Body of Controversial Envoy Is Removed From Arlington

The body of Ambassador M. Larry Lawrence was exhumed from Arlington National Cemetery and brought here Thursday for burial at the suburban El Camino Memorial Park and Mortuary.

A private cargo jet carrying the body of Lawrence, who was the envoy to Switzerland, arrived in the afternoon at a Carlsbad airport. The body had been exhumed hours earlier from Arlington at the request of Lawrence’s widow, Shelia Davis Lawrence, in an attempt to end the controversy over whether her husband, who had owned the famed Hotel del Coronado, had fabricated a story about heroic service in the merchant marine during World War II.

The story had helped win permission for Lawrence to be buried at Arlington. But in a letter to President Clinton, Shelia Lawrence said the politically charged controversy “precludes his resting there in peace.”

The body was brought to the cemetery in the Sorrento Valley area of San Diego, where the Lawrence family has a plot, amid tight security. News photographers were kept away by security guards, and a large tent was erected over the grave site. A hearse backed up to the tent and then left several minutes later. A limousine carrying several people arrived shortly thereafter.

Despite the Arlington exhumation, House Republicans said they will pursue an investigation into the waiver that allowed Lawrence, a major donor to the Democratic Party, to be buried in the hallowed military cemetery across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital.

Rep. Terry Everett (R-Ala.) has said his House Veterans Affairs oversight subcommittee wanted to know how Lawrence received the waiver in the first place. Lawrence held his ambassadorial post at the time of his death in 1996.

The controversy concerns whether Lawrence was serving in the merchant marine and was wounded in action in March 1945, as he had claimed. Investigators have found records indicating Lawrence was enrolled in a Chicago junior college that month.