Possibility of Kennedy’s burial at Arlington is explored

By Times wire services

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 20, 1999

In 90-degree heat Monday, spectators view the grave at Arlington National Cemetery where President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis are buried with their stillborn child and one who died at 3 days old. Burying John Jr. there would require a presidential waiver because he was not a minor or a veteran. [AP photo: Dennis Cook]

ARLINGTON, Va. -- Questions abounded Monday about whether John F. Kennedy Jr. would be buried with his parents at Arlington National Cemetery.

Crews at Arlington visited the Kennedy memorial Monday and took measurements even though the family has not made a request, said Sgt. 1st Class Lewis A. Matson, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Military District of Washington, which runs Arlington National Cemetery.

President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, are buried at the hillside grave along with their first child, an unnamed daughter stillborn in 1956, and an infant son, Patrick, who died three days after birth in 1963.

Without a waiver from President Clinton, the 38-year-old John Jr. is ineligible to be buried there because he never served in the military and was not a minor child.

A spokesman for Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said, "Any speculation would be premature."

Clintons offer condolences

President Clinton: "This has been a very difficult thing for us personally." [AP photo]

WASHINGTON -- With John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife and sister-in-law presumed dead in a plane crash, President Clinton on Monday began openly grieving, saying the tragedy had been a "very difficult thing" for his family because of their closeness to the Kennedys

Meanwhile, Hillary Rodham Clinton postponed a political trip to New York because of the plane crash.

Both Clintons have made calls to Kennedy's only surviving immediate family member, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, and to his uncle, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

Clinton, at a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, said: "Let me say that John Kennedy and his sister and later his wife were uncommonly kind to my daughter and to my wife. And this has been a very difficult thing for us personally, as well as because of my position."

Sen. Kennedy plays hoops with nieces, nephew

BRIDGEHAMPTON, N.Y. -- Sen. Edward Kennedy tried to lighten his family's sad vigil Monday by playing basketball with the three children of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg -- his niece and John F. Kennedy Jr.'s sister -- in the front yard of their summer home.

It was a heartbreakingly normal glimpse of a family at play on an otherwise joyless day -- the third day of searching for JFK Jr.'s remains, and the 13th anniversary of Caroline and Edwin Schlossberg's wedding.

Schlossberg stayed away from reporters gathered outside her home.

Kennedy had spent the weekend on Cape Cod with the rest of the Kennedy clan but arrived on Long Island on Monday morning in a dark limousine followed by an unmarked police car.

Only a sliver of his niece's brown-shingled, two-story summer house can be seen from the road through tall hedges, along with a wooden jungle gym and the freestanding basketball hoop.

On Monday afternoon, the Democrat from Massachusetts was glimpsed, bare-chested, shooting hoops with his niece's children -- Rose, 11, Tatiana, 9, and John, 6 -- in humid 85-degree weather.

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