Body of Controversial Envoy Is Removed From Arlington

The body of Ambassador M. Larry Lawrence was exhumed from Arlington National Cemetery on Thursday, a week after Republicans questioned his claims of wartime service that helped win permission for burial there.

Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said the Lawrence family handled the details of removing Lawrence’s body and moving it to a new burial site.

Lawrence’s widow, Shelia Davis Lawrence, had asked President Clinton in a letter this week to order the body exhumed for reburial in the San Diego area, where Lawrence owned the landmark Hotel del Coronado. She said in her letter that the controversy over his burial in Arlington “precludes his resting there in peace.”

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

The controversy concerns whether Lawrence served in the merchant marine in 1945 and was wounded, as he had claimed.

Lawrence died while serving as ambassador to Switzerland, and his merchant marine service was cited to help him receive a waiver to be buried in the nation’s most prominent military cemetery. But congressional investigators said last week they had found no evidence that he served in the merchant marine. In addition, Wilbur Wright Junior College in Chicago confirmed that Lawrence was a full-time student in March 1945, the same month he claimed his ship was torpedoed off Russia.