A warm, late-autumn sun shone down on the cemetery. The last notes of the Star-Spangled Banner floated up from the tomb, mingling with the faint purr of a jet airplane, invisible in the sky above. Facing the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the panorama of Washington beyond it stood a white-haired old man in a black Chesterfield coat. His face was pink, and in his right hand he held a black felt hat over his heart. As the anthem ended, Herbert Hoover, 81, stepped forward to meet an Army sergeant holding a large wreath of yellow chrysanthemums. He took the flowers and firmly laid them against the tomb, directly under the inscription: HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY AN AMERICAN SOLDIER
KNOWN BUT TO GOD. As the former President (substituting at the annual Veterans' Day ceremonies for the homeward-bound President Eisenhower) turned and resumed his place, a soldier with a gleaming bugle sounded taps.
When Hoover and 2,500 other citizens left the tomb* after the annual ceremony, stillness descended on the scene, broken only by the precise footfalls of the ramrod-stiff sentry on his everlasting guard: he took 29 paces before the tomb, halted, about-faced, and resumed his march.
The Solemn Record. Behind the Unknown Soldier and his solitary guard lay the gently rolling countryside of northern Virginia and the 408 carefully tended acres of Arlington National Cemetery. In the cemetery lie the remains of 87,000, most of them military men and women, and on the headstones of their graves is carved a solemn record of history. The names themselves ring with historic significance : William Howard Taft, the only President to exercise his prerogative as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and select Arlington as his burial site; Admiral Robert (North Pole) Peary; Robert Todd Lincoln, James Garfield's Secretary of War, and the only one of Abraham Lincoln's sons to live to manhood ; General Phil Sheridan; Air General Henry ("Hap") Arnold and Admiral Marc ("Turn on the Lights") Mitscher; William Gibbs McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson's World War I Secretary of the Treasury; Pianist and Polish Patriot Ignace Jan Paderewski, who rests in Arlington until Poland is free again; Navy Lieut, (j.g.) James V. Forrestal, later the first Secretary of Defense; Pierre L'Enfant, the French-born engineer who designed the city of Washington, also served as a peacetime major in the Army engineers; Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, sometime lieutenant-colonel in the 20th Massachusetts Volunteers during the Civil War; General Jonathan Wainwright of Corregidor. On a brooding hillock General John J. Pershing lies in lonely aloofness. Another small knoll is occupied by the grave of Lieut. General Arthur MacArthur; near by, a plot is reserved for his son. Humbler graves reflect the grimness of war and the greatness of American history: "James Parks, born a slave," or, simply, "Unknown."