In November 1963, three months after the first edition of this book was published, it became once more the unhappy task of presidential aides to supervise the obsequies of a president. Two writers give particulars of negotiations with undertakers in Dallas and Washington over arrangements for John F. Kennedy’s funeral.
In Robert Kennedy and His Times(Houghton Mifflin, 1978), Arthur Schlesinger describes RFK’s arrival at Bethesda Hospital:
There were so many details. The funeral home wanted to know how grand the coffin should be. “I was influenced by… that girl’s book on (burial) expenses… Jessica Mitford ( The American Way of Death)…. I remember making the decision based on Jessica Mitford’s book…. I remember thinking about it afterward, about whether I was cheap or what I was, and I remembered thinking about how difficult it must be for everybody making that kind of decision.”
While Yours Truly was, needless to say, most gratified to learn that her message had been absorbed in high places, further exploration reveals that—much as in the case of FDR’s funeral—the best-laid schemes of Robert Kennedy and his assistants went agley. The undertakers prevailed after all.
William Manchester in The Death of a President(Harper & Row, 1967) goes into far greater detail when discussing this situation. Of the Dallas undertaker who supplied the coffin in which JFK’s body was transported to Washington, he writes:
Vernon B. Oneal of Oak Lawn funeral home is an interesting figure in the story of John Kennedy. Squat, hairy and professionally doleful, with a thick Texas accent and gray hair parted precisely in the middle and slicked back, he was the proprietor of an establishment which might have been invented by Waugh or Huxley. It had a wall-to-wall carpeted Slumber Room. There was piped religious music, and a coffee bar for hungry relatives of loved ones…. (p. 291)
Instructed by a member of JFK’s entourage to bring a coffin to Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital, Oneal ran into his selection room and
chose his most expensive coffin, the Elgin Casket Company’s “Britannia” model, eight hundred pounds of double-walled, hermetically sealed solid bronze.
The scene now shifts to Washington. Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh told Robert Kennedy that the solid bronze casket had been badly damaged in transit: “It’s really shabby. One handle is off, and the ornaments are in bad shape.” RFK decided that “he could scarcely permit a state funeral to proceed with a battered casket.” Four aides were dispatched to Gawler’s, the selfsame old, established Washington firm that had supervised President Roosevelt’s funeral. They reported their findings to RFK.
Manchester’s description of the casket-price negotiations roughly parallels Schlesinger’s, but with elaboration:
Robert Kennedy had read Miss Mitford’s carefully documented exposé of the gouging of bereaved relatives, and so had Dr. Joseph English, the Peace Corps psychiatrist who stood at Sargent Shriver’s elbow Friday afternoon. Robert Kennedy… believes he spoke to O’Donnell… (special assistant to the President) about price… and he has a clear memory of a girl who told him… “You can get one for $500, one for $1,400, or one for $2,000.” She went on about water-proofing and optional equipment. Influenced by the Mitford book, he shied away from the high figure. He asked for the $1,400 coffin, and afterward he wondered whether he had been cheap; he thought how difficult such choices must be for everyone…. (p. 432)
This, as Manchester points out, was already almost twice the average bill for “casket and services” only two years earlier… $708 in 1961. But there was worse to come, as he discovered on further investigation.
In the end, Gawler put one over on the White House staff members. He sold them a “Marsellus No. 710, constructed of hand-rubbed, five-hundred-year-old solid African mahogany,” for which he charged $2,400. He then slipped in the most expensive vault in the establishment, for a total bill, rendered and paid, of $3,160.
And what about Oneal? His bill to the Kennedy family was finally settled, after some haggling over “services rendered”—spotted by a sharp-eyed CPA—for $3,495. Thus, despite Robert Kennedy’s laudable efforts to avoid a price-gouging, he was outmaneuvered; the family ended up paying a total of $6,655 into the coffers of undertakers.
His curiosity piqued by these nefarious transactions, Manchester pursued the subject further, visiting Vernon Oneal in his Dallas establishment:
Actually, as he conceded to this writer, he was hoping for a return of the coffin. He made two trips to Washington in the hope of retrieving it. Word of this reached the right quarters, and to avoid an exhibition he was paid. The wholesale prices of coffins are a closely guarded trade secret, but at the request of the author a licensed funeral director and a cemetery manager made discreet inquiries at the Elgin Casket Company about its Britannia model. Both were quoted an identical figure: $1,150. Thus Oneal’s fee represents a markup of $2,345.
Lastly, William Manchester records some reactions to the embalmer’s art as practiced by Gawler’s:
Arthur Schlesinger and Nancy Tuckerman went in through the Green Room. “It was appalling,” Arthur reported. “When I came closer it looked less and less like him. It is too waxen, too made-up.” Nancy echoed faintly that the face resembled “the rubber masks stores sell as novelties.” He urged Bob to “close the casket.”… Walton [William Walton, artist, friend of Kennedy’s] looked as long as he could, with a growing sense of outrage. He said to Bob, “You mustn’t keep it open. It has no resemblance to the President. It’s a wax dummy.”
And closed the coffin did remain. UPI commented as follows:
When Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy decided that President Kennedy’s casket would remain closed while his body lay in state, she acted as many religious leaders wish that all bereaved families would…. They feel that it is pagan rather than Christian to focus attention on the corpse. It is worth noting that in other particulars as well, the conduct of the Kennedy funeral represented a departure from the prevailing funerary practices fostered by the American death industries. There were no flowers, by request of the Kennedy family. At no point did a Cadillac hearse intrude; the coffin, covered by a flag, was transported by gun carriage.
12. FASHIONS IN FUNERALS
Disposal of the dead falls rather into a class with fashions, than with either customs or folkways on the one hand, or institutions on the other…. [S]ocial practices of disposing of the dead are of a kind with fashion of dress, luxury and etiquette.
One of the interesting things about burial practices is that they provide many a clue to the customs and society of the living. The very word “antiquarian” conjures up the picture of a mild-eyed historian groping about amidst old tombstones, copying down epitaphs with their folksy inscriptions and irregular spelling, extrapolating from these a picture of the quaint people and homey ways of yore. There is unconscious wit: the widow’s epitaph to her husband, “Rest in peace—until we meet again.” There is gay inventiveness: