Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb__ A Tour of Presidential Gravesites - Brian Lamb [1]
Touring the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum and The Carter Center
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Ronald Reagan
Touring the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum
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George Bush
Touring the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum
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William Jefferson Clinton
Touring the William J. Clinton Presidential Center
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George W. Bush
For additional information
Barack Obama
Afterword
Appendices
Appendix A - Presidents Who Died in Office
Appendix B - Presidents’ Length of Retirement after Leaving Office
Appendix C - Presidents and Their Wives: Dates of Death and Places of Burial
Appendix D - Vice Presidents and Their Gravesites
Appendix E - Presidential and Vice Presidential Gravesites by State
Appendix F - Presidential Libraries
Bibliography
C-SPAN
Copyright Page
To the memory of
Eric Clitheroe (1907-1986)
a great teacher
Bill Hartnett (1936-1980)
a true public servant
Cal Andringa (1941-1997)
a good friend
Foreword
Forty-Three Men and the Great Adventure
By Presidential Historian Richard Norton Smith
“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead, the communication
Of the dead is tongued with the fire beyond the
language of the living.”
—T.S. Eliot
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