The mystery over what happened to a large memorial wreath designated for placement at President John F. Kennedy’s grave has been solved.
But why it never was put in place at Arlington National Cemetery? That question continues to bedevil researchers.
Based on a concept by the French jewelry designer Jean Schlumberger of Tiffany & Co., the marker had been commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy several years after her husband’s assassination. It was nearly installed at the gravesite before the effort was quietly abandoned in the early 1970s.
The Upperville, Va.-based Oak Spring Garden Foundation helped to locate this forgotten memorial and bring to light its previously untold back story.
The entire tale, from the memorial’s conception to how its current location was divined, is revealed in the new edition of Ploughshares, a publication of Emerson College.
The article by Gretchen Ernster Henderson also highlights how the Mellon family, particularly Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon (1910-2014), was intimately involved with creation of the memorial.
The memorial wreath was secretly created by the sculptor and goldsmith Louis Féron at his studio in New Hampshire, before being cast at the Modern Art Foundry in New York in April-May 1969.
As designed, the piece was designed to surround the Eternal Flame at the gravesite. Its design paid homage to the caps of those who served on the military honor guard carrying President Kennedy’s coffin to its resting place in November 1963.
Members of the honor guard removed their caps and left them at the grave as a mark of respect. They were maintained on the site until 1967 after the reinterment and consecration of the permanent gravesite, which was designed by John Carl Warnecke and Associates and was approved by Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Mellon.
Though constructed, the Schlumberger memorial wreath did not become part of Kennedy gravesite, which has been visited by millions through the decades.
While the current location of the sculpture has now been determinec, there are still some open questions.
“Why the wreath was not placed at the grave remains a mystery,” said Elinor Crane, a head volunteer at Oak Spring, the estate that had been the home of Rachel Mellon and after her death was transferred to the foundation.
But Crane, who heads the Kennedy Grave Project at Oak Spring, has some ideas:
“My own conjecture is that maybe in 1963 we honored the military, and by the fog of the Vietnam War in the mid-1970s, we were less inclined to lift up the military. There is also so many years that passed between the reinterment of the president in 1967 and the completion of the wreath that maybe the simple round stone eternal-flame design that ‘Bunny’ Mellon had conjured it was felt too heavy for the grave. We shall really never know, for the written materials in our archives really end by 1970.”
Until recently, nobody had any idea where the memorial resided — if it had survived at all. But recent research located it at an off-site storage facility at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in Massachusetts.
“There is some hope that in the winter of 2025 the wreath can be reassembled and photographed,” Crane said. But putting it on permanent exhibition there could be difficult, owing to space limitations, she said.
Oak Spring has released a 9-minute video detailing the story of the memorial.
