Subject: RE: BS: Reagan Funeral Looks Kennedy-esque
From:
GUEST
Date: 09 Jun 04 - 09:06 PM
The New York Stock Exchange has traditionally closed for presidential funerals. The exchange also closed for the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.
Reagan appointed the first woman to the US Supreme Court. Ironic, eh?
FDR 85 years, almost to the day, after Abraham Lincoln-also at the finish of a great war, with all the attendant echoes of sacrifice and rebirth.
It was, appropriately, a grand exit. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Ga., and it was nearly two days before the train carrying his coffin and his widow could make its way up to Washington. The coffin sat in the last car, guarded by one man from each of the service branches, and as it passed, thousands of Southerners, black and white alike, knelt and prayed by the tracks, or sang "Rock of Ages" and "Abide With Me" and "Onward, Christian Soldiers"-the hymn he and Winston Churchill had sung so defiantly together, four years before.
In the capital there was a solemn procession through the streets, the coffin draped with an American flag, carried on a caisson pulled by six white horses. The funeral was held in the East Room of the White House, and when the service began America was silent. "That Saturday afternoon was probably the quietest of the war," wrote William Manchester, in his brilliant account of FDR's death and burial.
The radio went still for the moment-and carried no commercials for four days. Newspapers carried no ads that day. Buses, streetcars, automobiles stopped where they were. Movie theaters and grocery stores closed their doors.
The next day the funeral train resumed its journey home, to the president's estate at Hyde Park, and thousands more lined the tracks-families, Boy Scout troops, a troop of monks from a Hudson River monastery; weeping and waving, or standing in stiff, stunned silence. The West Point corps of cadets met the train and marched with the president's hearse up the winding road from the Hudson River siding to the family rose garden.
There waited much of the Congress, the Supreme Court, the new president and his family, Eleanor Roosevelt and her daughter Anna and son Elliott. (Sons John, James and Franklin Jr. were still at war.) There were also 883 veterans from every service; Geoffrey Ward, in his superb study of FDR, noted that "The medals and decorations they wore recorded the trials of the great war that Roosevelt had directed and whose end he had not lived to see—North Africa and Monte Cassino, Guadalcanal andMidway, Tarawa and Normandy."
There, at Hyde Park, Franklin Roosevelt was laid to rest, with a solemn Episcopal benediction and a 21-gun salute. A riderless horse with its stirrups reversed stood outside the garden; a single bomber flew overhead, emblem of the brave, barbaric new world the president had guided the nation through.
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sj
