An American Tour: Reflections at Arlington

Travelling to America twenty-six years after my last visit --- and that was when Bill Clinton was President --- was essentially a tour of the history of the country. Or should I say the trip, apart from being a good opportunity to link up with my siblings and in-laws, was for me a new exercise in American political history? Since my schooldays my interest in the stories of US Presidents has been intense. It is a preoccupation which continues to this day.
On a beautiful morning in September, my youngest sibling Nadeem drove me to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where I was keen to revisit the gravesite of President John F. Kennedy, his wife Jacqueline and their two boys. The site has always been a source of fascination for me since that day in November 1963 when the newspapers carried pictures of a young Jacqueline, suddenly turned into a widow in Dallas a few days earlier, lighting the Eternal Flame on her husband’s grave. Jackie, as she was popularly known, passed away nearly thirty-one years, in 1994, after her husband’s assassination.
My earlier visits to Arlington were in June 1999 and February 2000. And on both occasions I stood at the JFK gravesite, in homage to the fallen President. As on those earlier occasions, I stood on this September day before those Kennedy graves, my mind travelling back to the funeral in 1963. Where I stood was the very spot where global dignitaries, among whom were Charles de Gaulle, Ludwig Erhard, Haile Selassie, Anastas Mikoyan and King Baudouin, among so many others, had stood as President Kennedy’s coffin was lowered into his grave. For me, it was once again a reconnecting with history. My brother, born more than a decade after the assassination, stood and watched in sombre silence the stillness that pervaded the gravesite.
Somewhere nearby was the grave of another slain Kennedy. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, campaigning for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, was assassinated in June 1968. My brother and I asked a security officer about the location of RFK’s grave, to be told that it was on the other side, behind the spot where the Eternal Flame burned. It took us quite some minutes to spot the grave and as we were busy looking for it, we stumbled on the grave of Robert Strange McNamara, who served as Secretary of Defence under President Kennedy and then under President Lyndon Johnson. McNamara, who pursued a Vietnam policy that was going nowhere --- it was a time when Washington was desperate about beating back the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong and preserving the regime in Saigon (today’s Ho Chi Minh City) --- left government in 1968 convinced that America was not winning the war. McNamara did not, however, lapse into silence or retirement. He was swiftly moved to the World Bank, where he served as its President for thirteen years.

People of my generation recall how resolutely opposed Tajuddin Ahmad, as Finance Minister of a newly independent Bangladesh, was to any links with either the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It was Tajuddin’s belief that membership of the two organisations would condemn Bangladesh to a debt trap from which it would never be able to emerge free. A staunch socialist, he was convinced the country had the resources and the leadership that would have it scale the heights of progress without the assistance of the Bretton Woods institutions. Tajuddin, having presided over the guerrilla war that led Bangladesh to liberation in late 1971, was however forced to eat humble pie when the precarious economic conditions confronting Bangladesh led him to Washington in autumn 1974 to negotiate with McNamara on the ways and means by which a solution to Bangladesh’s growing crisis could be arrived at. Tajuddin Ahmad was certainly not happy about it. Not long after he returned home, he was instructed by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to resign from the cabinet. Tajuddin followed his leader’s directive and left government at the end of October 1974.
These images from the past rushed back into my imagination as I stood at McNamara’s grave. That his mea culpa about Vietnam was conveyed in his work, ‘In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam’, an account of the war I read years ago in Dhaka, was what I recalled as I reflected on the man now in peaceful repose in Arlington. And then, for my brother and me, it was again a search for the grave of Robert Kennedy. We found it, marked by a simple white cross. We also discovered a truth we had quite been unaware of: that his widow Ethel Skakel Kennedy had also been interred in the same grave. Ethel Kennedy, whose biography by her daughter Kerry Kennedy has recently been released, died in October 2024. She and RFK were the parents of eleven children, the last baby Rory being born after her father’s assassination. One of their children, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, now serves as Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration.

Beside Robert Kennedy’s grave was the resting place of Senator Edward Moore Kennedy. My brother and I stood there, humbled by the unpretentious nature of the graves of the two Kennedys. The graves were marked by two simple white crosses. I seemed to hear once again Edward Kennedy invoke Rabindranath Tagore (‘Where the Mind Is Without Fear) before the Arts Faculty of Dhaka University in February 1972. I also heard, in the blowing of the winds, the speech in which he quoted from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ moments after he had lost the race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination against President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Edward Kennedy succumbed to brain cancer in August 2009.
As my brother and I stepped out of Arlington National Cemetery, my thoughts seemed to be zeroing in on Abraham Lincoln, indeed on that consequential speech he delivered in Gettysburg in 1863. But let that be for another day.
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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy, history and culture