the evidence further stipulates that that bullet was the one found in near pristine condition lying atop Kennedy’s stretcher—a clear impossibility. Supporters of the other “lone gunman” camp insist that Oswald fired four shots, but this scenario is also unfeasible simply because Oswald couldn’t have squeezed four rounds out of his bolt-action rifle in the six seconds of shooting, as exhibited in Zapruder’s infamous film—never mind that he would have had to train those shots on a moving target 75 yards away. The forensic evidence of the Kennedy assassination does not support any conceivable sequence of events in
which there is only a single gunman. Once the forensic and ballistic evidence is weighed, it seems to have been physically impossible for Oswald to have acted alone.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
He was buried at Shannon Rose Hill Memorial Park in Fort Worth, Texas. From I-820, take Exit 30, follow Lancaster Avenue east for 1½ miles, and the cemetery is on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, drive up the road that runs directly behind the funeral home, and stop at the brown Shannon mausoleum. Just behind and to the left of this mausoleum, along the road, is a flat marker for Skelton. Oswald lies in the grass, waiting, just twenty feet behind the Skelton marker. The inscription on his gravestone reads simply, “Oswald.”

SEPTEMBER 18, 1924 – NOVEMBER 22, 1963

In any event, after Oswald fired at Kennedy, he ditched his rifle between some boxes, ran out of the depository building, jumped on a bus and then into a cab, and then walked the remaining few blocks to his rooming house. He left his room after just a few minutes and, at 1:18 p.m., a caller radioed to the Dallas police that one of its own had been gunned down. The fallen policeman was Officer Jefferson Davis Tippit, and his assailant, as you may have guessed, turned out to be Oswald. Apparently, Tippit had stopped to question a suspicious-looking Oswald and, after exchanging a few words, Oswald felled him with revolver shots to the head and chest.

At his funeral, of course, 39-year-old Officer Tippit was afforded all the ceremony that befits one killed in the line of duty and, in light of the circumstances, he was deservedly martyred by the public at large. However, in the eyes of conspiracy theorists, nobody is beyond reproach, and a number of them directly accuse Tippit of being “the other gunman.” In these scenarios, Tippit didn’t just happen to cross paths with Oswald. Instead, they were discussing their next move minutes after the assassination when Oswald double-crossed Tippit, ostensibly to eliminate a witness. Well, anything’s possible, I guess.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
He rests at Laurel Land Memorial Park in Dallas. From I-35E, take Exit 420 and the cemetery is on the east side of the highway.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Tippit is buried in Section 62, a distinguished area reserved for those whose lives were dedicated to some special service.

APRIL 25, 1911 – JANUARY 3, 1967

Two days after Kennedy and Tippit died, Oswald was transferred from police headquarters to the Dallas County jail and a crowd gathered to witness his departure. Oswald was escorted through the basement of the Dallas police building by a black-hatted detective, Lyle Cassidy Graves, who gripped Oswald’s upper arm tightly while a phalanx of police provided the illusion of security. Then, while live television cameras rolled, a strip-club owner, Jack Ruby, emerged from the crowd, stabbed a .38 revolver at Oswald’s abdomen, and fired. Two hours later Oswald was dead at 24.

Some call Ruby a hero, while others believe that Ruby, a shady operator who had minor connections to organized crime and the Dallas Police Department, killed Oswald to keep him from revealing a larger conspiracy. During his trial Ruby claimed that his rage at Kennedy’s murder was the sole motive for his action but, whatever his motives, he certainly helped propel the cottage business of conspiracy theorists. Ruby was convicted of “murder with malice” and sentenced to death in March 1964, but the verdict was overturned in November 1966 on the grounds that he could not have received a fair trial in Dallas at the time. In January 1967, while awaiting a second trial, Ruby died of lung cancer at 55.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
He was buried at Westlawn Memorial Park in Norridge, Illinois. Westlawn is located on Montrose Avenue, a mile west of Route 43.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn at the first left and then again at the next right, then proceed to the Violet section on your left. Stop at “2” and eighteen rows back is Ruby’s grave.

OCTOBER 8, 1918 – FEBRUARY 11, 1995

Some buffs paint a conspiracy of the Kennedy assassination that even encompasses members of the Dallas police force, and especially L.C. Graves, because of the amateurish protection offered to Oswald. Graves left the force in 1970 and worked as a bank-fraud investigator for the next dozen years. Though he had plenty of opportunities, he never cashed in on his link to history. At 76, he died of cardiac arrest.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Buried at Grove Hill Cemetery in Dallas, Texas, his grave is easy to find off of I-30. Take Exit 49B onto Samuell Boulevard and you’ll immediately see the cemetery southeast of the highway.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery at the first entrance and park wherever you can. In the section on the left is the Wolff mausoleum, 30 feet in front of which is L.C.’s flat marker.

JANUARY 15, 1929 – APRIL 4, 1968

After receiving his doctorate in theology from Boston University, Martin Luther King Jr. moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, where he was to be a preacher at a Baptist church. Having grown up in Atlanta he was no stranger to Southern prejudice, but the scale of racial bigotry in Montgomery was so outrageous that Martin’s ambitions were refocused, and he dedicated his life to amending those inequities and presenting his race with a fair chance at the American Dream.

By refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white person, Rosa Parks was the catalyst for a boycott of Montgomery’s city buses, organized by Martin, which ended only after the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregation on public transportation is legally and socially unacceptable. Building on that success, achieved through nonviolence, Martin founded the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 and became a figure with a national platform. The Civil Rights Movement had begun.

In the years following, Martin organized many similar nonviolent protests and the movement reached its zenith when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. The broad-reaching legislation guaranteed equal rights in all areas of the public domain, and a civil rights commission would ensure that these laws were enforced. Though Martin and his thousands of followers had not struggled in vain, the victory had come at a cost. They had endured high-pressure fire hoses, midnight cross burnings, and backwoods lynchings. But Martin had remained peaceful throughout, and in biblical cadence assured his followers that their fight could be victorious if they did not resort to bloodshed.