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By Root 833 0

serving at the time of his passing. In fact, well into the twentieth century, presidential funerals were essentially family affairs. Flamboyant in life, even Theodore Roosevelt went to his grave in a small cemetery near his beloved Sagamore Hill with admirable restraint. At his wife’s request Woodrow Wilson was interred in the unfinished Washington Cathedral in February 1924, following a private service in the dead man’s S Street home. The first president of the modern era to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda was William Howard Taft, and then for only ninety minutes prior to his burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

When Calvin Coolidge died three years later at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, the ceremonies were appropriately minimalist. The strains of Handel’s Xerxes filled a downtown church named for the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards. President Hoover attended, as did Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the president-elect. Local stores remained open, their owners asserting, truthfully enough, that Cal would have wanted it that way. Washington limited itself to a memorial session of Congress. The wishes of the deceased carried less weight in 1945. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s preference for a simple East Room service, with no embalming or lying in state, yielded to more elaborate pageantry consistent with his singular place in public affection and the history of his times. Hundreds of thousands of grieving citizens watched the president’s caisson roll through the streets of Washington en route to Union Station. From there a funeral train carried FDR home to Hyde Park. A quarter century later Dwight Eisenhower became the last American president to ride the rails to his resting place, and the first to have his state funeral at Washington National Cathedral. Although the cathedral never realized its original objective as an American Westminster Abbey, it has become the de facto Church of the Presidents, at least for the ceremonial planners of the Military District of Washington. Since Ike, the great Rose Window and soaring Gothic arches crowning Mount Saint Albans have twice provided a backdrop to presidential obsequies (Reagan in 2004 and Ford in 2007).

It is no accident that most recent presidents have chosen entombment at their presidential libraries, which are often located in settings that shaped their individual characters and outlook. Thus Harry Truman was buried a stone’s throw from the office he frequented after leaving Washington (Truman especially enjoyed conducting tours of the library for visiting schoolchildren). His gravestone, inscribed with the seals of Jackson County, Missouri, the United States Senate, and the presidency, reads like a Who’s Who entry, listing not only every office Truman held, but the dates of his marriage and the birth of his daughter. Andrew Johnson, with no library to commemorate his stormy tenure, insisted on being buried in an American flag, his head resting upon a copy of the Constitution whose wartime transformation he stubbornly refused to concede. Presidents, no less than historians, like to have the last word.

Then there was Lyndon B. Johnson, who chose burial in a family cemetery on the banks of his cherished Pedernales River, “where folks know when you’re sick and care when you die.” Two decades after Johnson received homage beneath the dome of the Capitol he had dominated as Senate majority leader and president, Richard Nixon passed up the formal commemoration of a capital city in which he had never felt at home. Emulating the example of his hero, Charles de Gaulle, Nixon opted for a less official, more heartfelt tribute in Yorba Linda, California—his Colombey-les-deux-Eglises. The town of his birth was also the site of his presidential library. As important, it epitomized the Silent Majority to whom Nixon had appealed during his time in the White House, and who turned out by the thousands to bid him farewell. In the interest of full disclosure: as one who had a hand in drafting Robert Dole’s eulogy for Nixon, delivered on April 27, 1994, I will go to my grave convinced