A Mystery Surrounding the Grave of JFK Is Solved
A sculpture recognizing a spontaneous gesture of affection towards the slain president vanished into thin air more than half a century ago. Here’s the story of how it was just recently rediscovered.
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Before he was a civil rights activist, James Felder was a member of the elite U.S. Honor Guard who helped bury John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery after his assassination in 1963. In a move that was unrehearsed, after laying the casket to rest, the members of the Honor Guard placed their military hats upon the gravesite in what James Felder called “a final salute to President Kennedy.”
Years later, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis commissioned a bronze wreath to be made in honor of her husband that incorporated the caps. Once completed, this sculpture disappeared quite suddenly. Half a century later, improbably, it was found due to the help of a couple of sleuths at a private garden in Northern Virginia.
In this episode, host Ari Daniel speaks with Felder and Elinor Crane of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation.
A transcript is below. To subscribe to “There’s More to That,” and to listen to past episodes on the man behind the nonfiction thriller about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, separating fact from fiction in the life of Sojourner Truth, and the complicated legacy of being the descendant of a Civil War hero, find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ari Daniel: In 1962, James Felder thought his fate had been sealed. He was drafted into the Army and was told to report to a base near where he was living in South Carolina for training. He spent six months there and then—
James Felder: They shipped me up to Washington, D.C. to try out for the Army Honor Guard. And I made the cut, and I spent the next 18 months at Fort Myer burying the dead in Arlington National Cemetery. I did a total of 1,100 funerals during that period of time.
Daniel: Wow. You may not know the Honor Guard by name, but you’ve probably seen them.
Felder: One section is for the flag bearers and the guys who do the drill teams, do twirling the rifles and so forth. The second unit is the casket bearer team. That was my unit. The third unit are the guys who fire the weapons at graveside just before the bugle plays “Taps.” The fourth unit is the tomb guards. They’re the ones who march across the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier 24 hours a day.
Daniel: As you can probably tell, military burials at Arlington National Cemetery have a certain degree of fanfare to them, and James Felder participated in a lot of them.
Felder: We pulled the flag over the casket. The priest or rabbi does the ritual. And we fold the flag, present it to the family, and we’d move on to the next gravesite. So there were some days we would do ten funerals in the same day.
Daniel: Even so, James Felder remembers some quite clearly.
Felder: Medgar Evers.
Daniel: Oh, wow.
Felder: June 1963, he was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi, with his family looking on from inside the house, and he was shot in the back. So that was my first funeral at Arlington.
Daniel: That was your first funeral, was Medgar Evers’?
Felder: It was my first one.
Daniel: Wow. And he was a veteran?
Felder: He was a veteran, World War II veteran, so he was entitled to be buried in Arlington Cemetery. After the burial, I escorted his family into the White House where President Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy had a repast and reception for them. Then later on in 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated, like five months later, and I did his funeral.
Narrator of archival footage: There are few events in our national life that so unite Americans, so touch the hearts of all of us, as the passing of a president of the United States. There is nothing that adds shock to our sadness more than the assassination of our leaders.
Daniel: John F. Kennedy died in one of the most shocking and public ways a person could die, shot in the head in broad daylight alongside his wife during a celebratory procession in Dallas. The nation had watched him die, and now all eyes would be on his burial.
Narrator: We are saddened, we are stunned, we are perplexed. Our nation is bereaved. The whole world is poorer because of his loss.
Daniel: The members of the Honor Guard were part of a country in mourning, and now they were entrusted with the solemn task of laying the president to rest.
Felder: It was Lieutenant Sam Bird, he was our platoon commander, and it was his idea to leave something there to show that we were a part of it. Whenever there’s a presidential funeral, you have Army, Navy, Marine, Air Force, and so forth. So that’s how we were able to select the four hats representing the four branches of service. And we had small ceremony. Lieutenant Bird gave a short prayer, and we put the hats at the grave site, one at each corner. And it was very simple, and that was it. We left our hats there as a final salute to President Kennedy.
Elinor Crane: As a history major, I just think it’s fascinating.
Daniel: This is Elinor Crane. Her story is entwined with James Felder’s and this moment at JFK’s burial site because that gesture of leaving a hat behind was all but forgotten for decades. It was Elinor that unearthed its connection to an incredible mystery, an unlikely story that involves Jackie Kennedy, a wealthy socialite, an esteemed jeweler, a French sculptor and James Felder himself.
Crane: It’s sort of Raiders of the Lost Ark meets a celebrity, right? You’re finding something you could have never dreamed this big.
Daniel: From Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions, this is “There’s More to That,” the show that holds an eternal flame for a good art history mystery. I’m Ari Daniel. In this episode, JFK, the Honor Guard and a grand gesture that vanished into thin air more than half a century ago.
Daniel: James Felder first became enamored with John F. Kennedy in 1956. At the time, he was a young college student, and Kennedy was running to be vice president.
Felder: He was my hero.
Daniel: What do you mean?
Felder: Here’s this handsome guy from Massachusetts, speaking in that Boston accent, and he was young. He was different from other politicians of the time. And I just took a liking to him. People would keep asking me, “How did you, a little Black boy from Sumpter, South Carolina, get selected to head President Kennedy’s funeral?”
Daniel: What was motivating that question? Why would people ask that?
Felder: We’re segregated in 1963. This is before the Civil Rights Act, before the Voting Rights Act. The country was completely segregated, at least the South was, anyway.
Daniel: The Honor Guard, like so many other institutions, had long been segregated. President Kennedy helped change that.
Felder: During his inauguration when he was riding down Pennsylvania Avenue and he got to the reviewing stand, the troops were parading in front of him. There were no Black troops in the Honor Guard unit. So he said to the general for the Military District of Washington, he said, “Why aren’t there any Black soldiers in that unit?” Well, the general didn’t have an answer. And Kennedy said, “The next time I see that unit, I want to see some Black faces there.” That was January 1961. Six months later, we had the first Blacks in the Honor Guard. I came along, I was the tenth Black to be appointed to that unit, but that’s how it happened. But Kennedy did have a role.
Daniel: Incredible.
Felder: Yes. Yeah.
Daniel: So your serving was a direct result of JFK getting involved in integrating that group.
Felder: That is correct. Even though Harry Truman, by executive order back in 1948, had desegregated the military, and Blacks for the first time became officers and could do things that other white soldiers did in the military. But it took a long time from ’48 until 1961 to really begin to see some real integration in the military.
Daniel: James Felder was out job hunting on November 22, 1963, the day JFK was assassinated. His time in the Army was almost up.
Felder: That day, it was a Friday. I was coming out of the Department of Agriculture from a job interview. And at the base of the building, at the steps, there was the taxi cab and there was some ladies standing around and crying. I went over nosy and asked, “What’s going on?” I asked the cab driver. He said, “They just shot Kennedy.” I said, “What do you mean they shot Kennedy? He’s in Dallas today.” When you’re in the military, you always know where the president was. And he said, “Yeah, that’s where they got him, in Dallas.”
Well, at that point, they hadn’t declared him dead yet. I got in my little Volkswagen and rode around D.C. for a while waiting to see what was the final outcome going to be. Walter Cronkite came on and said, “The president is dead.” I went home to my apartment in Southeast Washington, walked in, the telephone was ringing. It was my first sergeant. He said, “Sergeant Felder, you heard what happened to the president?” I said, “Yes, sir.” He said, “Well, you need to get out here to Fort Myer, get your team together. You’ve got to pick up the president’s body.”
Daniel: Wow.
Felder: That’s how it started for me.
Daniel: No time to think.
Felder: No time to think.
Daniel: In Dallas, the president’s body was loaded onto Air Force One, accompanied by Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was sworn in as president in the air on the flight back to Washington.
Felder: About 6:15 that evening, Air Force One touched down. We took the body off, and we got it into an ambulance and took it up to Bethesda Naval Hospital for autopsy and for embalming, because we had to provide security at the hospital. You had press all over the place. We literally threw two reporters out of the hospital. Also, we had to get a new casket. The casket that he came up in, the handle got broken on. So I went through my company commander and I said, “Listen, we cannot use this casket, because we’ve got to move this body all over D.C., to the Capitol and the White House and to the church.” So at midnight, three of Kennedys, I call them the Irish mafia guys, went out to buy a new casket: Larry O’Brien, who later became NBA commissioner; [Kenny] O’Donnell, who was his right-hand man; and Dave Powers, who swam with him every day in the pool.
Daniel: They tracked down a new casket at a nearby funeral home.
Felder: That casket was heavy. It weighed some 800 pounds, and when you put the president’s body in it, it came up to like a thousand pounds. We started off with a six-man pallbearer team, which is the norm. But because of the weight of the casket, we had to add two more men, too.
Daniel: Wow.
Felder: So that’s why when you see footage of it, you’ll see eight people carrying the casket or walking beside it as we had to do also. All right. So the undertakers, they came in, they did their job. They did a miraculous job of restoring him for viewing. Now we leave the hospital. It’s 4:00 in the morning, now Saturday morning. We get to the White House. Mrs. Kennedy had not seen the results. She came downstairs, they opened the casket, she looked in and she said, “He looks so wax-like.” Well, what did you expect for the trauma that the head had gone through? So she cut a lock of hair from this head and she put her ring in the casket and closed it. And she said, “We’re not going to have an open viewing of the body.” And it was never opened again.
Daniel: Can I just ask, what was it like to be that close to the now deceased JFK?
Felder: Well, it was just a job at that time. You didn’t have time to think about it. But this was the president, which made it different.
Daniel: Yeah.
Felder: And of course, I have strong feelings about President Kennedy as well. But at this point, I had no choice but to do what we needed to do. And the Army believes in doing things flawlessly. So it was just a matter of doing a job at that point.
Daniel: Right.
Felder: Now, later on, I did have a breakdown. When I say breakdown, I just sat down and cried when I realized what I had done. But that was like ten days later when it all came back to me as to what I had done.
All right. This is now Saturday morning. Heads of states, dignitaries started coming in from all over the world to the White House. We are standing, we’re providing security, and you’ve got the four men at each corner, one at each corner of the casket. And I’m standing there and I’m watching history walk in before me. Here comes Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had twisted arms to get a unanimous decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education, and George Wallace, two opposites.
Daniel: Yeah.
Felder: That same year, Wallace had stood in the door of the University of Alabama and said, “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” And now he and Earl Warren walking in viewing the casket.
Daniel: The following day, the casket was moved to the Rotunda to lie in state.
Felder: It was supposed to close at 9:00, but at 9:00 there was some hundred, some said 200,000 people in line trying to get into the Capitol. And so I drove by the Capitol and saw all these people in line. This is now like midnight. I get home, I get four hours’ sleep. I’m heading back to Fort Myer at 6:00 in the morning, and it looks like the line had never stopped going. There was still people in the line all night long.
Daniel: The funeral was held on that Monday, and that meant it was time for the Honor Guard procession.
Felder: We put the casket on the caisson, and did the two-and-a-half-mile march to Arlington National Cemetery. We get to Arlington Cemetery, we’re tired because the casket and the horses were moving at a real good clip. So we took the casket off the caisson, and we’re going up the hill to the burial site. Leading the procession, we had a Protestant minister, a priest and a rabbi. And they were walking as if they had no place to go, just step, step, step. And that casket was getting heavier and heavier with each step. So finally, I looked at the young Marine across from me. I said, “Jerry, let’s nudge these guys and tell them, ‘Pick it up.’” So we took the casket and nudged the last one, and he looked back and we said, “This casket is heavy. Can you move a little faster?” They started stepping a little faster. We got it up to the grave site, put it on the lowering device, grabbed the flag, and the ceremony started.
Archival footage: Let us pray. Oh, God …
Felder: Cardinal Cushing did the final blessing. We folded the flag. I gave it to Mrs. Kennedy, and our job was over.
Archival footage: … pleased to bless this grave.
Daniel: Felder says it can’t be overstated what a sight it was for the country to see Black members of the Honor Guard presiding over JFK’s burial ceremony.
Felder: After the funeral, went home to Sumter, South Carolina. They had a big parade, I was the grand marshal. And it was the talk of the town and the talk of the state, for that matter. We start getting phone calls from all over the country, from classmates, people who saw me on TV. And you’ve got to remember, 1963, color television was just beginning to come into the fold.
Daniel: Right.
Felder: But people still would recognize me and they immediately started calling congratulating me.
Daniel: But there was one particular gesture from the burial ceremony that stood out to many. It was when the members of the Honor Guard laid their hats down in tribute to the president, the man who had directly desegregated their unit.
Felder: Regular hat, but this was our dress hats. Ours was blue with gold strips, the Army is. And the Navy, of course, they wear the white caps. And the Air Force has a blue hat. So that’s what the hats were all about, representing the various branches of the service.
Daniel: And I’m curious, in that moment when you laid your hat down, what did that feel like to you?
Felder: Well, it was kind of a release of pent-up emotions, I guess. Because now we felt that we had done all we could do, and we wanted to remember this great man and what he went through in particular from a Black perspective. Remember, Kennedy decided to, after he saw what was going on in Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama, and the dogs and the hoses, knocking people down in the streets, he decided June of 1963 to send some legislation to Congress on civil rights, made a great speech that night, June 12th. That’s the same night that Medgar Evers was gunned down when he was coming home from an NAACP meeting. So we loved Kennedy for making his efforts.
Daniel: Mr. Felder, when you all laid the caps down, did you expect them to stay there?
Felder: We knew they wouldn’t stay there forever, but at least we made the effort and we thought that would bring more attention to the assassination and to visitors who visit the cemetery. Cause after that, gosh, the cemetery visitors increased a hundred percent. People from all over the country, all over the world wanted to come to Arlington Cemetery to see what that was all about.
Daniel: The caps were eventually removed. Do you have any suspicions as to where they might have gone or why they might have been taken?
Felder: I have no idea. We knew at least they were somewhere in the cemetery office when they were finally removed. But then, of course, I left. Other guys got out of the military and went on to do other things, and we kind of left it behind. Didn’t even think about it anymore until several years ago when somebody else called it to my attention, and then I inquired at the superintendent’s office in Arlington on one of my trips there. And they said, “We don’t have them. If they were here, we don’t know where they are.” He said, “We’ve got a lot of unknown stuff in boxes around.”
Crane: We have to remember it was a national grief, but it was also a grief for the world.
Daniel: This is Elinor Crane again.
Crane: Somebody who dies at a very old age after the presidency is different than a young, charming man who gave the nation hope, the world hope.
Daniel: Elinor’s role in this story starts with a place called the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia.
Crane: The Oak Spring Garden Foundation was set up after the death of Mrs. “Bunny” Rachel Lambert Mellon, who was married to Paul Mellon.
Daniel: Paul Mellon was heir to the Mellon Bank fortune. When he and Bunny were alive, they resided on a 700-acre property, which is now preserved and looked after by Elinor and others.
And what was Bunny Mellon’s connection to the Kennedy family?
Crane: Bunny was introduced to Mrs. Kennedy by Adele Astaire, Fred Astaire’s sister who lived in this area. They were introduced probably in the late ’50s. And Mrs. Mellon and Mrs. Kennedy become friends. Mrs. Kennedy visits here and admires Mrs. Mellon’s style and everything about the home, it’s very charming, and says, “I wish you could help me with my own home.” And so, Mrs. Mellon does. They’re 15 years apart in age and yet they have a very close friendship. So they met, they knew each other. President Kennedy in 1961 asked Bunny Mellon to do the Rose Garden at the White House.
Daniel: And Bunny Mellon was a landscape architect?
Crane: You would think, Ari, but she actually has a high school education. She’s self-taught. She begins buying landscape and gardening books when she’s 10 years old. She lives to be 103 and a half.
Daniel: Wow.
Crane: So she amasses a great collection. So no, she’s not a landscape architect. She’s a woman who’s coming down to these great landscape architects and telling them what to do.
Daniel: I love that you said 103 and a half. The half a year is very important for little kids and for people once they get much older.
Crane: Yeah. Every day of her existence has to be noted.
Daniel: Bunny Mellon became part of the Kennedy family’s inner circle.
Crane: Mrs. Mellon did the flowers for both John Kennedy Jr. and Caroline Kennedy’s wedding. So it was a long-term friendship that lasted their lifetime.
Daniel: It was only natural, then, that she should be involved in JFK’s funeral.
Crane: The president is shot on a Friday. At some point during that weekend, Mrs. Mellon is asked by Mrs. Kennedy to collect flowers from the Rose Garden to put on President Kennedy’s grave, and then puts Mrs. Mellon in charge of the floral arrangements for the church service as well as up at the grave. The whole world’s watching and the whole world is sending flowers—big, huge wreaths from some of the great countries of the world—and they come to Arlington. But Mrs. Kennedy doesn’t want these wreaths, these kind of round memorial death wreaths to be seen. And so, Mrs. Mellon lays them all down on the hillside. So it looks like the whole hillside is in bloom, just a whole thicket of flowers. And it’s one of the reasons Mrs. Mellon is one of the last people into the church for the service, because she’s doing the flowers up at the grave before the church service in Washington, D.C. She said she’s the last one over the bridge to get into the church before the church closes.
The day after, at the cemetery, the burial of the president, Bobby Kennedy, who is attorney general; Mrs. Kennedy; and John Warnecke, the actual architect of the grave, they go back to Arlington to begin this process of, “What should this grave look like?” because they’ve buried him quickly. So from the end of 1963 to March of 1967, they’re actually planning the actual grave site of the president. Poor John Warnecke has to get the approval of five commissions, because not only is it government property, but then there’s art critics and there’s religious people, and everybody’s got an opinion on what the grave should look like. It’s not like a little grave with a little cross that’s at Arlington. It’s going to be very big to accommodate the crowds.
Daniel: About six months after the burial, the Kennedy family once again called on Bunny Mellon for her expertise, this time to plan that gravesite.
Crane: Mrs. Kennedy said, “I don’t want a big memorial up there. When I go to that grave, I want it to be a family grave. I don’t want it to be a monument to, well, a president.”
Daniel: Through all of this back and forth about the official design of the grave, James Felder’s hat was still lying there at JFK’s burial site alongside the hats of his fellow Honor Guard members. They were left there for years.
Crane: You heard that they took their caps off as a sign of respect. Those caps were still around the grave. And when the reinterment of the president happens in March of 1967, those hats are still around the grave.
Daniel: Are you saying they stay on there for four years?
Crane: We think they were changed, but they stay there, yeah. Bobby Kennedy says to Mrs. Kennedy, when he sees them, “Leave those until they crumble.”
Daniel: JFK was reinterred at his final resting place in 1967.
Crane: But within a month of the reinterment, the hats are still placed around the roundstone where the eternal flame comes up, and an art critic says they’re unbecoming. And in April of 1967, the hats are taken away. But we do know that Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Mellon have a plan to memorialize those hats at that time.
Daniel: Here’s where that mystery we promised you starts to take shape.
Crane: When they were talking about this new grave, we think Mrs. Mellon calls this jeweler who is a designer and says, “What could you do to memorialize these hats?” And this jewelry designer, Jean Schlumberger, draws a drawing about how they could memorialize the hats. And it’s a wreath, and it would have in bronze the hats of the different military servicemen, but they would be placed on branches and rope. One branch palm, one bamboo, one navy rope for his Navy career, the palm and bamboo for his service in the South Pacific, driftwood, which was common in Cape Cod, but also his love of the sea, and one oak leaf in the center, which would be around the eternal flame, it was called, for hope. So the jeweler designs it. Mrs. Kennedy sees it the day before the reinterment and writes to the jeweler and says, “I love your drawing, and we should get a maquette and go back to Arlington and look at it to see if it’ll work.”
Daniel: Schlumberger was quite famous at the time, known for his Tiffany jewelry, but working under him was a sculptor named Louis Féron.
Crane: And Louis is a Frenchman. He’s kind of got a chip on his shoulder because he’s been under the auspices of Schlumberger. Schlumberger draws a drawing and says, “I like this beautiful sea creature, I want it as a piece of jewelry,” and then hands it off to a goldsmith who makes it. But when it’s sold at Tiffany’s, it’s sold under the name Jean Schlumberger. And so, Féron has been under his shadow. He’s doing the work, and this guy’s getting the credit. So he sees how big is this commission from first lady Mrs. Kennedy. He’s going to be able to sign his work as Louis Féron.
So Féron begins this process of making this bronze. And Louis Féron is under deep secrecy about this project. Even in letters, they talk about that project or the memorial wreath or sometimes in code, the presidential tomb, because they don’t want anyone to know what they’re doing. And when he sends it to the foundry, he doesn’t want the foundry to know about this, so he sends it in pieces. So the foundry can’t even put it together that it’s a wreath. It looks like just a military war art, is what somebody described it as.
And we know Mrs. Mellon must have had some input into that. We can’t prove it a hundred percent, but it’s finished in 1969, and Louis thinks he’s finally going to get his due. He writes a letter to Time-Life magazine, and he’s like, “I got this special project. It’s going to be great.” And Time-Life says, “Send me some pictures.” And he’s like, “OK, but you’ve got to send them back.” And they do. And they said, “We’ll think about it once it’s on the grave.” And of course, it never gets to the grave. It disappeared.
Daniel: For half a century, gone without a trace. And Elinor says, no one knows why. Now it’s October 2020, more than 50 years later, and it’s a normal day at Oak Spring.
Crane: I was cleaning the graves up at the cemetery. There’s 36 graves up there. They’re from 1840s to 1940s. And the landscape team would bring me up water to wash the graves and get the lichens off and document what was up there. The stonemason came up with his apprentice, and we were just chatting as we do, and he brought the water up and he said, “Well, I did that over there.”
Daniel: He pointed to a plot of crumbling stones in the dirt, believed to be Bunny Mellon’s mock-up of the grave design for JFK in 1967.
Crane: But I said, “Tommy, you came in 1973.” He said, “Yeah, I did it in 1973.” And that didn’t make any sense to me. Why would she have a mock-up years after the reinterment in March of 1967?
Daniel: But Tommy distinctly remembered a statue arriving there in 1973.
Crane: He just said, “It was a bunch of hats. They were really hard. They were bronze.” But he didn’t really know the symbolism. And Mr. Mellon said to the stonemason team who had done it, said, “We’re going to leave this here to age.” And the landscape team was told by Mrs. Mellon, “Be careful when you’re trimming trees up at the cemetery ’cause we don’t want a tree limb to fall on this sculpture.” So people were notified. So we have two people who remember it.
Daniel: Elinor was determined to make sense of this. Had the sculpture of the hats been at Oak Spring in 1973? And even though the structure was never installed and never put atop JFK’s grave, the question gnawed at her—was it still out there somewhere, this significant work of art that had never been seen in public?
Crane: So that’s where my friend Nancy Collins comes in. She’s the archivist here at Oak Spring. She also was Mr. Mellon’s nurse from the 1980s and then Mrs. Mellon’s nurse until she died, and she literally knows where the dead bodies are. So we went into the archives at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation and started trying to piece this together.
Daniel: What was the question that was driving you in that search?
Crane: Mrs. Mellon never did anything without a reason. Why would she have a fake grave up there for no reason? So going through the archives, there’s a letter to Robert McNamara.
Daniel: He was the secretary of defense under Kennedy and Johnson.
Crane: And one of the paragraphs says, “She wants to memorialize the hats that are left at the grave.” So that’s when we thought she was going to do more with the grave and the hats are the key.
Daniel: Elinor and Nancy searched fruitlessly for four years until January 2024.
Crane: And then, Louis Féron’s archives were at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. And so, Nancy just thought, “Let’s go back to Boston to see if they’ve looked at the documents yet.” And Boston had, they sent us the files, and that’s when we saw the photo of the wreath here at the Oak Spring Garden Cemetery.
Daniel: Once they had confirmation that the wreath had been at Oak Spring, they started finding more clues.
Crane: It’s sent back to Louis Féron’s house. And we know in 1977, he gets the agreement of the JFK Library, which hadn’t even been built yet, to take the wreath off his hands for $1,500 in April of 1977. There’s one letter from Dave Powers at the JFK Library that says, “Maybe we should send an artist up there to look at this thing before we buy it.” It’s 1,500 bucks. It was a lot of money. And then, they accept it into the JFK Library for $1,500 from Féron, who packs it up and sends it. And it’s sent to an offsite storage in six or eight crates and never opened.
Daniel: This was the big breakthrough.
Crane: Us knowing it’s at the JFK Library and Museum. And they wouldn’t have known they had it because not only was it in back storage, but it was under Féron’s name who nobody would’ve been looking up.
Daniel: Right? Much to his chagrin.
Crane: Yeah.
Daniel: Now Elinor knew what to ask for.
Crane: The JFK Library did call us on a Monday saying that they found it, and you could have heard the scream all over D.C.—Nancy and I screaming about it. So yeah, that was the moment. We wouldn’t have asked for Féron’s name either. It’s just a fluke that this thing escaped to the back of beyond, so to speak.
Daniel: Elinor traveled to the JFK Library in Boston last winter to see it. Most of the wreath was still in boxes.
Crane: They took a few pieces. Felder’s hat happens to be one of them. We’re very proud to say there’s some Virginia bird poop on Felder’s hat that has remained there for the 50 years since it was up here at the cemetery.
Daniel: Really? Amazing. So what was it like that moment to actually see it?
Crane: Seeing his hat was sort of the pinnacle. But then, when we went back in July with Nancy Collins and myself, they took out some of the branches. And one of the branches had Louis Féron’s signature on it. That was really exciting to see. Louis got his due. He got his signature there. He probably wanted a bit more than that.
Daniel: Yeah, like a profile in the magazine.
Crane: Yeah.
Daniel: As we were reporting this story, the JFK Library was finally beginning to take the wreath out of its boxes and reassemble it for public display—a moment of patriotism, of tenderness memorialized.
Crane: Felder, he’s my hero. He’s so fantastic.
Daniel: When did you leave the Honor Guard, and where did your life take you from there?
Felder: I left the Honor Guard in 1964 and I went to law school. And I entered Howard University Law School in September of the same year. After three years of law school, I came back home to South Carolina. Vernon Jordan was running a project called the Voter Education Project. It was an effort to get Blacks registered in the South following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He recruited me to come to South Carolina to do voter registration, and I did.
Daniel: Felder helped register thousands more Black voters in South Carolina at a crucial time in our nation’s history.
Felder: 1970 came, and I was drafted to run for the state legislature here in South Carolina and won.
Daniel: Felder and a few of his new colleagues became the first Black representatives to sit in the South Carolina House since the turn of the century.
Felder: Following that, I served as an assistant prosecutor, served as a special family court judge. I practiced law for a while. Then I went on the academic scene teaching at the University of South Carolina, Allen University and at Benedict College. I’m now retired. I’ve been writing books about my experience in various areas. I’ve done five books. I’m working on two more presently.
Daniel: You keep busy, huh?
Felder: Well, it keeps the blood flowing.
Daniel: James Felder is currently planning a trip to Boston to see the wreath as well. I’m curious, did you have a reaction to knowing that the hats had been kind of memorialized in this way?
Felder: I was pleasantly surprised. So I’ve been spreading the word to those of the Honor Guard unit who are still alive. We’ve lost three of the eight original casket bearers. We were doing a reunion every two years in recent years because we’re all getting older now. So we were meeting in places just outside of Chicago to talk about and share our stories and talk about family and all of that, yeah.
Daniel: When you found out that the wreath had been rediscovered, what did you think?
Felder: Well, I said, “Amen. Amen to that.”
Daniel: How are you feeling about seeing it?
Felder: I guess after all of these years, it revs me up, and I have flashbacks through that day and what happened with President Kennedy. The fact that I was so close to what had happened there, I used to be kind of cold about what had happened. I didn’t even want to talk about it. Matter of fact, didn’t even talk about what had happened to my children. So my feelings come and go, they come and go. I have my good moments and then I have the flashback moments also. Yeah.
Daniel: Incredible, incredible.
Felder: I’m sitting in my voter registration office right now, still trying to get people to run for public office. It’s just in my blood. It’s in my DNA.
Daniel: It was such a treat to get to speak with you. Thank you for taking the time to share your story, your perspective, your feelings about what happened. I really appreciate it.
Felder: You’re welcome.
Daniel: Special thanks to Smithsonian editor Ellen Wexler for her reporting that laid the foundation for this episode. To read her article and learn more about James Felder, Elinor Crane and the famous hats of the JFK wreath, head to SmithsonianMag.com.
“There’s More To That” is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the iHeart Radio app, and wherever you get your podcasts.
From the magazine, our team is me, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly. From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Genevieve Sponsler, Adriana Rozas Rivera, Sandra Lopez-Monsalve and Edwin Ochoa. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.
Our episode artwork is by Emily Lankiewicz. Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson. Our music is from APM Music. Clips courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
I’m Ari Daniel. Thanks for listening.
I can’t wait to go see that sculpture.
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