News
First Person: Covering JFK’s assassination emotional
 |
| MARIO AGUILAR | GREEN VALLEY NEWS Green Valley resident Richard Homan recalls his coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. MARIO AGUILAR | GREEN VALLEY NEWS ‘The Washington Post’ printed an extra edition on the assassination of President Kennedy. |
By Richard Homan, Special to the Green Valley News
When John F. Kennedy was assassinated Nov. 22, 1963 — 44 years ago this month — I’d been a full-time reporter in the newsroom of the Washington Post little more than a year. But I quickly found myself deeply involved in one of the biggest stories in our nation’s history — and my eventual professional career.
I was sent to Washington in 1959 by the U.S. Army as a counter-intelligence agent, and for most of the next three years, I’d moonlighted, with the Army’s permission, as a part-time sportswriter for the Post. When I left the Army in 1962, I got the job I’d really wanted as a reporter in the Post’s newsroom.
Thirty-seven years later, in 1999, I retired from the Post after a rewarding career as a reporter at the state and national levels and then as an editor and writer for its foreign desk. My wife, Mary Lou, and I began wintering in Green Valley in 2002, and two years ago, we became full-time residents, selling our home of 35 years in Bethesda, Md., and, for me, ending 46 years in the D.C. area.
In 1963, official Washington was a far simpler place than it is now. A president could move almost unremarked through the city, with only a handful of Secret Service bodyguards.
The Washington Post of that time also had an informality and coziness it has long since lost. With a news staff less than one-tenth that of today, it was possible in the early 1960s for a callow young reporter to come to work in the late afternoon and learn he would be covering the president of the United States at some public event that evening, or maybe his brother, the attorney general.
So on Nov. 22, 1963, as a very junior reporter covering suburban Arlington County, it seemed to me only a normal part of my beat to head for the nearby McLean, Va., home of Robert Kennedy, when a major story involving him broke. I assumed, rightly, that I’d have no problems getting to the house of a man with whom I bad little more than a nodding acquaintance, on the day that his brother was shot and killed-even though one of them was the attorney general and the other the slain president.
I had first met John Kennedy at a Democratic Party fundraiser in Topeka, Kan., in 1958, when I was a college student and he was a senator. At the Post, I had covered him attending a drill ceremony at the Marine Corps Barracks, speaking at a testimonial for Democratic Party Chairman Matt McCloskey, meeting with Appalachian state governors at the White House — events too puny to take up the time of the Post’s White House correspondent.
As a sportswriter, I had met Robert Kennedy in 1961 when I wrote a feature article about him and his family attending the Washington International Horse Show to watch son Joe, 9, and daughter Kathleen, 10, later Maryland’s lieutenant governor, compete on their pony Atlas. While a newsroom reporter, I covered him occasionally as attorney general, and bummed a ride with him to the Post in his limousine one day after covering a speech he gave.
I lived, at the time, with two college friends who were well plugged in to the administration’s party machinery: Paul Pendergast, head of the Democratic National Committee’s speakers’ bureau, and Bob Resnick, a speechwriter for Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Our tiny row house in Georgetown had a steady stream of visitors our age whose jobs-and very lives, it sometimes seemed-revolved around the Kennedy magic.
What follows are excerpts, with some explanatory additions, from a diary I kept at the time. It begins the morning after the shooting in Dallas, because the day itself left me no time for personal indulgence.
Nov. 23, 1963
Yesterday, President Kennedy was shot.
The shock to me was almost physical when I heard about it. The full feeling of grief did not come until today. I can describe it best by saying that his death affected me as deeply as any death has ever affected me.
I had brought some highway plans from the pressroom in the Arlington Courthouse to the D.C. newsroom, then went home for lunch. A little after 1:30 1 got into my car and was listening to the “Singing Nun” sing “Dominique” on the car radio. The song was interrupted at 1:38. The bulletin was that the President had been shot in Dallas.
My first reaction was disbelief — then intense interest. As I drove up Wisconsin avenue from my house, I said aloud, “Oh God! Oh, God!” and wanted to tell all those people on the streets who obviously had not heard about it.
In front of the posh Rive Gauche restaurant, I saw two distinguished looking men get into a chauffeured limousine with low-numbered D.C. plates 444, and thought that, whoever they were, they should know. I rolled down the window and yelled, “The President has been shot.” They couldn’t understand what I was saying, so I yelled again. They sent the chauffeur over to see what I was saying, and I told him. He ran back to the car and one of the two men sitting in the back seat climbed over to the front to turn on the radio. I found out today that the limousine belongs to the NBC bureau in Washington.
I drove to Arlington, listening to the steady coverage but not knowing whether he was dead. I went immediately to my desk in the pressroom and tried repeatedly to dial the Post but couldn’t get through. I realized someone should be at Hickory Hill, the Attorney General’s home in McLean, and I was the closest, so I drove there.
About 2:20, I arrived. No reporters were there and no police. CIA Director John McCone was there. Robert Kennedy had been lunching with Robert Morgenthau, the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York, and Silvio Mollo, Morgenthau’s aide, when he received a call from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover telling him of the shooting. McCone had come immediately.
James McShane, chief of federal marshals, was in and out of the house. Mrs. Byron White, wife of the Supreme Court justice, was there. Down a hill, at the far end of the yard, I could see Kennedy and McCone walking together, pacing back and forth. No one else was near them. Occasionally Kennedy broke away to talk on a telephone in the tennis court. A White House car drove up and three people, one of them White House aide Ted Sorensen, went into the house. Robert Kennedy’s wife Ethel and a young woman left to bring some of the children home from school.
I still hadn’t called my office to tell them where I was. I was a little afraid to leave because police had arrived and were now guarding the gate.
Brian Kelly, a reporter and friend from the Washington Evening Star, came about 30 minutes after I did, and he then went to a house across the street to make a call. I saw him coming back and went to the same house. I gave all the information I had gathered so far to a rewrite reporter, then returned to Robert Kennedy’s house, brushing past a policeman by saying, “I just came from there,” and went to the front yard again. Brian Kelly was not there. He’d been stopped at the gate when he tried to return.
I realized I was the only reporter on the grounds.
Kennedy and McCone continued to pace. Three dogs walked with them and a couple of ponies grazed in the front yard. Then as McCone’s driver and I listened on the CIA director’s radio, we heard what Robert Kennedy obviously had already learned: that the President was dead.
Justice White arrived, walked to the attorney general, and put his arm around him. Ethel returned with the children. McCone got into his car and left.
The attorney general and six of his children now walked solemnly in the side yard. Ed Guthman, Robert Kennedy’s press aide, whom I knew from covering the attorney general, had arrived and we talked for a while. Then Nicole Alphand, wife of the French ambassador, came, and a driver from the British Embassy with a message of condolence.
About 4:30, Guthman told me I was the only reporter in the yard and he had tried to overlook it for quite a while. “But in fairness to those I told to stay outside, I’d appreciate it if you would go to the gate,” he said.
I did.
Ten minutes later, the attorney general and Guthman left for Andrews Air Force Base to meet Air Force One, carrying John Kennedy’s body and the new president, Lyndon Johnson. Ethel left shortly after. I kept a vigil at the gates until 11 p.m., but there was no more activity. I went home to Georgetown wondering what the reaction there would be. With Johnson sworn in as president, my roommate Bob was now a presidential staffer. He and Paul Pendergast were home, with a journalist friend of ours. We talked of the enormity of it all, then went to bed.
Today, for the first time in many years, I cried. I cried twice, and the second time was worse. Both times, fortunately, I was alone. I was washing in the bathroom, morbidly humming various hymns from the Catholic funeral liturgy. I began humming, “In Paradisum,” and was suddenly sobbing into the washcloth. Within seconds, it was over.
I went to a special Mass at St. Stephen’s, the church I normally attend and the one the president often went to when he was in town. There was a purple cord tied across the seventh pew from the back on the right side, the pew he used, and a black stole lay over his seat.
I went to work and, in an empty section of the newsroom, began writing memos on various bits I had gathered. I wrote one about St. Stephen’s. I said a black stole lay over the seat he used and a purple cord was ti- At that point, with a word and sentence unfinished but with a thought poignantly ended, I could not control myself I cried openly and hard.
Nov. 24, 1963
I had an exclusive story in today’s paper. It described the location chosen for the president’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery and had a map.
White House spokesman Pierre Salinger, in his press briefing this morning, was asked where the grave site would be. He said he didn’t know, but he referred reporters to the article and map in the Post, saying he assumed it was correct.
An editor on the Post city desk had called me Saturday about 3:30 p.m. to tell me it was rumored Kennedy would be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. At the time, it had been widely assumed he’d be buried in Massachusetts.
I drove to the cemetery in a tremendous downpour and went to the office of John Metzler, the cemetery director, whom I had dealt with often. He wasn’t there. I waited. No one would tell me anything. Finally someone said they were closing soon and I would have to leave but they would have Metzler call me “tonight or in the morning.”
There was enough activity there that I knew the rumor was probably right. I drove around in the cemetery. In front of the imposing Custis-Lee Mansion on a prominent rise in the middle of the grounds, I spotted a gathering of people in business dress. They broke up and left before I could reach them, so I went back to the cemetery office, eavesdropped long enough to assure myself the rumors were right, then beckoned to a man I had not talked to before.
I’m from the Post. Can you mark the burial site on a map?” I asked. He could and he did.
“The mark may not be perfect,” be said, “because it hasn’t been surveyed yet, but there’s a stake in the ground now.” He said it was lined up with the Mansion and the Lincoln Memorial, across the Potomac. I went to a phone booth, called my office, then went back to the area in front of the Mansion.
Using a flashlight, in the driving rain, I lined myself up between the Mansion’s flagpole and the cemetery’s Memorial Gate entrance then began looking. I quickly found the stake in the ground. I made notes on the area and on who was buried in the closest graves. I drove to the Post, gave them the map, wrote a story, then maneuvered so that I rode down the elevator with the paper’s Managing Editor Alfred Friendly and told him what I’d been doing.
Nov. 26, 1963
President Kennedy was buried yesterday in what was probably the most moving ceremony I’ll ever watch. The whole tragic weekend came to an impressive close on the steep Arlington hillside.
I was the Post’s “advance man” at Arlington Cemetery and arrived there about 10 a.m. Tight security was already in effect, and we had to wait a couple of hours behind the Custis-Lee Mansion for Wayne Phillips, who was handling press affairs at the cemetery for the White House. It was coincidental that five of us reporters waiting to be cleared by Wayne had been his students at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
The roped-off press section was 50 feet uphill from the grave. I watched the cortege from the Capitol to the White House, then to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, and the funeral, on NBC television monitors.
Shortly after noon, the rest of the Washington Post team arrived at the cemetery. Four worked with me and another, our senior correspondent, Carroll Kilpatrick, was in the White House press pool. I was the only Catholic, and I was designated to observe the religious aspects-and translate the Latin, I guess.
Members of Congress and other notables arrived in eight city buses and stood on the grass some 60 feet below the grave.
The caisson came to the end of a walkway that led to the grave. The casket was put onto the apparatus that would lower it into the grave, and moments later, 50 jet fighters in three-plane V formations with one position empty, swept over the cemetery at 404 mph and 2,500 feet, according to a Pentagon fact sheet. A few seconds behind, and with a startling stillness, the beautiful blue-and-white Air Force One came over at 2,000 feet and 513 mph. As it swooshed over the grave, the plane dipped first its left, then its right wing, in a magnificent tribute to the man who had made it Air Force One.
The grandeur of the occasion was brought home to me and other reporters when we looked across the grave and saw as complete a gathering of heads of state as we were likely to see again. There was President DeGaulle, standing erect in a light-brown uniform. He reached into his coat once and took out a pair of glasses, put them on, and peered intently at the casket for a moment, then put them away. Next to him was Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, and the only word to describe him was resplendent-like the sun going up and coming down at the same time. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and Belgian Prince Baudouin were there, Baudouin wearing a uniform with a simple purple sash. Queen Frederika of Denmark was there, and Ludwig Erhard of Germany and Eamon de Valera of Ireland. These were only a few.
At the graveside was the family of the late president. The military joint chiefs were at the head of the grave, immediately behind Boston’s Cardinal Cushing and Washington’s Archbishop O’Boyle. President Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and others were just below the grave.
On the hillside to our left were hundreds of wreaths and bouquets. I walked among them before the Secret Service restricted us to the press enclosure. They included one from the “2506 Cuban Brigade,” one “From the President and People of Israel in Grief,” and a huge one with red, white and blue streamers, inscribed simply, “Le General de Gaulle.”
Carroll Kilpatrick wrote the cemetery story for today’s paper and White House correspondent wrote Eddie Folliard the funeral story. I and the others contributed memos to them.
Richard Homan is a Green Valley resident and former Washington Post reporter.
I was sent to Washington in 1959 by the U.S. Army as a counter-intelligence agent, and for most of the next three years, I’d moonlighted, with the Army’s permission, as a part-time sportswriter for the Post. When I left the Army in 1962, I got the job I’d really wanted as a reporter in the Post’s newsroom.
Thirty-seven years later, in 1999, I retired from the Post after a rewarding career as a reporter at the state and national levels and then as an editor and writer for its foreign desk. My wife, Mary Lou, and I began wintering in Green Valley in 2002, and two years ago, we became full-time residents, selling our home of 35 years in Bethesda, Md., and, for me, ending 46 years in the D.C. area.
In 1963, official Washington was a far simpler place than it is now. A president could move almost unremarked through the city, with only a handful of Secret Service bodyguards.
The Washington Post of that time also had an informality and coziness it has long since lost. With a news staff less than one-tenth that of today, it was possible in the early 1960s for a callow young reporter to come to work in the late afternoon and learn he would be covering the president of the United States at some public event that evening, or maybe his brother, the attorney general.
So on Nov. 22, 1963, as a very junior reporter covering suburban Arlington County, it seemed to me only a normal part of my beat to head for the nearby McLean, Va., home of Robert Kennedy, when a major story involving him broke. I assumed, rightly, that I’d have no problems getting to the house of a man with whom I bad little more than a nodding acquaintance, on the day that his brother was shot and killed-even though one of them was the attorney general and the other the slain president.
I had first met John Kennedy at a Democratic Party fundraiser in Topeka, Kan., in 1958, when I was a college student and he was a senator. At the Post, I had covered him attending a drill ceremony at the Marine Corps Barracks, speaking at a testimonial for Democratic Party Chairman Matt McCloskey, meeting with Appalachian state governors at the White House — events too puny to take up the time of the Post’s White House correspondent.
As a sportswriter, I had met Robert Kennedy in 1961 when I wrote a feature article about him and his family attending the Washington International Horse Show to watch son Joe, 9, and daughter Kathleen, 10, later Maryland’s lieutenant governor, compete on their pony Atlas. While a newsroom reporter, I covered him occasionally as attorney general, and bummed a ride with him to the Post in his limousine one day after covering a speech he gave.
I lived, at the time, with two college friends who were well plugged in to the administration’s party machinery: Paul Pendergast, head of the Democratic National Committee’s speakers’ bureau, and Bob Resnick, a speechwriter for Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Our tiny row house in Georgetown had a steady stream of visitors our age whose jobs-and very lives, it sometimes seemed-revolved around the Kennedy magic.
What follows are excerpts, with some explanatory additions, from a diary I kept at the time. It begins the morning after the shooting in Dallas, because the day itself left me no time for personal indulgence.
Nov. 23, 1963
Yesterday, President Kennedy was shot.
The shock to me was almost physical when I heard about it. The full feeling of grief did not come until today. I can describe it best by saying that his death affected me as deeply as any death has ever affected me.
I had brought some highway plans from the pressroom in the Arlington Courthouse to the D.C. newsroom, then went home for lunch. A little after 1:30 1 got into my car and was listening to the “Singing Nun” sing “Dominique” on the car radio. The song was interrupted at 1:38. The bulletin was that the President had been shot in Dallas.
My first reaction was disbelief — then intense interest. As I drove up Wisconsin avenue from my house, I said aloud, “Oh God! Oh, God!” and wanted to tell all those people on the streets who obviously had not heard about it.
In front of the posh Rive Gauche restaurant, I saw two distinguished looking men get into a chauffeured limousine with low-numbered D.C. plates 444, and thought that, whoever they were, they should know. I rolled down the window and yelled, “The President has been shot.” They couldn’t understand what I was saying, so I yelled again. They sent the chauffeur over to see what I was saying, and I told him. He ran back to the car and one of the two men sitting in the back seat climbed over to the front to turn on the radio. I found out today that the limousine belongs to the NBC bureau in Washington.
I drove to Arlington, listening to the steady coverage but not knowing whether he was dead. I went immediately to my desk in the pressroom and tried repeatedly to dial the Post but couldn’t get through. I realized someone should be at Hickory Hill, the Attorney General’s home in McLean, and I was the closest, so I drove there.
About 2:20, I arrived. No reporters were there and no police. CIA Director John McCone was there. Robert Kennedy had been lunching with Robert Morgenthau, the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York, and Silvio Mollo, Morgenthau’s aide, when he received a call from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover telling him of the shooting. McCone had come immediately.
James McShane, chief of federal marshals, was in and out of the house. Mrs. Byron White, wife of the Supreme Court justice, was there. Down a hill, at the far end of the yard, I could see Kennedy and McCone walking together, pacing back and forth. No one else was near them. Occasionally Kennedy broke away to talk on a telephone in the tennis court. A White House car drove up and three people, one of them White House aide Ted Sorensen, went into the house. Robert Kennedy’s wife Ethel and a young woman left to bring some of the children home from school.
I still hadn’t called my office to tell them where I was. I was a little afraid to leave because police had arrived and were now guarding the gate.
Brian Kelly, a reporter and friend from the Washington Evening Star, came about 30 minutes after I did, and he then went to a house across the street to make a call. I saw him coming back and went to the same house. I gave all the information I had gathered so far to a rewrite reporter, then returned to Robert Kennedy’s house, brushing past a policeman by saying, “I just came from there,” and went to the front yard again. Brian Kelly was not there. He’d been stopped at the gate when he tried to return.
I realized I was the only reporter on the grounds.
Kennedy and McCone continued to pace. Three dogs walked with them and a couple of ponies grazed in the front yard. Then as McCone’s driver and I listened on the CIA director’s radio, we heard what Robert Kennedy obviously had already learned: that the President was dead.
Justice White arrived, walked to the attorney general, and put his arm around him. Ethel returned with the children. McCone got into his car and left.
The attorney general and six of his children now walked solemnly in the side yard. Ed Guthman, Robert Kennedy’s press aide, whom I knew from covering the attorney general, had arrived and we talked for a while. Then Nicole Alphand, wife of the French ambassador, came, and a driver from the British Embassy with a message of condolence.
About 4:30, Guthman told me I was the only reporter in the yard and he had tried to overlook it for quite a while. “But in fairness to those I told to stay outside, I’d appreciate it if you would go to the gate,” he said.
I did.
Ten minutes later, the attorney general and Guthman left for Andrews Air Force Base to meet Air Force One, carrying John Kennedy’s body and the new president, Lyndon Johnson. Ethel left shortly after. I kept a vigil at the gates until 11 p.m., but there was no more activity. I went home to Georgetown wondering what the reaction there would be. With Johnson sworn in as president, my roommate Bob was now a presidential staffer. He and Paul Pendergast were home, with a journalist friend of ours. We talked of the enormity of it all, then went to bed.
Today, for the first time in many years, I cried. I cried twice, and the second time was worse. Both times, fortunately, I was alone. I was washing in the bathroom, morbidly humming various hymns from the Catholic funeral liturgy. I began humming, “In Paradisum,” and was suddenly sobbing into the washcloth. Within seconds, it was over.
I went to a special Mass at St. Stephen’s, the church I normally attend and the one the president often went to when he was in town. There was a purple cord tied across the seventh pew from the back on the right side, the pew he used, and a black stole lay over his seat.
I went to work and, in an empty section of the newsroom, began writing memos on various bits I had gathered. I wrote one about St. Stephen’s. I said a black stole lay over the seat he used and a purple cord was ti- At that point, with a word and sentence unfinished but with a thought poignantly ended, I could not control myself I cried openly and hard.
Nov. 24, 1963
I had an exclusive story in today’s paper. It described the location chosen for the president’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery and had a map.
White House spokesman Pierre Salinger, in his press briefing this morning, was asked where the grave site would be. He said he didn’t know, but he referred reporters to the article and map in the Post, saying he assumed it was correct.
An editor on the Post city desk had called me Saturday about 3:30 p.m. to tell me it was rumored Kennedy would be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. At the time, it had been widely assumed he’d be buried in Massachusetts.
I drove to the cemetery in a tremendous downpour and went to the office of John Metzler, the cemetery director, whom I had dealt with often. He wasn’t there. I waited. No one would tell me anything. Finally someone said they were closing soon and I would have to leave but they would have Metzler call me “tonight or in the morning.”
There was enough activity there that I knew the rumor was probably right. I drove around in the cemetery. In front of the imposing Custis-Lee Mansion on a prominent rise in the middle of the grounds, I spotted a gathering of people in business dress. They broke up and left before I could reach them, so I went back to the cemetery office, eavesdropped long enough to assure myself the rumors were right, then beckoned to a man I had not talked to before.
I’m from the Post. Can you mark the burial site on a map?” I asked. He could and he did.
“The mark may not be perfect,” be said, “because it hasn’t been surveyed yet, but there’s a stake in the ground now.” He said it was lined up with the Mansion and the Lincoln Memorial, across the Potomac. I went to a phone booth, called my office, then went back to the area in front of the Mansion.
Using a flashlight, in the driving rain, I lined myself up between the Mansion’s flagpole and the cemetery’s Memorial Gate entrance then began looking. I quickly found the stake in the ground. I made notes on the area and on who was buried in the closest graves. I drove to the Post, gave them the map, wrote a story, then maneuvered so that I rode down the elevator with the paper’s Managing Editor Alfred Friendly and told him what I’d been doing.
Nov. 26, 1963
President Kennedy was buried yesterday in what was probably the most moving ceremony I’ll ever watch. The whole tragic weekend came to an impressive close on the steep Arlington hillside.
I was the Post’s “advance man” at Arlington Cemetery and arrived there about 10 a.m. Tight security was already in effect, and we had to wait a couple of hours behind the Custis-Lee Mansion for Wayne Phillips, who was handling press affairs at the cemetery for the White House. It was coincidental that five of us reporters waiting to be cleared by Wayne had been his students at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
The roped-off press section was 50 feet uphill from the grave. I watched the cortege from the Capitol to the White House, then to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, and the funeral, on NBC television monitors.
Shortly after noon, the rest of the Washington Post team arrived at the cemetery. Four worked with me and another, our senior correspondent, Carroll Kilpatrick, was in the White House press pool. I was the only Catholic, and I was designated to observe the religious aspects-and translate the Latin, I guess.
Members of Congress and other notables arrived in eight city buses and stood on the grass some 60 feet below the grave.
The caisson came to the end of a walkway that led to the grave. The casket was put onto the apparatus that would lower it into the grave, and moments later, 50 jet fighters in three-plane V formations with one position empty, swept over the cemetery at 404 mph and 2,500 feet, according to a Pentagon fact sheet. A few seconds behind, and with a startling stillness, the beautiful blue-and-white Air Force One came over at 2,000 feet and 513 mph. As it swooshed over the grave, the plane dipped first its left, then its right wing, in a magnificent tribute to the man who had made it Air Force One.
The grandeur of the occasion was brought home to me and other reporters when we looked across the grave and saw as complete a gathering of heads of state as we were likely to see again. There was President DeGaulle, standing erect in a light-brown uniform. He reached into his coat once and took out a pair of glasses, put them on, and peered intently at the casket for a moment, then put them away. Next to him was Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, and the only word to describe him was resplendent-like the sun going up and coming down at the same time. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and Belgian Prince Baudouin were there, Baudouin wearing a uniform with a simple purple sash. Queen Frederika of Denmark was there, and Ludwig Erhard of Germany and Eamon de Valera of Ireland. These were only a few.
At the graveside was the family of the late president. The military joint chiefs were at the head of the grave, immediately behind Boston’s Cardinal Cushing and Washington’s Archbishop O’Boyle. President Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and others were just below the grave.
On the hillside to our left were hundreds of wreaths and bouquets. I walked among them before the Secret Service restricted us to the press enclosure. They included one from the “2506 Cuban Brigade,” one “From the President and People of Israel in Grief,” and a huge one with red, white and blue streamers, inscribed simply, “Le General de Gaulle.”
Carroll Kilpatrick wrote the cemetery story for today’s paper and White House correspondent wrote Eddie Folliard the funeral story. I and the others contributed memos to them.
Richard Homan is a Green Valley resident and former Washington Post reporter.
Copyright © 2009 - Green Valley News and Sun