Subtitled A Tour of Presidential Gravesites, this book was a slam-dunk Christmas gift from A’s aunt and uncle. They know that my BFF K and I share an ambition to visit all of the presidential libraries together—after all, they kindly hosted us at their home in Iowa City the night before we visited the Hoover Library, kicking off a three-library roadtrip two summers ago (the second of two trips we’ve taken specifically to visit presidential libraries, or the third if you count K’s visit to me in California when we knocked the Reagan and Nixon libraries off her list). I had already been lamenting the fact that National Archive-sponsored presidential libraries don’t go any further back than Hoover, and subsequently considering expanding my goal to visiting a site (home? birthplace?) for every single president, but gravesites hadn’t occurred to me. It makes perfect sense, though: Many of the presidential graves tend to be at significant places I’d like to visit anyway, like their libraries or homes (Jefferson’s at Monticello, for example), and besides, I love graveyards and will frequently consult Find a Grave when planning a trip in case there are any historical personages buried nearby (among others, I’ve paid my respects to Colonel Sanders in Louisville, Kentucky, and Hoagy Carmichael in Bloomington, Indiana—oh, and I just discovered that Octavia Butler, Eldridge Cleaver, and Richard Feynman are all buried just up the road from me in Altadena!). I also got an inadvertent head start on the presidential gravesite quest on my last trip to DC, when I saw JFK and Taft’s graves in Arlington (while, on a literary note, tragically missing Dashiell Hammett, having neglected to do my Find a Grave research first) and Washington’s at Mount Vernon—though if I’d read this book beforehand, I would have pushed harder to go to the National Cathedral, where we almost went before changing plans and where it turns out Wilson is buried (and also Helen Keller, of all people). With the graves I’ve already seen at presidential libraries (Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan), that brings my total to a whopping eight—just 30 currently-dead presidents to go!
As you can see, I found this book informative and inspirational. There are several pages on every president, mostly brief biographical notes focusing on their demises and burials, with plenty of quirky factoids with which to delight your friends if they’re into mildly gruesome trivia (mine, mostly, are). The authorship was rather odd—it’s credited to “Brian Lamb and the staff of C-SPAN,” and while the introduction made much of how Lamb undertook the task of visiting every presidential gravesite, the only real personal touches in the book don’t come from Lamb himself, but from Richard Norton Smith, the expert brought in to provide a brief historical-perspective essay on each president, who occasionally veers into personal reminiscences/opinions (a bit jarringly at times: he manages to wax nostalgic about Nixon’s funeral not once but twice, working in a Bob Dole lovefest alone the way). I would so much rather have read a narrative one man’s quirky personal odyssey, a la Assassination Vacation, and done away with all the straight-up guidebook-style info (of which there is a lot, including admission prices, directions, hours, etc., all of which I’d rather look up on the Internet anyway) in exchange for more historical detail. Also, while the book had a number of useful appendixes, including one that lists all the gravesites by state (I’m not surprised that New York state has the most, with six, but who knew that Ohio would be the runner-up, with five? And no presidents west of the Mississippi except the two in California and LBJ in Texas [though the Bushes will eventually follow]?), it seemed like a major oversight that there was no map showing their locations within each state. Overall, however, this will be a valued addition to my reference library and is highly recommended for any fan of presidential lore.
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