Breslin and Son of Kennedy Gravedigger Recall the Famous Job

“Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday,” is the way that Jimmy Breslin’s famous gravedigger column begins, kicking off a poignant account of Mr. Pollard digging President Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery shortly after the assassination in 1963.

And it is similar to how Mr. Pollard’s stepson, Johnnie Edward Jones, 66, begins his own recollection of the day Mr. Pollard dug the president’s grave.

“My father didn’t work weekends, but he knew he was going to be called in for this,” Mr. Jones recalled when reached by phone on Friday. “They wanted him to prepare a grave for the president, so my mother got up early and fixed him breakfast, and he come home late that night.”

Breakfast was bacon and eggs, noted Mr. Breslin’s column, which also quoted the supervisor telling Mr. Pollard on the phone, “I guess you know what it’s for.”

Mr. Breslin, now 85, said the idea to visit Kennedy’s grave occurred to him shortly after hearing about the assassination, while working in Selma, Ala.

“First thing I thought was, ‘Where will they bury him?’ ” he said, reached by phone at his home in Manhattan on Friday. He said he contacted Arlington and was told Mr. Pollard would be called in to dig the grave. He rushed that morning to the Pollard house on Corcoran Street in the Northeast section of Washington, where, as the column noted, Mr. Pollard put on khaki overalls and ate his breakfast. Then he and the columnist traveled to the cemetery, which would result in Mr. Breslin’s now-famous column for The New York Herald Tribune.

“By then, I knew I was in good shape, because there were a thousand reporters at the funeral, so no way I was going there,” Mr. Breslin recalled. “I knew it was going to be a good piece. I didn’t get excited. I just wanted to do it and get out, and hit the bar.”

When President Kennedy’s body was moved several years later, to its current spot nearby, Mr. Pollard was called upon to dig that second grave.

“He dug the president’s grave twice,” said Mr. Jones, of New Carrollton, Md., who was 16 at the time and remembers it vividly. He now works as a courier at Federal Express and as a desk clerk at a condominium complex.

“He was very upset when he heard about the assassination, but when he got the call from Arlington that Sunday, he found it within himself to put his sorrow behind him and do what he had to do, for his country,” Mr. Jones said. “It was a big part of his life.”

Mr. Pollard, a World War II veteran, worked at Arlington for more than 30 years, before retiring around 1980. He died two years later and was buried a few hundred feet from where President Kennedy now rests.

“My father and mother both liked Kennedy when he first came on the scene, and they mostly voted Democratic, so there was a lot of pride involved in digging his grave,” Mr. Jones said. “He wasn’t looking for special recognition. He considered it his duty to his country, and he took as a great honor.”

Mr. Breslin said that he wrote the column in Washington in a couple of hours before a 5 p.m. deadline - “I could write a column in a half an hour, if it was life and death” - and then hopped a train to New York and another one to Queens and went straight to Pep McGuire’s bar and began drinking.

Mr. Jones said that Mr. Breslin sent copies of the column to the Pollards, which they distributed to friends. On Friday, Mr. Breslin said he himself never even read the column once he filed it.

“To this day, I haven’t read the thing,” he said. “You just go on to the next one. What, am I going to read it and extol myself? I worked for a living. It’s ‘Where’s the bar?’ and you keep going.”