Word: rotundas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hour. Next morning, a cortege placed the plain, steel Army casket aboard a train that took MacArthur, his widow Jean and son Arthur, 26, to Washington. It was raining as the procession headed slowly toward the Capitol, but tens of thousands lined the streets. In the rotunda President Johnson, his face working with emotion, placed a wreath at the casket's head. A dirge sounded as a military honor guard took its post...
...Sunday, the body lay in state beneath the Capitol rotunda. The casket, draped in a flag and surrounded by a five-service military honor guard, was never to be opened because the President had been deeply disfigured. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield fought through sobs to read a eulogy that, although well-meaning, was cruel in its emotion: "There was the sound of laughter; in a moment, it was no more. And so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands...
...held her face rigid as stone. Beside her were the children, Caroline and John Jr., dressed in matching powder-blue coats and red shoes. Caroline was solemn and open-eyed. But John-John capered about, tugging at his mother's hand, and had to be sent from the rotunda with his nurse. When he left the Capitol later he was clutching a small flag on a foot-long stick. He had spotted it in the office of House Speaker John McCormack and firmly announced, "I want that flag to take home to my daddy...
During the night, Jackie had come back again, slipped through the mourners. She knelt at the casket, brushed her lips against the flag. As she did so, Bobby Kennedy lingered brooding near the rotunda wall. When a reporter remarked to him of the crowds, Bobby managed a slight smile and murmured, "Fantastic. Fantastic." Then the couple left. Outside, Jackie said, "Let's walk a bit." Arm in arm, they moved almost like ghosts across the lawn below the steps and through the waiting line. As they turned to descend the hill at the Senate side of the Capitol...
Front & Center. On Monday, sunlight splashed the rotunda, and a million people lined the streets of Washington. Shortly before 11 a.m., nine servicemen slid the casket from its catafalque, bore it haltingly, laboriously down the 36 Capitol steps past the black-clothed ranks of John Kennedy's family. The drums began a muffled thunder. There was a gnashing of metal as the military men loaded it aboard the glistening black caisson, the same that carried the coffin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt 18 years...