Dead Presidents by Brady Carlson

Author:Brady Carlson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

9

ETERNAL FLAME

On John F. Kennedy, the City of Dallas, and

What Ties Them Together Every November 22

HENRY ROEDIGER is a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and he’s been researching how—and sometimes if—we remember presidents. He says our brains remember the presidents “like we would recall a list that somebody gave us. . . . Usually you can remember the presidents who were during your lifetime, and you get a few before that, and then of course most people can also get the early presidents. They can get Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson. But after that, except for Lincoln, it kind of falls off.”

Roediger has been running these memory tests for forty years—so long, he says, that “we can actually plot for people, from Truman on, how quickly they’re being forgotten. For most presidents, they’ll live in modern memory for about 50 or 100 years, and then they’ll drop down to roughly the baseline of about 20 to 25 percent of people can remember them, if you give them five minutes.” A half century from now, once-towering figures like Harry Truman or Dwight D. Eisenhower may be remembered as poorly as Rutherford B. Hayes or Zachary Taylor are today.

The only exceptions, he says, come “if there’s something really distinctive” in an administration—like presiding over a war, for example, or getting a major piece of legislation passed. Or, possibly, a president’s jarring, tragic assassination, followed by the biggest funeral in national history and an ongoing effort to assure that president’s place in history.

John F. Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery, just outside Washington, has an eternal flame; it’s probably the most recognized grave marker of any president. Unlike the other presidential graves, which place their subjects in the past, Kennedy’s eternal flame aims for the future. It consciously recalls something JFK once said: “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.”

It’s moving. It’s beautiful. It’s poignant. It is not, however, eternal: the flame at the grave today is not the one Jacqueline Kennedy lit in 1963. The original structure, essentially a custom-built wire basket welded to a tiki torch, was put together the day before the president’s funeral by Arlington superintendent John C. Metzler and Lieutenant Colonel Bernard G. Carroll, the post engineer at nearby Fort Myer. “I advised them that such a construction and installation was beyond my capabilities,” Metzler said later. “Their answer was, ‘Yes, we know but somehow get an eternal flame.’” The contraption had to be hidden under pine boughs, which had been doused twice with water so that the first lady wouldn’t catch on fire as she lit the gas-powered torch.

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