Laid to Rest

As the President of the U.S. entered by a side door, the organ played My Country, 'Tis of Thee. The modernistic, brick and glass First Baptist Church of Bonham, Texas, was full. John Kennedy took his place in a second-row pew, beside former Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman, and next to Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

In the rows behind them were 128 members of the House and Senate, Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark of Texas, and hundreds of other dignitaries from all over the U.S. At the door of the church, William ("Fishbait") Miller, longtime chief doorkeeper of the House, greeted the distinguished mourners and quietly ushered them to their seats. Out front, an overflow crowd of the friends and neighbors of Samuel Taliaferro Rayburn waited in the street.

Great and Noble. In front of the pulpit, the body of Mister Sam lay in a bronze casket under a mantle of deep red roses. "Whatever was great and noble in his life shall abide forever," said the Rev. Bernard Braskamp, chaplain of the House. "We are not saying farewell, only good night." Elder H. G. Ball, the Primitive Baptist Church pastor who had baptized Sam Rayburn just five years ago, intoned the eulogy. Then, while the organ played America, the Beautiful, six of Mister Sam's lifelong friends carried him away.

The sun broke through the wintry sky as the funeral cortege made its way to Willow Wild Cemetery, where, in the family plot, Sam Rayburn was laid to rest beside the grave of his favorite sister, Lucinda.

After the funeral, the mourners silently went their separate ways. They had known for weeks that Sam Rayburn was dying--but he had somehow seemed indestructible, and few could believe that the end would really come. In fact, the fatal cancer that eventually consumed Rayburn was at work during the spring of 1961, when lines of pain began etching his face and he complained of an aching back. Twice during last June and July he lost consciousness while sitting in the Speaker's chair, only to recover within moments and carry on as though nothing had happened. "They're going to have to carry me out of here, God willing," he once said. "I love this House."

The Damnedest Thing. By late August the cancer had so ravaged the old man that he could no longer carry on. Mister Sam had a pretty good idea of what ailed him--and he determined to go home to Texas to die. Still, as he left Washington four weeks before Congress adjourned, he defiantly promised to return for the next session in January.

In October, after a month in his Bonham home, Rayburn went to Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas for extensive medical tests. Surgical examination showed cancer of the lymphatic system--inoperable, incurable and spreading through his body. When he recovered consciousness, Mister Sam asked his doctors for the truth and got it. "This," Rayburn told a great-nephew, Robert Bartley Jr., "is the damnedest thing that ever got ahold of me."

The nation's great hastened to his hospital door. First on the scene was Lyndon Johnson, whom Rayburn had helped raise from a political neophyte to the vice-presidency. Then came President Kennedy, making a 3,000-mile round trip to visit at the bedside of the stern-faced Speaker he had first known when he was a freshman Congressman from Massachusetts. "They don't make them like that any more," said Kennedy. "He has the courage of ten men." Finally came Harry Truman, who on that April day in 1945 was in Rayburn's Capitol hideaway for a drink when he learned that Franklin Roosevelt had died. Emerging from the hospital room, Truman reported that the Speaker was as doughty as ever: "He told me where to get off just like he did when I was in the White House. I was so happy at the way he treated me."

Home to Bonham. Mister Sam fought hard against death. Pneumonia nearly finished him, but he came back for a while. The doctors eased his pain with drugs. They tried X rays and the drug 5-fluorou-racil in a futile attempt to slow the cancer's spread. At last the day came when medicine could do no more and, at his own request, Mister Sam went home to Bonham for the last time, returning to "those friends and neighbors who for so long have given me a love and loyalty unsurpassed in any annals." By last week the cancer had reached his brain. He sank into a coma, rallied, sank and rallied again. Finally he yielded, passed peacefully from his deep sleep to death. Said his doctor: "He just stopped breathing."

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