Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb__ A Tour of Presidential Gravesites - Brian Lamb [5]
In point of fact, Dole had been among the eulogists at Pat Nixon’s funeral the previous June, as was California governor Pete Wilson. Both men were Nixonian favorites. Ten months later the audience was vastly larger as Dole and Wilson reprised their speaking parts, joined this time by President Clinton and Henry Kissinger. Approximately thirty-three million Americans watched Nixon’s late afternoon burial in the lengthening shadow of his boyhood home. They saw a side of Bob Dole few would have predicted—except Nixon himself. For he knew that Dole’s feelings lay just below the surface, much closer than his hardboiled public image suggested. As evidence, he had only to flash back to the lawn of the Russell County Courthouse in August 1976. Following his unexpected vice presidential nomination a day earlier, Dole had returned to Russell for what turned out to be a highly emotional homecoming. Looking out at the crowd on the courthouse lawn, he recognized old friends and neighbors whose spontaneous gifts to a post-World War II fund had enabled a badly wounded second lieutenant to undergo repeated surgeries on his shattered right arm and shoulder. As feelings of the moment mingled with gratitude for past kindnesses, Dole teared up.
In designating him one of his Yorba Linda eulogists, Nixon anticipated the sob in Dole’s voice as he struggled to complete his tribute to the central figure in what the senator that day called the Age of Nixon. So authentic a display of grief was touching to all but the Nixon-haters in the vast audience. Moreover, by exhibiting his feelings so openly, Dole was, in effect, humanized in ways no other speech could have done. Which is exactly what Nixon intended, I believe, as he made his own funeral a showcase for his political heirs. Nixon was always a better campaign manager than candidate.
Nixon’s modest headstone reminds onlookers that “the greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.” By going home to Yorba Linda, he joined a tradition as old as George Washington, and carried on by Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Hayes, and FDR, each of whom rests on his ancestral acres. Less rooted, geographically and politically, was William Howard Taft, whose bumbling performance in the White House was redeemed by his later service as Chief Justice of the United States. Far more than the proverbially jolly fat man of most accounts, Taft was a thoughtful, wry observer of a world moving a bit too fast for his tastes. After finishing third in the 1912 election behind Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, Taft said he consoled himself with the knowledge that no other American had ever been elected ex-president so resoundingly.
So mellow a figure would doubtless have chuckled over the complaint voiced by Herbert Hoover, on leaving Taft’s 1930 Washington funeral service. When his turn came, remarked Hoover, he would see to it that mourners were not denied the pleasure of a good cigar.
The waspish Henry Adams asserted that it was easy to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution; all one had to do was trace the line of presidents stretching from Washington to Grant. Less jaded observers agree that the Grants, no less than the Washingtons, have much to teach us about a nation that is nothing if not a work in progress.
As Brian Lamb demonstrates in the pages that follow, there is no better way to personalize the past than through the lives, and deaths, of America’s presidents. But then, I have long believed there is more drama in a graveyard than a textbook. Meanwhile, the true C-SPAN junkie is left to grapple with an existential question beyond any president’s fathoming: Is there cable in Heaven?
A 1983 photo of Richard Norton Smith with former Boston Mayor Kevin White at the King’s Chapel Burial Ground in Boston. They stand behind the gravestone of Massachusetts’s first governor,