Why JFK Was Secretly Buried a Second Time in 1967

On November 25, 1963, the world watched President John F. Kennedy buried at Arlington National Cemetery, as Jacqueline Kennedy lit an eternal flame at his grave. What almost nobody knew was that the grave was temporary. The flame was a propane torch the Army had put together overnight. The plot was a patch of grass behind a white picket fence. Within three years, more than sixteen million people had walked up that hillside to see it, and two small coffins had been brought from Massachusetts and Rhode Island to lie beside their father. On the evening of March 14, 1967, after the cemetery gates had closed, the President was taken out of the ground and buried again, about twenty feet away. Using contemporary reports, Arlington's own history and the words of Clifton Pollard, the gravedigger who dug Kennedy's first grave and later helped move him, this file follows the grave from a Sunday morning shift in 1963 to a consecration at dawn in a driving rain. Where the sources disagree, we say so, and we tell you only what the records can back up.