his young son John Jr. in tow to pay tribute to the fallen on Veterans Day. As a World War II naval hero of the South Pacific theater, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Kennedy must have felt a link to America’s largest military cemetery.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara reconnoitered Arlington for an appropriate setting. He found it on the sloping lawn below what was then called the Custis-Lee Mansion, built by the first president’s step-grandson, George Washington Park Custis, whose daughter Mary Custis married Robert E. Lee at the famed home. McNamara thought the vista of the Potomac River and monuments in the nation’s capital made the spot a perfect final resting place for President Kennedy. After viewing his suggestion, Jackie, Bobby, and the Kennedy sisters agreed.

Mrs. Kennedy’s deft touch in the creation of iconography during the funeral – based on that of another martyred president, Abraham Lincoln – was evident in the closing and lasting tribute to her husband at the graveside service. After Roman Catholic prayers, “missing man” formation of the Air Force flyover, twenty-one-gun salute, playing of taps, folding and presentment of the flag from her husband’s casket, she departed from standard religious and military ritual to light an “eternal flame” over the president’s grave. 

Reminiscent of the fire she remembered that burns at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, the one at JFK’s burial site recalls the metaphorical torch, “passed to a new generation of Americans,” whom he had hailed in this inaugural address, as the first president born in the 20th century. After igniting the flame with her brothers-in-law, she walked from the grave, clutching the folded American standard. 

Later that night, after greeting foreign leaders at the White House and celebrating John Jr.’s third birthday as best they could manage under the painful circumstances, she and Bobby returned to pay a sorrowful midnight visit to the fresh grave, now covered in evergreen boughs and the service caps of the military pallbearers. The eternal flame cast a warm glow on the otherwise chilly November night. Before the end of the year, Mrs. Kennedy would have the bodies of her stillborn daughter Arabella and infant son Patrick moved from Holyhood to lie next to their father, who had thought Patrick seemed “so alone” in his original grave when the president left a Harvard football game the previous month to visit the lost baby he was still grieving. 

Nearly a year after his death, Jackie wrote for Look magazine, “So now he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man.” Yet she spent the rest of her life, starting with creation of the Camelot mythology to describe JFK’s presidency, just one week after the assassination, preserving his legendary status at home and abroad. 
The permanent gravesite
Jackie’s first effort to create a lasting memorial for her husband came in planning the permanent gravesite at Arlington. Three days after the president’s funeral, Jackie, Bobby, and architect John (Jack) Carl Warnecke met at

the new grave to discuss a permanent design for the 3.2 acres. 

JFK had met Warnecke when he audited business classes at Stanford, and the president reached out to him about plans for a Kennedy presidential library in his hometown of Boston. Warnecke and his associates prepared an initial report for the president about five possible locations for the library: in Boston, Cambridge, and near Brookline. Presuming that Kennedy would serve two terms and have eight years of archival papers from his administration for use by researchers, along with a museum, auditorium, staff facilities, and a “presidential suite,” where the president could work after leaving the White House, Warnecke summarized the pros and cons of each locale. 
First discussions with Harvard
In October 1963, JFK signed a memo of understanding with Harvard that the university would donate acreage next to its famed Business School, on the opposite side of the Charles River from the main campus. The president and architect, both Harvard alumni, were pleased that the proposed library would be so close to the country’s oldest university and attract students to its resources. 

Later that month, on what turned out to be the president’s last stay in Boston, for a fundraising dinner on behalf of his youngest brother, Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy, attendance at a Harvard football game, and a visit to his parents on Cape Cod, JFK met with Warnecke on the banks of the Charles to review the architect’s plans. They looked over architectural drawings on sheets of drafting paper, as Jack W. explained his concept to Jack K.
Plans for Kennedy Library
The president’s assassination intervened; he would never see the Kennedy Library. The project was the first memorial to her husband that Mrs. Kennedy, a widow at age thirty-four, with two young fatherless children to raise, promoted publicly. In her television address to the American people on January 14, 1964, thanking them for their condolences, she reported, as her eyes welled with tears, “Your letters will be placed with his papers in the library to be erected in his memory. . . . It will be, we hope, not only a memorial to President Kennedy but a living center of study of the times in which he lived and center for young people and for scholars from all over the world.” In a private meeting of the committee to plan the library, she revealed her determination to define JFK’s martyrdom: the library “must express the beliefs that Jack gave his life for. [W]e want people to enter the memorial part and see what Jack was.”

Within the week after the president’s death, Warnecke discussed with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Harvard historian and special assistant to the president, plans for the Kennedy Library that he had shared with JFK just six weeks earlier at the president’s preferred site in Boston. A few weeks later, the architect met with Kennedy’s brother Ted and followed their meeting by responding to the senator’s request for an outline of how to proceed

with a Committee on the Art and Architecture of the Kennedy Memorial Library. 

Understandably, Warnecke included himself as a suggested committee member for having worked with the late president on plans and collaborated with Mrs. Kennedy on the Lafayette Square project. “The essence of the architecture of the library is the man to be memorialized,” Warnecke believed. “Out of the life of this individual we must develop a noble design concept as strong and bold as John F. Kennedy himself.” He also sent his outline to William Walton, an artist and close friend of the Kennedys from their days in Georgetown. JFK had named him chair of the Fine Arts Commission, on which Warnecke also served. Walton would lead the primary library committee, with Warnecke serving on its architectural advisory body.

In this same time frame, just before Christmas 1963, with Mrs. Kennedy and her children in Florida trying to salvage some good cheer from the holidays, a group of the late president’s family, advisors, architects, and academicians met in New York City, without Warnecke, to discuss moving forward with the JFK Memorial Library, as it was then called. They would start afresh the process of choosing an architect, although it was still assumed that the site next to the Harvard Business School would remain the venue. Warnecke would land on the list of fourteen architects from around the world vying for the most important commission of its time.

By the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death, Mrs. Kennedy, bolstered by JFK’s brothers and other members of the selection committee, had settled on then relatively unknown architect I.M. Pei. Unlike Warnecke, who contextualized his buildings with their historical settings, the Chinese American architect preferred modern geometric shapes and materials like glass and concrete. Pei had studied at the Harvard School of Design, and the former First Lady explained, “He was so full of promise, like Jack [Kennedy]; they were born in the same year. I decided it would be fun to take a great leap with him.” And she did, announcing Pei as the library’s designer in December 1964. Later she observed, “Pei’s work, as John Kennedy’s in 1960, was yet to come.” 

Warnecke, while presumably disappointed, could take heart that Mrs. Kennedy had asked him to design the president’s permanent gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery. He and his associates worked assiduously on the project. The day Mrs. Kennedy and her two children moved out of the White House, December 6, 1963, to settle in Georgetown, Warnecke assured the former First Lady that he was giving the gravesite and Presidential Library (as he was still in the running for the latter commission) his “continuous attention.” His new Washington office “had set a nice large room for work specifically” on these two projects. He looked forward to meeting with her on the designs.
Warneke designs the permanent gravesite
The library would showcase the Kennedy presidency and era, address current policy challenges, and inspire future leaders. The gravesite, as Warnecke designed it, would have a

different meaning for public memory, which denotes how groups recall the past and how those ideas take shape, evolve, and prompt differences or agreement about history’s events and actors. In the first outline of his approach, he explained: “The preparation of a final resting place for John F. Kennedy is a permanent act that will have lasting significance for his family and country. It is imperative that this remembrance of the man take its proper place in the history of the United States.”  

Warnecke embraced how the permanent site could cement Kennedy’s relationship to Washington by situating it on the “axial spine of the whole city,” including Memorial Bridge over the Potomac River and the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, and Capitol, all aligned according to urban planner Pierre L’Enfant’s 18th-century grid for a grand capital city. Appropriately, L’Enfant was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, and the deliberate placement of Kennedy’s grave on this historic axis would render it monumental in and of itself, Warnecke believed. The gravesite would provide spectacular views of the nation’s capital where Kennedy had spent his entire political career and which he had taken by storm with his 1961 inauguration.

Warnecke understood how important it was for the design to “evoke the appropriate images, emotions, and connotations.” The memorial should be “modest and simple but also dignified and noble.” He knew, for example, that the eternal flame should be “the primary symbol at the grave.”  In addition to symbolizing the passing torch to Kennedy’s generation, it also referred to his inaugural declaration that the “energy, faith, devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our world and all who serve it, and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.” 

President Kennedy, his wife, and Warnecke had all intuitively grasped the meaning of a political symbol, “which conveys a larger range of meaning, typically with emotional, moral, or psychological impact … and “will tap ideas people want to believe in as true.” Mrs. Kennedy wanted to be sure that the flame’s final placement allowed it to be viewed from Memorial Bridge as people crossed over the Potomac from Washington to Arlington in Virginia.

Warnecke envisioned the grave as a serene and beautiful resting place for the 35th president but a site that had to accommodate the thousands of “mourners” who arrived each day. He reported to Mrs. Kennedy that he had received well-meaning, but ill-considered, suggestions for grave decor, especially ideas for sculptures of a crashing eagle or angels guarding the site. He immediately ruled out such designs, along with a sculptural rendering of the president. Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the president’s most devout sister, and among many of the Kennedy family members, friends, advisors, and artists with whom Warnecke consulted, favored a Celtic cross or angelic sculpture representing resurrection to eternal life. The architect nixed that idea, too, explaining to her that such statuary was now outdated; the Committee on Fine Arts, on which he served, agreed. 

Others suggested modern sculpture, but JFK’s widow vetoed that

possibility, having her secretary tell Warnecke, “The one thing she definitely does not want is any abstract sculpture. She knows that you can deal tactfully with the Shrivers about this . . . .” Her main concern was not to lose “valuable time” in “pursuing this tangent.”1

Mrs. Kennedy’s exquisite taste in restoring the White House to historical authenticity and in her world-famous fashions undoubtedly aligned with Warnecke’s refined sensibilities. In addition, given JFK’s emphasis on the separation of church and state as the first Roman Catholic president, he assuredly would have eschewed religious symbolism for the Arlington site. It is St. Matthew’s Basilica, the venue for his funeral Mass, that focuses on Catholic religious beliefs, with an inscription in front of its marble altar: “Here rested the remains of President Kennedy at the requiem Mass, November 25, 1963, before their removal to Arlington where they lie in expectation of heavenly resurrection.”
Final design of the grave site
By May 1964, Mrs. Kennedy had approved Warnecke’s total grave design concept. Later that month, on May 29, the president’s 47th birthday, she and her children knelt at the original grave after attending Mass in honor of JFK at St. Matthew’s. Warnecke had settled on a plan to arrive at the memorial from a “great circular approach walk, going into a gathering place, then up to the grave area.” This scheme, he reported to Mrs. Kennedy and her family, “possessed the site, was more powerful and also more subtle.” 

At Mrs. Kennedy’s request, Warnecke consulted on landscaping the acreage with an expert gardener, the Kennedys’ friend, Rachel (Bunny) Mellon, with whom President Kennedy had collaborated in planning the Rose Garden outside the Oval Office, and who designed the White House’s East Garden, eventually named for Jacqueline Kennedy. In considering flowers for the site, the former First Lady “remembered the president’s love for his White House Garden and how beautiful it looked in the spring and the fall, and also how proud he was of his garden.” 

The architect suggested adding flowering trees, which Mrs. Kennedy accepted with alacrity. She insisted that the original gravesite remain open to visitors while construction on the “memorial grave,” occurred. The president’s temporary site stayed undisturbed and surrounded by its original white picket fence, then replaced by a sturdier iron enclosure. Thousands of visitors queued to offer respects — on average of four million annually. In the first years after his death, more tourists visited the grave than any other landmark in Washington, including the Lincoln Memorial or Washington Monument.

Released in November 1964, Warnecke’s final design for the site, included a suggestion by Mrs. Mellon and preferred by Mrs. Kennedy to replace grass around the grave with a hardscape. It represented a simple yet evocative use of Cape Cod granite fieldstone on the plat, focused on the eternal flame, placed in the center of a five-foot circular flat granite stone at the head of the site. Green clover and sedum filled in the fieldstones’ crevices to reflect the appearance

of rocks lying naturally in a Massachusetts meadow. Encircling the terrace leading up to the grave were inscription tablets, hand chiseled with excerpts chosen by Mrs. Kennedy from JFK’s inaugural address, which is considered, along with FDR’s first and Lincoln’s second, among the top three such speeches in presidential history. 

The setting of the stones occurred in the summer of 1966, supervised by master mason Billy Cleland, who was the superintendent of craftsmen completing the National Cathedral, a massive Gothic structure in northwest Washington. 
Reinterment and permanent memorial dedicated
Finally, in March 1967, the new site was complete and cemetery workers late at night disinterred the president’s casket and those of his baby children and moved them down the hillside to their permanent memorial, while Bobby and Ted Kennedy witnessed the transfer. Boston’s Richard Also witnessing the reinterment was Cardinal Cushing, the Kennedy family’s prelate, who had married Jack and Jackie, baptized their children, buried their deceased infants, and said the assassinated president’s funeral Mass. 

At dawn the next morning, the cardinal, Jackie, and JFK’s brothers, sisters, and in-laws, along with President Lyndon Johnson, attended the official dedication of the new site, where now the president and his two deceased children lay under new black granite headstones positioned nearly flush with the ground, as Mrs. Kennedy wished.

After a military band played the Navy hymn, national anthem, and “The Boys of Wexford,” JFK’s favorite patriotic Irish song, Cardinal Cushing captured the essence of Mrs. Kennedy’s success in how the Arlington site had cemented her husband’s legacy and would continue to do so. Indeed some 16 million visitors had come to the first gravesite in the three years since the president’s shocking murder. In the first year following Kennedy’s death, up to 3,000 people per hour filed past the site, with an estimated 50,000 visiting it on the weekends, for a total of 8.4 million people by November 1964. Warnecke deliberately designed the new space to accommodate such crowds. 
      Cushing began his dedicatory remarks:
The eyes of the world have turned many times to this hillside to freshen the memory of youth and life, which all of us knew such a little while ago. Now a permanent memorial marks the place where our young leader rests, and generations will journey here to be close to that greatness, which once we knew, and now have lost. Dear God, our Father, look down upon this hallowed place, reach out Your love to John, cover him with Your mercies, and give him joy eternal with Your saints. In this life, he placed his trust in You, sought Your guidance in his ways, called upon You in his sufferings, and hoped in Your promise of an everlasting life. As You cared for him in this life, keep him in Your goodness for all eternity.

Just as he had at JFK’s November 1963 funeral Mass, Cushing added a deeply personal coda to his final prayer over the granite memorial, calling his friend by the diminutive: “Be

at peace, dear Jack, with your tiny infants by your side, until we all meet again above this hill and beyond the stars. May the good Lord grant you eternal rest and let perpetual light shine upon you and yours.” In August 1963, Cushing had comforted the president as he wept over the tiny coffin of baby Patrick after the cardinal’s funeral Mass for the infant. “Come on, Jack, let’s go. God is good,” Cushing told the grief-struck father.

Mrs. Kennedy now had the national shrine to her husband that she envisioned shortly after his tragic death. Two decades beyond his assassination, a reported 12,000 people each day, 4.5 million annually, came to view the memorial, making it the second-most visited site in the Washington area, behind only the Smithsonian. 
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
In addition to raising her children successfully, memorializing her husband would continue to be Mrs. Kennedy’s primary raison d’etre after his death. Amidst coverage of his funeral in the Washington Post on November 26, 1963, a brief announcement appeared that “a bipartisan move [in Congress] is under way to have the National Cultural Center named the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” 

Congress did so, and President Lyndon Johnson signed the legislation in 1964, designating the center the sole official memorial to JFK in the nation’s capital and authorizing federal matching funds for construction. On December 2, 1964, LBJ broke ground on the site of the officially named John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, along the banks of the Potomac River, just north of the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge. Mrs. Kennedy, as well as first lady Lady Bird Johnson and former first lady Mamie Eisenhower, became “honorary chairmen” of the Center’s Board of Trustees. 

Jackie was also an active member of the Program Committee of the Kennedy Center, which held its first meeting in January 1965 to establish the center’s mission and agenda. Architect Edward Durrell Stone designed the center’s simple classical form, rendered in Italian marble. The center’s opening night, September 8, 1971, was marked by the premier of Leonard Bernstein’s “MASS: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers” composed for the occasion. The JFK Center’s performance spaces include a concert hall and opera house, each seating over 2,000, and the Eisenhower Theater, which comprises 1,100 seats for theater, opera, and dance productions.

Jackie buried at Arlington in 1994
The former First Lady was buried next to President Kennedy after her 1994 death from cancer. Currently, more than three million tourists visit Arlington National Cemetery, a popular stop for tour buses, and most visitors see the JFK grave and that of his admired spouse, rated the “most-loved” First Lady by a 2024 Ranker online vote. A children’s educational packet includes the eternal flame for them to color. For older students, a map marks Kennedy’s grave, and historical content includes a link to a Cold War lesson plan that features President Kennedy with Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev, pictured at their famous 1961

Vienna summit.

Just as Mrs. Kennedy had hoped in planning the permanent grave, the site is particularly beautiful in spring when the tulip poplars[EG1] around the setting display their stunning pink blossoms and draw the visitors’ eyes up to the green hillside leading to Arlington House. Throughout the cemetery, fruit trees [EG2]show off their varied pastel blooms, just in time for Easter guests and students on field trips to witness the national graveyard in all its glory. 

Belongs to the ages
Upon Abraham Lincoln’s death, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton declared, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Mrs. Kennedy hoped that her husband, like Lincoln, taken much to soon by an assassin’s bullet, would “belong to the people.” She and Jack Warnecke helped to fulfill that wish by creating a place of pilgrimage for visitors to the JFK grave that is breathtaking in its simple beauty and informative by its symbolism and epitaphs from Kennedy’s inaugural address. The fact that ninety percent of Gallup poll respondents in 2023 approved of his presidency (higher than any other contemporary chief executives) evinces his positive image in public memory.

[EG1]Tulip poplar blossoms are yellow and orange. Do you mean pink flowering magnolias?
[EG2]Check if there are fruit trees. Flowering cherry trees are not considered fruit trees because they are cultivated for their flowers rather than edible crops. 
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