Every Person Who Has Lain in State or Honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda

The catafalque on which most of these caskets rested was hammered together in five days in April 1865, out of rough pine boards covered in black cloth, to support the body of Abraham Lincoln. It is still in use. Modern coffins are wider than Lincoln’s, so the base has been extended, but the structure underneath is the same one that held him in 1865, then James Garfield in 1881, then William McKinley in 1901, then John F. Kennedy in 1963, and so on. It lives in the basement of the Capitol when not in use. It has now been used for 41 separate ceremonies.

Henry Clay was the first, in July 1852. The Capitol Rotunda had been finished for nearly thirty years by then but had never been used for a state funeral, partly because no one had thought to formalize the practice. Congress voted to honor Clay there spontaneously, establishing a precedent no one had quite anticipated. Forty more would follow. Some were presidents. Some were senators. Some were soldiers no one could name. One was a French engineer who had been dead for 84 years when he was brought to the Rotunda. One was an evangelist who had counseled twelve presidents. One was a Capitol Police officer killed by a man who had stopped taking his medication. The list is, in many ways, a strange one.

The honor takes two forms. Officials of the federal government and senior military officers lie in state; private citizens lie in honor. The distinction was created in 1998 specifically to accommodate the first non-officials ever placed in the Rotunda – two Capitol Police officers shot defending the building – and has since been used for Rosa Parks, Billy Graham, and the last surviving Medal of Honor recipients of World War II and the Korean War. Some notable absences belong to the same category but happened in a different room: Elijah Cummings in 2019 and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020 both lay in state at the Capitol, but in Statuary Hall, not the Rotunda. The Rotunda is the higher honor and more rarely given. Two presidents have declined it – Truman, because his wife Bess hated Washington, and Nixon, whose family worried about controversy. More recently, Jesse Jackson’s family requested the honor for him in 2026 and were turned down.

What follows is everyone who has lain in state or in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, in chronological order, from Clay in 1852 to Jimmy Carter in 2025. The list represents 44 individuals across 41 entries – the four Unknown Soldiers are presented as three group entries, and the two Capitol Police officers killed in 1998 are presented together. They include thirteen presidents, two vice presidents, several senators, three Capitol Police officers, and a French city planner who had been dead for most of the country’s history when his bones finally reached the Capitol.

Henry Clay

Henry Clay was the first. He died on June 29, 1852, in his room at the National Hotel in Washington, having spent the better part of fifty years trying to hold the country together. His tombstone reads “I know no North – no South – no East – no West,” which captured both his career and the thing that was about to be tested.

Clay had served in the House and Senate intermittently since 1806, been Speaker three times, and run for president three times without ever winning. His nickname was the Great Compromiser, and he had earned it: the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Tariff Compromise of 1833, and finally the Compromise of 1850, which postponed the Civil War by perhaps a decade. He was 75, exhausted by tuberculosis, when he died in Washington.

The Capitol Rotunda had been completed in 1824 but had never been used for a funeral until then. Congress voted to lay him there in tribute, establishing a precedent no one had thought to formalize. His casket was placed in the rotunda on July 1, mourners filed past, and then his body was taken by train and steamboat back to Lexington, Kentucky. Tens of thousands turned out to watch the procession. Lincoln, then a Springfield lawyer, eulogized him a few days later. He could not have known he would be next.

Abraham Lincoln

The catafalque used in nearly every Capitol Rotunda funeral since 1865 – a simple platform of rough pine boards covered in black cloth – was built specifically for Lincoln. It was put together quickly in the days after his assassination, and it has not really changed since. Modern coffins are larger than Lincoln’s, so the base has been extended, but the structure is otherwise the same one used to support his casket on April 19, 1865, four days after John Wilkes Booth shot him at Ford’s Theatre.

Lincoln had attended a play called Our American Cousin and was watching the second act when Booth, who had slipped into the box, fired a single shot from a derringer at the back of his head. He died the next morning at the Petersen House across the street, having never regained consciousness. He was 56. The funeral train that eventually carried him from Washington to Springfield, Illinois covered 1,654 miles and stopped in dozens of cities so the public could view the body, which was repeatedly re-embalmed along the way and grew progressively unrecognizable.

Before any of that, however, his casket lay in the Rotunda for two days. The catafalque is still there, in the basement of the Capitol when not in use, brought up each time someone is honored. It has now held more than forty other people. They all rest, in a manner of speaking, on Lincoln.

Thaddeus Stevens

Stevens was the most powerful congressman of the Civil War era and the most hated man in the South. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he financed the war. As leader of the Radical Republicans, he pushed Lincoln toward emancipation, drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, and led the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.

He died on August 11, 1868, of acute diarrhea, having spent his last summer being carried everywhere in a chair because his health no longer allowed him to walk. His final words were a request for more ice to suck on. He had been born in poverty in Vermont with a club foot and had clawed his way to Dartmouth, then to law, then to Pennsylvania politics, then to Washington.

White and Black pallbearers carried his body from his house to the Capitol together. African American soldiers from a District of Columbia regiment served as the honor guard while he lay in state. The funeral train then took him to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he had asked to be buried in a cemetery that admitted people of all races. He had written his own epitaph: “I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: equality of man before his Creator.” He was 76.

Charles Sumner

In May 1856, a South Carolina congressman named Preston Brooks walked onto the Senate floor with a heavy gutta-percha cane and beat Charles Sumner unconscious at his desk. Sumner had given a speech denouncing slavery and had ridiculed Brooks’s elderly cousin Andrew Butler. Brooks struck Sumner so many times the cane broke; Sumner, his foot caught under his bolted-down desk, could not escape. He nearly died and did not return to full Senate duties for three years. He carried the injuries the rest of his life.

He was the senior senator from Massachusetts when he died of a heart attack on March 11, 1874, age 63. By then he had been advocating for a civil rights bill for nearly a decade, one that would guarantee equal access to public accommodations regardless of race. On his deathbed, he repeatedly told visitors, including Frederick Douglass, “Don’t let the bill fail.” It passed a year later as the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1883. The Senate did not pass another civil rights act for 82 years.

Sumner lay in state on the same Lincoln catafalque, the second senator and fourth person to receive the honor. The illustration of the scene by Joseph Becker shows Frederick Douglass and a small group of Black mourners standing apart from the white crowd, paying their respects to the man who had repeatedly nearly been killed for them.

Henry Wilson

Wilson is one of two vice presidents on this list and the only one to die in the Capitol building itself. On November 22, 1875, while suffering from the effects of a recent stroke, he collapsed in the vice president’s room off the Senate floor. He died there hours later. He was 63.

Wilson had risen from genuine poverty – apprenticed at ten to a Massachusetts farmer in conditions he later compared to slavery – to become a U.S. senator and then Ulysses Grant’s second vice president, replacing Schuyler Colfax in 1873. He had founded the Free Soil Party, helped found the Republican Party, and was a relentless advocate of abolition; in his final years he was writing a three-volume history of slavery in America, which he completed only days before his death. As vice president, his constitutional duty was to preside over the Senate, and his actual job was largely ceremonial. He took it seriously regardless.

The room where he died is on the Senate side of the Capitol, a few hundred feet from where his body was placed for public viewing two days later. He was the first sitting officer of the federal government to die in the Capitol since the building’s construction. The stroke that killed him had been preceded by another, suffered in the same room earlier that year. He had insisted on returning to work.

James A. Garfield

Garfield was shot on July 2, 1881, at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station by a delusional office-seeker named Charles Guiteau, who had convinced himself he was responsible for Garfield’s election and was owed a consulship. The bullet did not kill the president directly. Garfield’s doctors did, by repeatedly probing the wound with unsterilized fingers and instruments in search of the bullet, which they never found. Joseph Lister had been arguing for antiseptic surgery for fifteen years; American doctors had largely declined to listen.

Garfield lingered for eleven weeks, growing progressively more infected and emaciated, while Alexander Graham Bell tried unsuccessfully to locate the bullet using a primitive metal detector of his own invention. The detector was confused by the metal springs in Garfield’s mattress, which no one had thought to mention. He died on September 19, 1881, at a seaside cottage in Elberon, New Jersey, where he had been moved in hopes the air would help. His autopsy revealed the bullet had lodged in fatty tissue near his pancreas, where it would have been harmless if no one had touched it.

He was the second president to lie in state in the Rotunda and the second to be assassinated. He had been in office for 199 days. His killer was hanged the following year, having pleaded that the doctors, not he, had killed Garfield. He was, in a narrow sense, correct.

John A. Logan

Logan is the reason there is a Memorial Day. As commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, the largest organization of Union Civil War veterans, he issued General Order No. 11 in 1868, calling for May 30 to be set aside as a day to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. He called it Decoration Day. The name eventually shifted, the date eventually shifted, but the holiday is his.

Logan himself had been one of the most successful non-professional generals of the war, a Democratic congressman from southern Illinois who returned home in 1861, recruited a regiment, and went on to lead corps-level forces with notable competence. After the war he switched to the Republican Party and was elected to the Senate. In 1884 he was the Republican vice presidential nominee on a ticket with James Blaine; they lost narrowly to Cleveland.

He died in Washington on December 26, 1886, age 60, of complications from rheumatism that had been worsening for years. The Capitol funeral was simple by the standards being established. He was the first person to lie in state who had not held a federal office at the time of his death; he had returned to the Senate in 1885 but his death came shortly after. The holiday he founded would be officially renamed Memorial Day in 1971, by which point most Americans had forgotten the man.

William McKinley

McKinley was shot on September 6, 1901, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, while shaking hands with members of the public on a receiving line. The shooter, an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, had concealed his pistol under a handkerchief that looked, in the moment, like a bandage. McKinley was hit twice. The first bullet glanced off a button. The second entered his abdomen and could not be removed by surgeons working in the Exposition’s emergency hospital under what passed for adequate light.

McKinley seemed to recover for several days. Then gangrene set in along the path of the wound, and he died on September 14. He was 58 years old and the third American president to be assassinated in 36 years. The Exposition had a fully functioning x-ray machine on display, which would have located the bullet, but no one had thought to bring it.

His successor was Theodore Roosevelt, who at 42 became the youngest president in American history and was sworn in at a friend’s house in Buffalo because nothing else was available. McKinley lay in state at the White House first, then was moved to the Capitol Rotunda on September 17. Czolgosz was electrocuted in late October at Auburn Prison, having said almost nothing in his own defense beyond that he had killed the president because he believed the president was the enemy of the working man. He was 28.

Pierre Charles L’Enfant

L’Enfant designed Washington, D.C. He was a French military engineer who had served under Lafayette in the Revolution, and George Washington personally chose him in 1791 to draw up the plan for the new federal capital. He produced a remarkable scheme – radiating diagonal avenues, ceremonial vistas, a grid laid over the whole – that took two centuries to be properly appreciated.

He was also impossible to work with. He fought constantly with the commissioners overseeing the project, refused to share his drawings, and was dismissed within a year. He spent the rest of his life trying to get paid for the work, and never really did. He died in 1825, age 70, broke and largely forgotten, on a tobacco farm in Maryland called Digges Farm where a sympathetic family had taken him in. He was buried there.

Eighty-four years passed. By 1909, official Washington had finally caught up to what L’Enfant had given them, and Congress decided he ought to be properly recognized. His remains were exhumed from the Maryland farm and brought to the Capitol Rotunda on April 28, 1909, for a formal lying-in-state ceremony, then transported across the river to Arlington National Cemetery for reburial on a hill overlooking the city he had drawn. The grave site has a fine view of the Mall, the avenues, and the dome itself – all approximately where he had said they should be.

George Dewey

Dewey was the hero of the Battle of Manila Bay, which is more impressive than it sounds. On May 1, 1898, in the opening engagement of the Spanish-American War, his squadron of six ships entered Manila Bay before dawn, found the Spanish Pacific fleet anchored in defensive formation, and destroyed it without losing a single man. The battle lasted about six hours. Dewey reportedly turned to his flag captain partway through and said, “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley,” a line that became famous and was probably embellished afterward.

The Spanish fleet was outdated and the engagement was lopsided, but the result electrified the country and effectively ended Spanish power in the Pacific. Dewey returned to America a national celebrity, was promoted to the unique rank of Admiral of the Navy – a title held by no one else before or since – and briefly considered running for president in 1900. He gave it up after a few weeks, having realized he disliked politics and was bad at it.

He spent the rest of his life in Washington, presiding over various Navy boards. He died on January 16, 1917, age 79, of arteriosclerosis. He was the first naval officer to lie in state in the Rotunda. The rank of Admiral of the Navy died with him; Congress retired it as a gesture of respect.

The Unknown Soldier of World War I

In October 1921, four sets of unidentified American remains were exhumed from four different American military cemeteries in France: Meuse-Argonne, St. Mihiel, Somme, and Aisne-Marne. They were transported to a city hall in northeastern France, where Sergeant Edward Younger, a decorated Army veteran chosen for the duty, walked among the four caskets and laid a spray of white roses on one of them. That was the selection. The other three were reburied.

The chosen casket was carried home aboard the USS Olympia, the same cruiser that had served as Admiral Dewey’s flagship at Manila Bay. The Unknown Soldier arrived in Washington and was placed in the Capitol Rotunda on November 9, 1921, where he lay in state for three days. More than 90,000 people filed past. On November 11 – the third anniversary of the armistice that had ended the war – his casket was carried in procession across the Potomac to the new Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, where President Harding presided over the burial.

Above 115,000 American soldiers had died in the war then known as the Great War; this man stood for all of them. He was the first occupant of the tomb. He has been there ever since, joined by others, with the guard changed every half hour year-round, in every weather. The roses Sergeant Younger laid on his casket are still in France, in a glass case in the city hall in Chalons-sur-Marne.

Warren G. Harding

Harding died unexpectedly in San Francisco on August 2, 1923, at the Palace Hotel, age 57, while returning from a trip to Alaska. The official cause was a heart attack, though Mrs. Harding refused to allow an autopsy and rumors circulated for years that she had poisoned him. There is no real evidence she did. Harding had been complaining of indigestion and exhaustion for weeks, and his physician believed he had been suffering from a series of small heart episodes for some time.

He had also been worrying. The Teapot Dome scandal – in which his interior secretary had taken bribes to lease federal oil reserves to private companies – was beginning to break, and Harding apparently understood that several of his closest friends in the Cabinet were going to prison. “I have no trouble with my enemies,” he reportedly told the journalist William Allen White not long before his death. “It is my friends, my goddamned friends, that keep me walking the floor at night.”

His casket was returned to Washington by train and placed briefly in the East Room of the White House, then taken to the Capitol Rotunda on August 8, 1923. He had been president for two years and five months. Coolidge, his vice president, was sworn in by his own father, a notary public, by lamplight in a Vermont farmhouse where Coolidge had been visiting his parents and where there was no telephone or electricity.

William Howard Taft

Taft is the only person in American history to have served as both president and chief justice of the United States. He preferred the second job. He had never wanted to be president, having been pushed into the 1908 election by Theodore Roosevelt, who chose him as successor and then turned on him so violently that the resulting split delivered the 1912 election to Woodrow Wilson. Taft lost in a landslide and seemed mostly relieved.

He spent the next nine years teaching law at Yale and waiting. In 1921 President Harding appointed him chief justice, and the job suited him entirely – he was a careful jurist, a competent administrator, and a genuinely warm presence on the Court. He was also enormous. At his peak Taft weighed about 340 pounds, having gained the bulk during a miserable presidency he openly disliked, and the famous story about the special bathtub installed in the White House for him is true.

He retired in February 1930 in failing health and died a month later, on March 8, age 72. He was the first president to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and one of only two; the other is John F. Kennedy. He had asked specifically that his Rotunda viewing be brief, in deference to other government business that was scheduled. It lasted one day.

John J. Pershing

Pershing commanded the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I and held a rank no one else has ever held: General of the Armies of the United States. The rank was created for him by Congress in 1919 and was retroactively granted to George Washington in 1976, on the country’s bicentennial, to ensure that no one – including Pershing – outranked Washington. Pershing was thus, for 56 years, the highest-ranking soldier in American history.

He had earned it. He had served in the Apache campaigns, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, and against Pancho Villa in Mexico, and his command of two million American soldiers in France in 1917 and 1918 was the largest American military operation in history to that point. His nickname was “Black Jack,” a reference to his early career commanding a unit of Buffalo Soldiers, the all-Black 10th Cavalry. The original version of the nickname was an ugly slur, applied by fellow officers who disapproved; Pershing wore it proudly the rest of his life and the original word eventually fell off.

His wife and three of his four children had died in a 1915 fire at the Presidio in San Francisco, while he was deployed in Mexico. He never remarried. He died on July 15, 1948, age 87, at Walter Reed Army Hospital, having outlived nearly everyone he had served with.

Robert A. Taft

The second Taft. Robert was the eldest son of William Howard Taft, served three terms as a Republican senator from Ohio, and was known throughout his career as “Mr. Republican” – a serious, humorless, fiercely conservative legislator who believed deeply in limited government and isolationism. He ran for the Republican presidential nomination three times and lost each time. The 1952 nomination, which would have been the most likely path to the White House, went instead to Dwight Eisenhower, whom Taft considered an internationalist interloper imported by the East Coast establishment.

Taft accepted the loss with characteristic stiffness and was rewarded with the position of Senate majority leader after Eisenhower’s victory in November. He had held the job for six months when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the spring of 1953. He died on July 31, 1953, age 63, at New York Hospital. Eisenhower attended the Capitol funeral, which is interesting given that Taft had spent much of the previous year suggesting that an Eisenhower presidency would be the death of the Republican Party. The two men had reconciled, more or less, in the months before Taft’s death; Eisenhower had genuine respect for Taft’s integrity even when he disagreed with everything Taft believed.

Taft is one of seven senators commemorated in the Senate Reception Room as among the greatest in the Senate’s history, an honor selected by John F. Kennedy when Kennedy was a young senator chairing a committee on the question. Kennedy is on this list too.

The Unknown Soldiers of World War II and the Korean War

The selection process for the World War II Unknown was complicated by the war’s scale. Eighteen unidentified bodies were exhumed from cemeteries in North Africa, Europe, Hawaii, and the Philippines. Two were chosen as finalists – one from each theater – and on May 26, 1958, aboard the USS Canberra off the Virginia capes, Hospital Corpsman 1st Class William Charette, a Navy Medal of Honor recipient from Korea, made the final selection. The unselected casket was buried at sea.

The Korean Unknown was chosen separately at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii on May 15, 1958, by Master Sergeant Ned Lyle, a Distinguished Service Cross recipient. Four candidates from Korea, one selection. Both caskets arrived together in Washington on May 28 and were placed side by side in the Capitol Rotunda for two days of public viewing. The Lincoln catafalque was used for one casket; an identical catafalque, built specifically for the occasion, held the other.

On Memorial Day, May 30, 1958, two horse-drawn caissons carried them to Arlington. Twenty jets flew overhead in missing-man formation. President Eisenhower placed a Medal of Honor on each casket and accepted the burial flags as next of kin, in his role as commander-in-chief. He had ordered both wars to end. The records identifying the original cemetery locations of all candidate remains were destroyed by certificate immediately after each selection. No one alive knows where these men came from.

John F. Kennedy

Kennedy was shot in Dallas at 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza. He was 46 years old. The country had not lost a president to violence in 62 years, since McKinley, and the response was on a different scale. About a quarter million people filed past his casket in the Rotunda during 18 hours of public viewing. Fifty thousand more were still waiting outside when the doors closed.

Jacqueline Kennedy planned the funeral in less than 48 hours, working with the chief usher of the White House to model every detail on Lincoln’s. She asked that the East Room be redecorated to match what it had looked like when Lincoln lay there a century earlier. She asked that the Lincoln catafalque be brought up. She asked to walk behind her husband’s casket in the procession, as Mary Todd Lincoln had done. The horse-drawn caisson that carried the casket from the White House to the Capitol had also carried Franklin Roosevelt, and the Unknown Soldier in 1921.

The funeral was watched by an estimated 180 million people worldwide. Dignitaries from 92 countries attended, the largest gathering of foreign statesmen on American soil to that point. Kennedy was buried at Arlington with an eternal flame Mrs. Kennedy had specifically requested. Two of his three siblings would be assassinated within the next five years. His son saluted his casket on his third birthday.

Douglas MacArthur

MacArthur was relieved of his Korean War command by Harry Truman in April 1951 for repeatedly ignoring civilian authority and threatening to expand the war into China. He returned home a hero anyway. Congress invited him to address a joint session, where he gave the famous speech ending: “And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away.”

He spent the next thirteen years living in seclusion at the Waldorf Towers in New York, granting occasional interviews and never quite running for anything. He had been Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific in World War II, the architect of the postwar occupation of Japan, and one of only five men ever to hold the rank of General of the Army. His career spanned 52 years. He had graduated first in his class at West Point in 1903, when Theodore Roosevelt was president.

He died at Walter Reed Army Hospital on April 5, 1964, age 84, from biliary cirrhosis and kidney failure. He lay in state at the Rotunda for two days, then was carried by funeral train to Norfolk, Virginia, where his body was placed in the city’s old City Hall, which had been converted into the MacArthur Memorial. His mother had grown up in Norfolk; he had spent boyhood summers there. An estimated 150,000 people lined the streets for the procession. He had outfaded almost everyone.

Herbert Hoover

Hoover died at the Waldorf Towers in New York on October 20, 1964, at age 90, six months after MacArthur, in the same building where MacArthur had lived. He had been out of the presidency for 31 years, the longest retirement in American history at the time. Jimmy Carter would eventually break the record in 2012, but Hoover held it for nearly half a century.

Hoover’s reputation in 1964 was complicated. He was remembered as the president who had failed to prevent the Great Depression, defeated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and blamed for everything that followed. But he had also been a remarkable humanitarian – the man who organized the relief operation that fed Belgium during the German occupation in World War I, fed millions of starving Europeans after both world wars, and was credited with saving more lives from starvation than nearly anyone in history. He had spent his post-presidential decades writing books, advising successors, and chairing two commissions on government reorganization for Truman and Eisenhower.

He lay in state at the Capitol Rotunda for two days before his body was flown to West Branch, Iowa, his birthplace, for burial at his presidential library. The funeral was, by Quaker tradition, simpler than usual. There was no 21-gun salute. About 30,000 people passed his coffin in the Rotunda. The country was two weeks from a presidential election; Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater both attended the service and went back to campaigning afterward.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Eisenhower commanded the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the largest amphibious operation in history, an undertaking so vast and improbable that he had drafted a letter accepting full personal blame for its failure the night before, in case he needed it. He didn’t. He went on to accept the German surrender, serve as Army Chief of Staff, become president of Columbia University, organize NATO, and in 1952 win the presidency in a landslide.

He served two terms, ended the Korean War, sent the 101st Airborne to enforce desegregation at Little Rock Central High School, oversaw the construction of the Interstate Highway System, and warned the country in his farewell address about a “military-industrial complex” that he had helped build himself.

He died on March 28, 1969, at Walter Reed Army Hospital, age 78, of congestive heart failure. He had been suffering heart trouble for fourteen years, since the heart attack he had during his presidency. His casket lay in repose at Washington National Cathedral for 28 hours before being moved to the Rotunda for the formal lying in state. His body was carried by funeral train to Abilene, Kansas – one of the last presidential funeral trains. He was buried in a plain $80 government-issue soldier’s casket, which he had specified. He outranked every general except Pershing and Washington.

Everett M. Dirksen

Dirksen was the Republican leader of the Senate for ten years and was the only senator to lie in state in the Rotunda in the 20th century who was not also something else – not a vice president, not a former general, not a former presidential candidate. He was just a senator, and that was somehow enough. He was the second senator ever to receive the honor in the Capitol, after Robert Taft.

Dirksen represented Illinois from 1951 until his death and had a baritone speaking voice so distinctive that he made comedy records and won a Grammy in 1968 for best documentary album. He was famous for floor speeches that were equal parts erudition, sentimentality, and political maneuvering. He was a decisive figure in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, providing the Republican votes that broke the southern Democratic filibuster.

He died on September 7, 1969, age 73, of complications from lung cancer surgery. President Nixon attended the service in the Rotunda; so did former president Lyndon Johnson, who had worked closely with Dirksen on civil rights and called him “an institution.” A Senate office building was renamed for him. The line he is most quoted as having said about federal spending – “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money” – he never actually said. He was on tape denying it. The story stuck anyway.

J. Edgar Hoover

Hoover was the first director of the FBI and held the job for 48 years, from 1924 until his death in 1972. He served eight presidents, from Coolidge to Nixon, and was so feared, and in possession of so many secret files about so many powerful people, that no one dared fire him. Truman thought about it. Kennedy thought about it. Johnson thought about it. Nixon changed his mind because Hoover knew about the wiretaps.

He built the Bureau into the most powerful federal law enforcement agency in the world and used it for purposes that were sometimes legitimate and sometimes not. He had ordered surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. and tried to blackmail him into suicide. He had run a counterintelligence program that harassed civil rights groups, the New Left, and anyone he considered subversive. He had also, by general agreement, never personally taken a bribe and lived with the same man, FBI Associate Director Clyde Tolson, for over forty years.

He died of a heart attack at his home on May 2, 1972, age 77. Within hours, the White House dispatched aides to seize his secret files; some had reportedly already been removed by his secretary. Nixon delivered the eulogy in the Rotunda – the only time a president has eulogized someone lying in state – and ordered the new FBI headquarters to be named for Hoover. It still bears the name. Two months later, his agency would be at the center of a story called Watergate.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Johnson left the presidency in January 1969 and went home to his Texas ranch, having become so unpopular over Vietnam that he had decided not to seek reelection. He spent four years in semi-seclusion, smoking again after a decade of abstinence, growing his hair long, and writing his memoirs. He had been a tireless and physically domineering politician for nearly forty years, capable of cornering colleagues and applying what was called “the Johnson treatment” – leaning into their personal space, gripping their lapels, talking nonstop until they agreed – and the absence of all that activity seemed to wear on him.

His domestic record was extraordinary. He passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid to education, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and a dozen smaller landmark laws. He had also escalated the Vietnam War from 16,000 advisors to over 500,000 troops by 1968 and had been unable to find a way out. The two records will never be balanced; they coexist.

He died of a heart attack at his ranch on January 22, 1973, age 64. The day before, Henry Kissinger had told him that a Vietnam peace agreement was about to be signed. The agreement was announced four days after his death. He lay in state at the Rotunda for one day, then was buried in the family cemetery at the ranch, beside his parents and his still-living wife. Lady Bird Johnson outlived him by 34 years.

Hubert H. Humphrey

Humphrey came as close to becoming president as any losing candidate in American history. In 1968, he was Lyndon Johnson’s vice president and the Democratic nominee, hampered by Johnson’s Vietnam policy, the chaos of the Chicago convention, and his late entry into a campaign nobody had wanted to run for. He lost the popular vote to Richard Nixon by less than one percent. Half a million more votes in the right places would have made him the 37th president. He returned to the Senate in 1971.

He had been a force in liberal politics since his 1948 speech at the Democratic National Convention, in which he urged the party “to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights” – a speech that drove the Dixiecrat delegation out the door. He served as mayor of Minneapolis, four-term senator from Minnesota, vice president, and presidential nominee.

He died of bladder cancer at his home in Waverly, Minnesota, on January 13, 1978, age 66. His casket was flown to Washington, where he became the second vice president to lie in state in the Rotunda, after Henry Wilson 103 years earlier. President Carter and former presidents Nixon and Ford attended. His widow Muriel was appointed to fill his Senate seat the next month, the only Senate widow to serve as a senator in modern history.

The Unknown Soldier of the Vietnam Conflict

The Vietnam Unknown was the last unknown soldier and, in a sense, the only one whose anonymity was ever broken. By 1984, advances in forensic identification meant that very few American Vietnam War remains were truly unidentifiable. The military had to look for a long time before finding a set that qualified. He was selected aboard the USS Brewton in May 1984 by Marine Sergeant Major Allan Kellogg, a Medal of Honor recipient, and was carried to the Capitol Rotunda for three days of viewing.

President Reagan presided over the burial at Arlington on Memorial Day 1984. The Tomb’s Vietnam crypt was sealed. The country had not yet healed from the war and the ceremony was meant, in part, as a step toward that healing. It worked, mostly.

Then in 1998, a CBS News investigation suggested the remains were probably those of Air Force 1st Lt. Michael Blassie, who had been shot down over Vietnam in 1972. The Pentagon ordered the crypt opened. DNA testing confirmed it was Blassie. He was disinterred, returned to his family, and reburied near St. Louis. The Medal of Honor that had been awarded to him as the Unknown was rescinded. The Vietnam crypt at Arlington was resealed empty, with a new inscription: “Honoring and Keeping Faith with America’s Missing Servicemen, 1958-1975.” Some 1,500 Americans from the war remain unaccounted for. None of them will ever lie in that crypt; the technology has made anonymity impossible.

Claude Pepper

Pepper had one of the longest congressional careers in American history. He served as a U.S. senator from Florida from 1936 to 1951, lost his seat in a vicious red-baiting primary, then came back to the House in 1962 and served there until his death in 1989, eventually chairing the powerful Rules Committee. He was 88 when he died, and he had been an active congressman to the end. He was, by general agreement, the most effective advocate for elderly Americans the Congress had ever produced.

His committee on aging in the 1970s and 1980s was largely responsible for strengthening Medicare, raising the mandatory retirement age, and exposing health-care fraud against seniors. He understood the constituency partly because he had become it; he was 80 when he chaired the Rules Committee. He had also been a Roosevelt liberal in the 1940s, friendly enough toward the Soviet Union to be smeared as “Red Pepper” by his 1950 primary opponent George Smathers, an attack that worked.

He died of stomach cancer on May 30, 1989, four days after President George H.W. Bush had given him the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony. He was the 26th American to lie in state in the Rotunda. His was also the last open-casket Rotunda viewing – Congress closed the practice afterward, partly out of respect for the dignity of subsequent honorees, partly because the embalming science had not improved and the optics increasingly hadn’t either.

Jacob J. Chestnut and John M. Gibson

On Friday, July 24, 1998, a man named Russell Weston Jr. walked through the Document Door entrance on the East Front of the Capitol with a revolver under his jacket. Weston was a paranoid schizophrenic who had stopped taking his medication. He shot Officer Jacob Chestnut at the security checkpoint – Chestnut died almost immediately – then ran toward the offices of House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, where Detective John Gibson was working in plain clothes as part of DeLay’s protective detail. Gibson exchanged fire with Weston and was mortally wounded, but managed to shoot Weston four times before collapsing. Weston survived; he is still in a federal mental institution.

Chestnut and Gibson were the first individuals ever killed defending the Capitol. They were also the first two Americans to lie in honor in the Rotunda, a new category created specifically for them by congressional resolution because neither was a federal official. Chestnut had retired from the Air Force as a master sergeant after two tours in Vietnam; he was the first African American to lie in honor at the Capitol.

President Clinton spoke at the Rotunda service. Both men were buried at Arlington. The Document Door was renamed the Chestnut-Gibson Memorial Door. The Capitol Visitor Center, opened in 2008, was officially named the Jacob Joseph Chestnut-John Michael Gibson U.S. Capitol Visitor Center. Officer Brian Sicknick would lie in honor in the same Rotunda 23 years later, having defended the same building from a different kind of attack.

Ronald Reagan

Reagan died on June 5, 2004, age 93, ten years after announcing in a handwritten letter to the country that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and would withdraw from public life. The letter was characteristic – direct, graceful, ending “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life.” He had been almost entirely silent for the decade since. His wife Nancy had cared for him at their home in Bel Air, California.

His state funeral was the first for a U.S. president in 31 years, since Lyndon Johnson, and the planning had been in place since the late 1980s. He lay in repose at the Reagan Library in California, then his casket was flown to Washington and carried to the Rotunda by horse-drawn caisson. Approximately 104,000 people filed past in 34 hours of public viewing.

Both surviving former presidents at the time, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, attended. So did Margaret Thatcher, who delivered a recorded eulogy because her own health was failing. Reagan was buried at his presidential library in Simi Valley, California, on a hillside overlooking the Pacific. The sun set behind the casket as the burial concluded – timed to do exactly that, by a planner who knew his subject. Reagan had been a movie actor for two decades before he was a politician. He would have approved.

Rosa Parks

Parks was 92 when she died at her apartment in Detroit on October 24, 2005, of progressive dementia. She had refused, on December 1, 1955, to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus to a white passenger, a decision that triggered the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott and effectively launched the American civil rights movement. She had been 42 years old at the time, a seamstress and an experienced NAACP secretary – not, as the legend later had it, simply a tired woman who had not planned her resistance. She had planned it carefully.

Three days after her death, Congress passed a resolution authorizing her body to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda. She was the first woman, the first African American civilian, and only the third private citizen ever to receive the honor. Her casket arrived in Washington on October 30 and was placed in the center of the Rotunda. Approximately 50,000 people filed past during 18 hours of public viewing.

Parks had asked specifically to be buried in Detroit, where she had spent the second half of her life. A statue of her was unveiled in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall in 2013, the first full-length statue of an African American in the building. She had outlived nearly every other figure of the early civil rights movement. She had also, in retirement, worked in the Detroit office of John Conyers, the longest-serving Black member of Congress in American history.

Gerald R. Ford

Ford was the only person ever to serve as both vice president and president without being elected to either job. He was appointed vice president in 1973 after Spiro Agnew resigned over corruption charges, and became president in 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned over Watergate. A month after taking office, he pardoned Nixon. He believed the country needed to move on; the country mostly disagreed, and he lost the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter, partly because of the pardon and partly because of an offhand debate remark suggesting Eastern Europe was not under Soviet domination, which it very much was.

He had been House Minority Leader for nine years before Nixon picked him for the vice presidency. He was a former All-American football player at Michigan, a Naval officer who had survived a typhoon in the Pacific, a Yale Law School graduate, and a lifelong Republican from Grand Rapids. He was, by every account, one of the most genuinely decent men ever to hold the office.

He died at his home in Rancho Mirage, California on December 26, 2006, age 93. He was the longest-lived president in American history at the time. His state funeral spanned five days. He lay in state at the Rotunda from December 30 to January 2, the longest period of any 21st-century lying-in-state. Carter, the man who had defeated him 30 years earlier, attended the funeral and delivered a eulogy. They had become close friends in retirement. He outlived everyone he had run against.

Daniel K. Inouye

Inouye lost his right arm fighting Germans in Italy on April 21, 1945. He was 20 years old, a second lieutenant in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the segregated unit of Japanese-American soldiers known by their motto “Go For Broke.” He had been hit twice already that day and was leading an attack on a German machine-gun nest near San Terenzo when a rifle grenade struck his right elbow. The grenade was still primed in his disembodied hand. He pried it out with his left hand and threw it before passing out from blood loss.

He had wanted to be a surgeon. After 17 blood transfusions and the amputation, he picked law instead. When Hawaii became a state in 1959, he became its first congressman, and in 1962, its senator. He served until his death, 50 years later. He was the second-longest-serving senator in American history.

He died of respiratory complications at Walter Reed on December 17, 2012, age 88. His official congressional website reported his last word as “Aloha.” The Medal of Honor he had been awarded in 2000, 55 years after the action that earned it, was an upgrade. The original award had been a Distinguished Service Cross. The records had been reviewed when someone noticed that no one in the 442nd had been given the country’s highest decoration despite being one of the most decorated units of the war. The reason had been racial; everyone admitted as much.

Billy Graham

Graham was the most famous evangelist of the 20th century and counseled twelve presidents, from Truman to Obama, with varying degrees of access and intimacy. He was Eisenhower’s golf partner. He prayed with Lyndon Johnson the night before Johnson decided not to seek reelection. He was close enough to Nixon that the released White House tapes revealed him making antisemitic remarks in private conversation – remarks for which he later apologized publicly and which haunted his reputation. He preached to an estimated 215 million people in person across his career, a figure no other religious figure has approached.

He was the first private citizen to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda since Rosa Parks in 2005, and the first religious leader ever. The decision was made within hours of his death by Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Some scholars objected on First Amendment grounds; the ceremony went forward anyway.

He died at his home in Montreat, North Carolina on February 21, 2018, age 99. His casket was a simple pine box made by inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary – the same kind in which his wife Ruth had been buried in 2007. Among those who paid their respects in the Rotunda were President Trump, who recalled his father taking him to a Graham crusade at Yankee Stadium in 1957, and Bill Clinton, who recalled seeing one as an 11-year-old boy in Arkansas.

John McCain

McCain spent five and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison, most of them at Hoa Lo, the Hanoi Hilton. His Skyhawk had been shot down over Hanoi on October 26, 1967. He broke both arms and a leg ejecting, was beaten by a mob upon landing in a lake, and was captured by the North Vietnamese, who were not gentle either. They offered to release him in 1968 when they discovered his father was a Navy admiral; McCain refused, citing the POW code that prisoners must come home in the order they were captured. He was tortured systematically afterward.

He spent two years in solitary confinement. He could not lift his arms above his head for the rest of his life. He retired from the Navy as a captain in 1981, moved to Arizona, and won election to the House two years later, then to the Senate in 1986. He held the seat for 31 years. He ran for president twice, losing the Republican nomination to George W. Bush in 2000 and the general election to Barack Obama in 2008.

He died of brain cancer at his Arizona ranch on August 25, 2018, age 81. He had planned his own funeral. He requested that Bush and Obama deliver eulogies, and asked specifically that President Trump not attend. His mother Roberta, age 106, was wheeled to his casket to say goodbye. He had outlived her predictions.

George H.W. Bush

Bush had been president for one term and vice president for two before that, but the most famous photograph from his lying in state was of his service dog. Sully, a yellow Labrador, lay quietly beside the flag-draped casket while Bush was at the Houston funeral home, then accompanied the casket to Washington. The image went viral. Sully had been with Bush only since June, joining the family two months after Barbara Bush’s death.

Bush had been the youngest naval aviator in the Navy when he joined in 1942 at age 18. He flew 58 combat missions in the Pacific and was shot down over Chichi Jima in September 1944, the only survivor of his three-man crew. He went on to serve as a congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, envoy to China, director of the CIA, vice president, and the 41st president. He lost his 1992 reelection to Bill Clinton. The two became unlikely close friends in retirement.

He died at his home in Houston on November 30, 2018, age 94. His casket was flown to Washington aboard Special Air Mission 41, a presidential aircraft temporarily renamed in his honor. Both surviving former presidents at the time, Carter and Clinton, attended, as did Obama and Trump. He was buried beside Barbara and their daughter Robin, who had died of leukemia at age three in 1953, at his presidential library in College Station, Texas. He was wearing socks featuring fighter jets, in tribute to his Navy service.

Brian D. Sicknick

Sicknick was a Capitol Police officer who responded to the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. He was on the front lines on the west side of the building when he was sprayed in the face with a chemical substance by rioters – bear spray, according to court records of the prosecution that followed. He returned to his division office afterward, collapsed, and died at a hospital the next day. He was 42. He had served in the New Jersey Air National Guard, then joined the Capitol Police in 2008.

Initial reports claimed he had been struck in the head with a fire extinguisher. He had not. The Washington medical examiner ruled his death “natural,” resulting from two strokes hours after the attack, but noted that “all that transpired played a role in his condition.” Two men were eventually convicted of assaulting him with the chemical spray. Both were among the January 6 defendants pardoned by President Trump on his first day back in office in January 2025.

His cremated remains were placed in an urn in the Rotunda for two days of viewing, the first to be lain in honor since Billy Graham. President Biden, in office for thirteen days, paid his respects on Tuesday evening. Sicknick was the third Capitol Police officer to be honored in the Rotunda. The defending of the Capitol on January 6 had been done at the highest cost since 1814, when the British had set the previous one on fire.

William “Billy” Evans

Evans was the second Capitol Police officer to lie in honor in 2021, three months after Sicknick. He was struck and killed on April 2, 2021, when a 25-year-old man named Noah Green drove a sedan into him and a fellow officer at the North Barricade on Constitution Avenue, then exited the vehicle with a knife and lunged at the officers before being shot dead. Green’s motive was unclear; he had a history of mental illness and had recently posted online about feeling persecuted.

Evans was 41 years old and an 18-year veteran of the Capitol Police. He was a member of the First Responders Unit, the team trained to respond first to security incidents at the Capitol. He was also the father of two children, Logan and Abigail. He had been planning to attend his son’s First Communion that weekend. The attack happened on Good Friday.

His casket arrived at the Capitol on the morning of April 13. The ceremony was small – the COVID-19 pandemic had not yet receded – and was attended by President Biden, Vice President Harris, and congressional leadership. The fact that two Capitol Police officers had been killed in the line of duty within three months, after twenty-three years without any, was understood at the time to be unusual and grim. Both attacks had come at the East and West sides of the same building. Both attackers had been motivated by something the rest of the country struggled to name.

Bob Dole

Dole was the longest-serving Republican leader of the Senate when he retired to run for president in 1996. He had served 36 years in Congress, won and lost the Republican presidential nomination three times, served as Gerald Ford’s running mate in 1976, and lost the 1996 general election to Bill Clinton. He was the last World War II combat veteran to be a major-party presidential nominee.

He had been wounded by a German shell in northern Italy on April 14, 1945, three weeks before V-E Day. Both arms were paralyzed, the right one permanently. He spent 39 months in hospitals learning to function with one usable hand. He carried a pen in his right hand for the rest of his life so people would not try to shake it. He never complained about the war and rarely talked about it.

He died in his sleep on December 5, 2021, age 98, of complications from stage 4 lung cancer that had been diagnosed in February. President Biden, who had served alongside him in the Senate for over 20 years, eulogized him in the Rotunda as “a man of extraordinary courage, both physical and moral.” His widow Elizabeth, herself a former senator from North Carolina and the only woman to serve in two cabinets, sat with their daughter Robin during the ceremony and at one point laid herself across his casket. The Senate had been quieter, more agreeable, when he had run it. Most of his colleagues said so directly.

Harry Reid

Reid was an amateur boxer from Searchlight, Nevada, a town of 200 people he liked to describe as having more brothels than churches. His father was a hard-rock miner who killed himself when Reid was 32. His mother took in laundry from the brothels. Reid hitchhiked 40 miles to high school in Henderson because Searchlight had none. He went on to law school at George Washington University and was elected to the Nevada Assembly at age 28.

He served as Senate Democratic leader from 2005 to 2017, the second-longest tenure in either party’s history. He passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010 by reading the procedural rules so closely he found a way around the Republican filibuster. He blocked the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility for thirty years through sheer parliamentary tenacity. He was the most ruthlessly effective Senate procedural mind of his era.

He died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Henderson, Nevada on December 28, 2021, age 82. President Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi all attended the Rotunda ceremony. Obama, whom Reid had recruited to run for president in 2006, eulogized him at the funeral in Las Vegas. The eulogy described a phone call after the 2008 election in which Reid told Obama that the bipartisan agreement they were both promising could not happen, but they should pretend to try. Reid had grown up boxing because the alternatives in Searchlight were either accepting being beaten up or learning not to be.

Hershel “Woody” Williams

Williams was the last living American to receive the Medal of Honor for actions in World War II. When he died in 2022, an entire generation of recipients went with him. He had been a Marine demolition sergeant on Iwo Jima, where for four hours on February 23, 1945 – the same day as the Mount Suribachi flag-raising, about a thousand yards away – he advanced alone with a flamethrower against a network of reinforced concrete pillboxes that had pinned down his unit, returning repeatedly to friendly lines for fresh fuel. Of the 300-plus flamethrower operators who landed on Iwo Jima, fewer than 20 survived.

Williams himself had been turned away from the Marines initially because he was too short. He persisted. He was 21 at Iwo Jima. President Truman placed the Medal of Honor around his neck on October 5, 1945. He spent the rest of his life uncomfortable with the recognition, insisting two of the Marines covering him had given their lives to keep him alive.

He died at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Huntington, West Virginia on June 29, 2022, age 98. The hospital had been renamed for him. His remains lay in honor in the Rotunda for one day, the eighth American to be so honored. He had spent the previous decades raising money for Gold Star families through his foundation. The Medal of Honor itself, an unusual thing to display in life, he had given to a museum in Chicago. He never wore it.

Ralph Puckett Jr.

Puckett’s actions earned him the Medal of Honor on November 25-26, 1950, at a hill called Objective 205 outside Unsan, North Korea. He was a 23-year-old first lieutenant commanding the 8th U.S. Army Ranger Company – 50 men against an estimated battalion-sized Chinese force, somewhere around 500 soldiers. The Rangers held the hill against six successive human-wave attacks over the course of a night. Two mortar rounds landed in Puckett’s foxhole during the sixth attack. Both legs and his backside were torn up; he could not walk.

He ordered his men to leave him and withdraw. They refused. They carried him down the hill under fire and called in artillery to wipe out the position they had been holding. The Distinguished Service Cross he received afterward was upgraded to the Medal of Honor 71 years later, in 2021, when President Biden placed it around his neck at age 94.

He died at his home in Columbus, Georgia on April 8, 2024, age 97. He was the last living Medal of Honor recipient from the Korean War. The honor that ended with Williams in 2022 for World War II veterans now ended for Korean War veterans with him. Eight other Medal of Honor recipients attended the Rotunda ceremony and saluted his urn. The Korean War remains, in a phrase that Puckett’s death in some ways finalized, the Forgotten War; over five and a half million Americans served in it, and very few are now alive.

Jimmy Carter

Carter was the longest-lived president in American history and the first to reach 100. He served one term, lost his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan in a landslide, and spent the next 44 years redefining what former presidents could do. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his work after leaving office: monitoring elections, eradicating Guinea worm disease in Africa, and building houses with Habitat for Humanity. He published 32 books. He taught Sunday school in Plains, Georgia until 2019.

Before any of that, he was a Naval Academy graduate, a nuclear submarine officer under Hyman Rickover, a peanut farmer, and a one-term Georgia governor. As president, he negotiated the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, signed the SALT II treaty, and pardoned Vietnam-era draft dodgers. The Iran hostage crisis defined his last year and helped end his presidency. He was 56 when he left office.

He died at his home in Plains, Georgia on December 29, 2024, age 100. His wife Rosalynn, to whom he had been married for 77 years, had died in November 2023. The funeral procession from the Capitol on January 7 retraced his 1977 inaugural route in reverse – Carter and his family had walked from the Capitol to the White House on Inauguration Day, the first president to do so. He was buried in Plains, beside Rosalynn, in front of the house they had built and lived in since 1962. The next president to lie in state has not yet died.