Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb__ A Tour of Presidential Gravesites - Brian Lamb [2]
In life a three hundred pound mountain of a man, in death Grover Cleveland is anything but conspicuous. Tracking my quarry by headlight beams, ten minutes went by. Fifteen. Twenty. Adding to the surreal tone of the hunt, who should I come upon but—Aaron Burr? As an unreconstructed Hamiltonian, I was tempted to do an impromptu jig on the old reprobate, but time was growing short, the night was growing dark and everyone in the car was growing nervous lest we be arrested for trespassing. Eventually a kind, if dubious, groundskeeper appeared, flashlight in hand, to point out the modest stone marker and urn that adorns the Cleveland plot.
Those who haunt cemeteries can sometimes put their own mortality at risk. As the nation’s first dark horse presidential candidate in 1844, James K. Polk sparked little fer vor (“James K. Who?” sneered rival Whigs who rallied to Henry Clay). Polk is still easily overlooked; on a broiling August afternoon in 1976, I contracted sunstroke while scouring a treeless expanse of lawn surrounding the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville in search of the president who added more real estate to the United States than any other. Sic transit gloria.
Another youthful summer was spent in Ohio, a state which, as the self-proclaimed Mother of Presidents, is also the mother lode of presidential gravesites. By and large, chief executives from the Buckeye State demonstrate an inverse ratio between accomplishment in life and the lavishness with which that life is memorialized. (Of course, who would remember Cheops were it not for his pyramid?)
Consider Warren Gamaliel Harding. Nothing so became Harding’s life as his leaving it. His messy death in a San Francisco hotel room in August 1923 led to journalistic speculation that his wife, Florence, had poisoned him. In the years since, a scholarly consensus has formed around the belief that she didn’t, but should have. Today the Hardings rest unquietly on the outskirts of Marion, Ohio, condemned to an intimacy largely avoided in life, thanks to the generosity of countless schoolchildren who donated their pennies to construct a great hollow drum of white Georgia marble. Not far away is the famed front porch where Harding in 1920 proclaimed his desire for normalcy, and Mrs. Harding shooed away local mistresses whose desires ran in other channels.
Still another occupational hazard, a disappointed officeseeker, ended James Garfield’s brief term in the summer of 1881. Angered over Garfield’s refusal to give him the Paris consulship, Charles J. Guiteau shot the president in a Washington, D.C., railroad station. Guiteau had another motive for his crime: a frustrated author hoping to spur sales of his book, he anticipated today’s tabloid culture, wherein notoriety is the surest ticket to a gig with Larry King (even if modern criminals generally wait until after committing an outrage to take the agent’s call.)
In the feverishly inventive Gilded Age, even a mortally wounded president could inspire technological advance—in Garfield’s case, the world’s first indoor air conditioning system. Amid the stifling heat of a Washington, D.C., summer, a group of Navy engineers was summoned to the White House. Improvising a blower to force air cooled by six tons of ice through a heat vent in the president’s sick room, they succeeded in lowering the temperature twenty degrees.
The patient remained snappish, hardly surprising given his diet of oatmeal and lime water. Told that the Indian warrior Sitting Bull was starving in captivity, Garfield snorted, “Let him starve.” On second thought, a still more wicked alternative suggested itself. “Oh no,” said Garfield, “send him my oatmeal.”
Equally unrepentant, if decidedly more convivial, was Zachary Taylor, who declared on his deathbed, “I have no regret, but am sorry that I am about to leave my friends.” It will