With Whispers and Tears, Visitors View Onassis Grave

Some fought back tears, a few brought flowers and many snapped pictures Tuesday at the grave of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

A day after Mrs. Onassis was buried at Arlington National Cemetery next to her first husband--the 35th President of the United States--the Kennedy grave site was reopened to the public and thousands of visitors flocked to it.

Most were tourists. At times when two or three bus groups arrived simultaneously, the crowds around the hillside plot where John F. Kennedy, two of his four children and now his widow are buried were eight to nine people deep. At other times throughout the day, fewer than two dozen people gathered.

Nearly all of the visitors spent a few moments in front of the grave, any comments to companions reverently whispered. A few lingered for several minutes.

Frieda Sullivan of Atlanta knelt down and gently placed four carnations on the irregularly cut Cape Cod granite that a cemetery crew had spent the night carefully re-laying atop the graves. She had trouble breaking away.

Mrs. Onassis died of cancer Thursday at 64 at her home in New York, where she had lived since the 1975 death of her second husband, Aristotle Onassis. But it was with her first husband, the assassinated young President, with whom she wanted to be buried.

She had picked the site for his grave below a mansion that was Robert E. Lee’s home and overlooking the Lincoln Memorial across the Potomac River.

The only formal indication Tuesday that the grave was hers was a 5-by-7-inch printed card in a plastic holder, with the name “Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy” typed on it.

The permanent slate marker over President Kennedy’s grave bears only his full name under a cross and the years of his birth and death. A Kennedy family spokeswoman said Mrs. Onassis’ children had not yet relayed what would be written on their mother’s marker.