| AN ETERNAL FLAME
FOR A FALLEN PRESIDENT
It was the afternoon of Sunday,
November 24, 1963. Colonel Clayton B. Lyle, a 1937 graduate of
Texas A&M, was watching television in his living room in Washington,
D.C. He had recently returned from an assignment in Europe to find
the capital in bedlam. Two days before, President John F. Kennedy
had been assassinated in Dallas.
Tired and saddened because of the
tragic event that had happened in his native Texas, Lyle was trying
to relax when the telephone rang. The caller was Lieutenant General
Walter K. Wilson, Jr., chief of U. S. Army Engineers, and Lyle’s
boss.
"We’ve got a problem," his
commander began. "We have to have an eternal flame to mark the
President’s grave by eight o’clock tomorrow morning. You’ve got the
job."
The request had come directly from
the First Lady. It was long after the funeral, however, before Lyle
learned how the idea had originated. The story appeared in Death of
a President, William Manchester’s account of the assassination.
According to Manchester, Mrs.
Kennedy, along with the new President and Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson,
had accompanied her husband’s body to the Capitol rotunda earlier
that morning. It was to lie in state there until the next day when a
state funeral was scheduled. Mrs. Kennedy, who was helping plan the
service, told Manchester, a family friend, that the idea of an
eternal flame "just came into my head."
"This was the first time we had to
do anything like this," he says. "I just thought up the idea and
made a few sketches."
There was no time to carefully
design and plan such a device. He and his staff had to make do from
scratch. Scrounging Washington’s electrical shops, they found a
"luau lamp" normally used to illuminate garden parties. They tested
it by dousing it with water, blasting it with air, and trying
everything they could think of to kill the flame. It continued to
burn.
The gadget that Colonel Lyle and
his crew built no longer provides the flame over John Kennedy’s
grave. In March, 1965, Kennedy’s body was removed and re-interred in
a permanent site in Arlington Cemetery. Lyle’s lamp was replaced
along with the propane canisters. Now the eternal flame is fueled
from an underground line of natural gas.
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