Why is there a flame always burning at JFKs burial site?”
The John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame is a presidential memorial at the gravesite of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, in Arlington National Cemetery. The gravesite is aligned with the Lincoln Memorial across the Memorial Bridge. After the assassination of JFK, the widowed First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, requested an eternal flame for his gravesite. She was inspired by the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which she and her husband had seen during a visit to France in 1961, and/or took inspiration from the “candle in the wind” of Arthurian legend, and the Broadway Play “Camelot.”[1] According to William Manchester’s Death of a President (1967), Mrs. Kennedy made her request for an eternal flame on the afternoon of November 24, 1963, after she returned to the White House from the lying-in-state ceremony at the Capitol. The military planners who were organizing the funeral granted her request immediately and rushed to implement it. Overnight, the
AN ETERNAL FLAME FOR A FALLEN PRESIDENT It was the afternoon of Sunday, November 24, 1963. Colonel Clayton B. Lyle, a 1937 graduate of Texas A&M, was watching television in his living room in Washington, D.C. He had recently returned from an assignment in Europe to find the capital in bedlam. Two days before, President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. Tired and saddened because of the tragic event that had happened in his native Texas, Lyle was trying to relax when the telephone rang. The caller was Lieutenant General Walter K. Wilson, Jr., chief of U. S. Army Engineers, and Lyle’s boss. “We’ve got a problem,” his commander began. “We have to have an eternal flame to mark the President’s grave by eight o’clock tomorrow morning. You’ve got the job.” The request had come directly from the First Lady. It was long after the funeral, however, before Lyle learned how the idea had originated. The story appeared in Death of a President, William Manchester’s account of the assas
After the assassination of JFK, the widowed First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, requested an eternal flame for his gravesite. She was inspired by the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which she and her husband had seen during a visit to France in 1961, and/or took inspiration from the “candle in the wind” of Arthurian legend, and the Broadway Play “Camelot.”[1] Mrs. Kennedy made her request for an eternal flame on the afternoon of November 24, 1963, after she returned to the White House from the lying-in-state ceremony at the Capitol. The military planners who were organizing the funeral granted her request immediately and rushed to implement it. Overnight, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ran a gas line to the planned gravesite, fed by propane tanks from a distance.
