Where Are They Buried? (97 page)

At 39, Martin was killed in Memphis, Tennessee. While he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, a single bullet was fired at him from the bathroom of a flophouse across the parking lot. A fugitive from a Missouri prison, James Earl Ray, was staying in the flophouse and a rifle and a pair of binoculars marked with his fingerprints was found in a bag near there. Arrested in London two months later, Ray never stood trial, but instead pleaded guilty in order to avoid the death penalty. Ballistics tests were never able to prove, or disprove, that the bullet had come from Ray’s rifle and, largely on that basis, Ray tried to recant his guilty plea and repeatedly petitioned the court for a trial. However, no court ever recognized his request, and in 1998 he died of hepatitis at 70 and was cremated.

In a magnificent crypt atop a reflecting pool, Martin lies at his own Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, established in Atlanta in 1970.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
From I-75/85, take Exit 95 and follow either Butler Road or Hilliard Street for one block north to Auburn Avenue. Turn right onto Auburn Avenue and the site is one mile ahead on the right.

JANUARY 26, 1880 – APRIL 5, 1964

Douglas MacArthur was the son of a Union army hero during the Civil War, and he and his father remain the only such pair ever to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor.

After attendance at the West Texas Military Academy, Douglas received an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point and graduated first in the Class of 1903. During the next decade he rose steadily in the Army, eventually became its first public-relations officer, and is largely credited with selling the American people on the Selective Service Act of 1917. Upon the entry of the United States into World War I, MacArthur commanded a combat brigade in France and became the war’s most decorated American soldier.

While his peers were demoted to their pre-war ranks, MacArthur received a plum new assignment as superintendent of West Point and dragged the moribund academy into the twentieth century, enabling it to produce officers fit to lead the country in the type of modern war he had just experienced firsthand.

In 1923 he took command of the Army’s Philippine Department and, in 1930, President Hoover appointed him chief of staff. After only five years, MacArthur was drawn back to the Philippines to head a U.S. military mission charged with preparing the islands for independence. On December 7, 1941, though, an expansionist Japan struck the United States at Pearl Harbor and, without enough time or money to build a force capable of resisting the Japanese, his forces retreated to the Bataan peninsula and struggled to survive while MacArthur himself was ordered to Australia.

MacArthur left his men to face almost-certain destruction, comforted only by the belief that he would later lead an army back to rescue them. For the next three years, his personal quest—“I shall return”—became almost synonymous with the war in the Pacific. Although MacArthur’s path through the dense South Pacific island jungles could hardly have been foreseen in the initial war plans, the offensive under his command returned U.S. forces to the Philippines in October of 1944, and MacArthur dramatically waded ashore at Leyte during its liberation. The next year, as supreme commander of the Allied powers, MacArthur presided over the Japanese surrender aboard the
USS Missouri
, which brought an end to World War II.

His place as a leading figure of the twentieth century secure, MacArthur may have made his greatest contribution to history in the next five years as supreme commander of the allied powers in Japan. As its military governor, he implemented policies that purged Japan of its militarism, and through the successful occupation a devastated Japan, he saw it rebuild, institute a democratic government, and chart a course that has made it one of the world’s leading industrial powers.

At the outbreak of the Korean War in July 1950, MacArthur was placed in command of an American-led coalition of United Nations forces, and he reversed their dire military situation with an amphibious assault at the Port of Inchon, where he forced the invading North Koreans to surrender most of their gains. But when Chinese forces began fighting alongside the North Koreans, MacArthur advocated an extension of the war into China, and President Truman relieved him of command on April 11, 1951.

As the last great general of World War II to come home, MacArthur received a hero’s welcome and concluded his address to Congress with his citation of an old military song, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” True to his word, the old soldier faded from the public eye and quietly lived out the remainder of his years in New York until his death of natural causes at 84.

Douglas MacArthur is buried at his own MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
From I-264, take Exit 10, which is City Hall Avenue, and follow the signs to MacArthur Center, a big shopping mall across the street from the MacArthur Memorial. In the area you might find on-street parking, but it’s easiest to park in the south garage of the MacArthur Center and walk to the memorial. Bring your ticket and they’ll validate it so you don’t have to pay for parking.

The MacArthur Memorial is a National Historic Place that accepts donations and is very much worth whatever you might be able to give. The beautifully landscaped square features a theater, a library, and a museum with nine galleries of exhibits. The General and Mrs. MacArthur lie in the center rotunda.

NOVEMBER 14, 1909 – MAY 2, 1957

Joe McCarthy was an undistinguished first-term senator from Wisconsin when he found his cause in February 1950. Appearing at a Republican Women’s Club meeting in West Virginia, McCarthy announced that by clandestine effort he had collected a “list of 205 cases of individuals who appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party” working within the state department.

In spite of the fact that it was not a crime to be a member of the Communist Party, despite McCarthy’s refusal to disclose
exactly how he had arrived at this list, and, even though McCarthy couldn’t nail down the number of infiltrators that existed—in a Salt Lake City speech the following week there were only 57, and on the Senate floor five days later there were 81—the assertion was like gasoline tossed on the smoldering coals of Cold War anxiety.

The furor should have been extinguished in July 1950 when, after McCarthy failed to produce a single name of an actual Communist, the Tydings Senate subcommittee concluded that his campaign was a “hoax and a fraud.” But by then, McCarthy’s fantastic controversy had gained the momentum of a runaway train, and it certainly wasn’t going to be derailed by a mere subcommittee’s opinion. Instead, McCarthy rallied anxious supporters with inflammatory speeches and subpoenaed prominent citizens to Washington, where he demanded “the naming of names.” Regularly usurping executive and judicial authority, McCarthy cast suspicion on anyone he pleased. To question his character or the motivations of his witch-hunt could result in being blackballed, which was “as good as Red.”

His coffers overflowing with donations from frenzied supporters, McCarthy won his 1952 re-election and became chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of Governmental Operations. In 1954 he pressed to convene hearings to investigate the extent of communist espionage activity in the Army. His own Republican party resisted the hearings, as they knew full well that nothing would be found. But Democrats pushed the hearings ahead to allow McCarthy the opportunity to commit political suicide and, with any luck, kill his party.

On April 23, 1954, the hearings began and McCarthy’s flagrant disregard for proper investigative procedure and reckless interrogative tactics were quickly exposed to some twenty million television viewers. After 36 days of testimony, the Army was vindicated and Senator McCarthy became immediately irrelevant. In July a resolution accusing McCarthy of conduct “unbecoming a member of the United States Senate” was introduced, and in December 1954 the Senate voted to censure him.

Even before his professional reputation was destroyed there were whisperings that McCarthy suffered from alcoholism, and after his censure, though still a Senator, he stayed home and watched soap operas while drinking continuously. In the summer of 1956 he was hospitalized for detoxification, where he suffered fits of delirium screaming that snakes were attacking him. The treatment helped, but McCarthy soon resumed drinking and his face grew bloated, his body drawn, and his skin yellow.

When he was again admitted to the Navy Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, his wife said he was undergoing treatment for an old knee injury, but when he died four days later at 47, the hospital reported it was from “acute hepatitis, origin unknown.” It was later acknowledged that McCarthy was being treated in the neurology ward for alcohol abuse, which caused his liver failure.

He is buried at Saint Mary’s Church Cemetery in Appleton, Wisconsin.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From routes 41 and 10, take Exit 136 onto Prospect Avenue. Follow Prospect Avenue east for a mile and the cemetery is on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, go over the bridge and stop after the chapel. Joe’s stone is on the right, adjacent to the river.

In the 60 years since McCarthy’s hearings, information obtained from the KGB seems to indicate that Communists
did
infiltrate the government. Such revelations however, fall far short of any vindication for McCarthy. It’s clear that instead of having any actual knowledge, Joe McCarthy
supposed
there might be infiltration, and after concocting a list of such threats, he trampled over the United States Constitution, smeared hundreds of Americans and profited, for a while anyway, politically and personally from the hysteria he instigated.

MAY 22, 1930 – NOVEMBER 27, 1978

Harvey Milk was a stalwart Republican from Long Island who served in the Navy during the Korean War and came home to find success on Wall Street. But banking bored him, and he slipped into the vibrant gay Greenwich Village milieu. Enraptured by the reports of San Francisco’s flourishing gay counterculture, Harvey and his boyfriend headed west in 1972 and opened a camera shop.

To be gay in the 1970s, when many psychiatrists still called homosexuality a mental illness, meant that, to be accepted in conventional society you had to be satisfied with a closeted life and a fake wedding ring. Of course, the political arena was entirely off-limits to “avowed homosexuals.”

At the camera shop, Harvey began making waves as he convinced himself that the root cause of the gay predicament was
invisibility and that the gay community’s political situation needed an overhaul. Instead of being satisfied that members of the gay community had infiltrated the hostile Democratic Party and toiled in quiet anonymity with straight allies, the day had come for the gay community to publicly elect one of its own. Harvey turned his camera shop into a political war room and set out to infiltrate City Hall through the front door.

To secure a seat on the city’s administration, Harvey reached out to the gay masses and, in supporting him, they out-ed themselves in an invigorating and once-unthinkable way. In 1977, after three unsuccessful campaigns, he was elected to the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors. It was a watershed event; Harvey Milk had become the first openly gay elected official in the United States.

Though the gay community was ecstatic, not everyone cheered, of course, and death threats multiplied. Scarcely a year after his election, Harvey was killed by Dan White, a former police officer and troubled conservative political rival who had clashed with Harvey over gay issues. White had been a fellow supervisor but left the board and, after Mayor George Moscone denied his request to be reinstated, White became unhinged. He charged into the City Hall offices at midday, shooting and killing both Harvey and Mayor Moscone at their desks.

Harvey was 48. He was cremated and his ashes installed at the Neptune Society’s Columbarium on Loraine Court in San Francisco. To view Harvey’s niche, walk about eight feet into the Columbarium and you’ll find him on the top right.

At his trial, Dan White employed the “Twinkie defense,” claiming that too much junk food had affected his reasoning abilities. The jury didn’t buy it and he was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to 92 months for the murders of the two men, and most San Franciscans, both gay and straight, were enraged by the leniency. Demonstrations turned into riots in what became known as “White Night.”

After serving 61 months, only two-thirds of an already lenient sentence, White was paroled in January 1984 and, after a year in Los Angeles, he moved back to San Francisco, though Mayor Diane Feinstein publicly asked him not to return. White lived there quietly and without incident until October 21, 1985, when he asphyxiated himself in the garage of his home at age 39.

In 2000 the Board of Supervisors assigned the building that housed Harvey’s camera shop the status of Historic Building, and you can visit it at 575 Castro Street. Castro Street runs north-south through the Haight-Ashbury district and Number 575 is just north of Castro Street’s intersection with 19th Street.

APRIL 22, 1904 – FEBRUARY 18, 1967

In 1939, Niels Bohr brought to the United States the news that German scientists had succeeded at nuclear fission; they’d split the atom. This meant that the Nazis were on their way to developing an atomic bomb and, once President Roosevelt absorbed the terrible implications, he ordered the initiation of a scientific program aimed at developing such a weapon before the enemy did.

Splintered research had been ongoing at Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and at an emerging facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, but now there was a new urgency to the atomic project; to realize the objective, no expense would be spared and no sacrifice could be considered too great. The country’s top theoretical physicists and a few thousand support staff began working together on the so-called Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The resident genius, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was appointed technical director.