John F. Kennedy’s Funeral: Rare and Unpublished Photos (4)
John F. Kennedy’s Funeral: Rare and Unpublished Photos
Five
decades later, the assassination of John F. Kennedy remains one of the
few utterly signal events from the second half of the 20th century.
Other moments — some thrilling (the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin
Wall), others horrifying (the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and
Robert Kennedy, the Challenger explosion)
— have secured their places in the history books and, even more
indelibly, in the memories of those who witnessed them. But nothing in
the latter part of “the American century” defined an era as profoundly
as those rifle shots that split the warm Dallas air on November 22,
1963, and the sudden death of the 46-year-old president.
There was
Camelot — a media construct, of course, but a rarity in that it actually
resonated with so many people, everywhere — and then there was the
somber, profoundly uncertain period after Camelot.
For countless millions in America and around the globe who lived
through the near-surreal transition, the days and weeks after JFK’s
assassination felt like a chilling, restless pause: a moment so charged
with unease that even reflection, or taking stock, seemed impossible.
Here, on
the 45th anniversary of JFK’s March 1967 reinterment, when his remains
were moved from his initial resting place to the permanent grave site
and memorial at Arlington, offers a gallery of photographs (some never
published in LIFE magazine) from the deeply fraught funeral held mere
days after Kennedy was killed. While both ceremonies — the state funeral
in ’63, and the reinterment three-and-a-half years later — were marked
by sorrow, the rawness of the emotion evident in 1963 is still striking,
and rending, today.
“A woman
knelt and gently kissed the flag,” The magazine reported of the scene as
JFK’s casket lay in state for two days after his assassination. “A
little girl’s hand tenderly fumbled under the flag to reach closer.
Thus, in a privacy open to all the world, John F. Kennedy’s wife and
daughter touched at a barrier that no mortal ever can pass again.”
The next
day, Kennedy’s body was taken “from the proudly impassive care of his
honor guard” and was carried from the Capitol rotunda to Arlington.
“By a
tradition that is as old as Genghis Khan,” “a riderless horse followed”
the flag-draped casket, “carrying empty boots reversed in the stirrups
in token that the warrior would not mount again…. Through all this
mournful splendor Jacqueline Kennedy marched enfolded in courage and a
regal dignity. Then at midnight she came back again, in loneliness, to
lay some flowers on her husband’s grave.”
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