Your Weekend Message From The Master

(Editor’s note: Charles Pierce writes daily at The Esquire Politics Blog at Esquire.com. He is an award-winning writer and author, most recently Idiot America. Every weekend, he sends out a weekly newsletter to subscribers, of which, I am one. From now through the election, I will post his weekend musings on here)

August 31, 2024

Even for a cynical sod like me, Arlington National Cemetery is a place that hushes the mind. Rarely do I go to Washington when I don’t stop by the gentle hillside beneath the mansion that once belonged to the traitor, R.E. Lee and visit the Kennedy plot. What is most moving to me is not the eternal flame, although that’s a lovely touch, or the elaborate semi-plaza dedicated to the slain president, but the resting place of his slain brother, the senator from New York, buried there like a Franciscan beneath a simple white wooden cross, and also the markers memorializing the late president’s children who died at birth, or not long after it — the stillborn daughter, informally named Arabella by her mother, and young Patrick, who lived only 39 days and died three months before his father did in 1963.

JFK is one of only two presidents buried at Arlington. The other is William Howard Taft, who also is one of four chief justices interred there. (William Jennings Bryan is another double entry, being both one of five members of Congress and one of eight Secretaries of State.) There are 20 astronauts among Arlington’s permanent residents, as well as memorials to the lost crews of…