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John Everett Benson, Who Chiseled John F. Kennedy’s Grave, Dies at 85

Published

2 years ago

June 16, 2024

John Everett Benson, Who Chiseled John F. Kennedy’s Grave, Dies at 85

John Everett Benson, a master stone carver, designer and calligrapher whose chisel marked the deaths of presidents, playwrights, authors and artists, as well as generations of American families — and whose elegant inscriptions graced museums and universities, government buildings and houses of worship — died on Thursday in Newport, R.I. He was 85.

His son Christopher said he died in a hospital but did not specify the cause.

Mr. Benson practiced the ancient and exacting art of carving into rock; slate was his preferred medium. He did so, precisely and gorgeously, on cornerstones, gravestones and monuments, as his father had before him, working out of an atelier in Newport called the John Stevens Shop. Founded in 1705, it is one of the oldest continuously run businesses in the country.

The art Mr. Benson practiced is mostly devoted to mortality, the brief span of a life, though it is designed for eternity, or something close to it. It is often described as the slowest writing in the world. Mr. Benson could spend a day carving a cross; a gravestone might take three months.

For the inscriptions for the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, designed by I.M. Pei in the 1970s, he averaged an hour and a half carving each letter, some of which are nearly a foot tall. He and his team at the time, two young carvers named John Hegnauer and Brooke Roberts, spent months completing the painstaking work.

He carved the words on the pedestal that supports Secretariat’s statue at Belmont Park; he also carved John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s credo into a slab of polished granite in Rockefeller Center. His elegant slate alphabet stone — alphabet stones are where lapidary artists show off their chops, their calligraphic feats and flourishes — lives in Harvard’s Houghton Library. He also worked on the National Cathedral in Washington, Yale University and the Boston Public Library, among other institutions.

Mr. Benson, who was known as Fud, was 25 when began his first major commission: to mark John F. Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery and carve selections from his speeches onto a low wall made from seven granite blocks. (He changed into clean bell bottoms when Jackie Kennedy came to the shop in Newport to approve his design.)

Stone carvers on public sites invariably draw a crowd. And, inevitably, someone will ask, “What if you make a mistake?” As Mr. Benson, Mr. Hegnauer and Mr. Roberts worked at another site, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, onlookers asked and asked, so much so that Mr. Benson requested that a flyer be made to put an end to the incessant questioning.

Q: What happens if they make a mistake?

A: Don’t worry, they won’t.

“Why go to all this kind of trouble to get a name on a building?” Mr. Benson said in “Final Marks: The Art of the Carved Letter” (1979), a documentary about his work made by Frank Muhly. “Why carve it into the stone? Why carve it in this particular fashion?” He added: “There’s a tremendous emotional appeal about a carved letter. It partakes of the substance of the building. And of the carved letters, this particular style” — Mr. Benson favored what is known as a V-cut — “shows very clearly that the letter is made of the same stuff as the building itself. There are lots easier ways to do it, let me tell you.”

John Everett Benson was born on Oct. 8, 1939, in Newport, R.I., one of three children, and grew up in an 18th-century clapboard house overlooking Narragansett Bay. His mother, Esther Fisher (Smith) Benson, known as Fisher, was a Philadelphia-born Quaker who used “plain speech” at home, deploying “thee,” “thy” and “thine” for “you,” “your” and “yours.”

His father, John Howard Benson, was an artist who had become enamored of the stone carver’s art. He bought the John Stevens Shop with a $1,200 loan in 1927, when he was 26, and began to revive its business.

The elder Mr. Benson was, like his son, a polymath skilled at calligraphy and carving, and he elevated the practice, reaching back to the Roman tradition of carving large, elegant capital letters designed first with a brush and ink on paper. In his time he was known as the country’s finest stone carver, and he worked on many commissions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was a professor.

Fud was 15 when he began apprenticing in the shop, and his first commissions were gravestones for two clients’ pets. He was 16 when his father died of a heart attack in 1956. His mother ran the business while he studied sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design, and he took over the shop after he graduated in 1961.

Mr. Benson was eloquent, erudite and prone to grand gestures. He was agile enough to perform a Fred Astaire chair trick — stepping from seat to chair back in a graceful arc — though he sometimes overestimated his abilities. During a youthful fascination with firearms, he shot himself in the leg. He was better on the fiddle, and played traditional Irish music and sea chanteys with a local band, the Reprobates, in Newport’s bars.

In addition to his son Christopher, a painter, Mr. Benson is survived by his wife, Karen Augeri Benson, a lawyer, whom he married in 1988; another son, Nick, a stone carver; and four grandchildren. His marriage to Ruth Furgiuele in 1959 ended in divorce in the early 1970s. Mr. Benson’s older brother, Thomas, a sculptor and art and antiques restorer who died in 1987, was a founder of the Newport Museum of Yachting. His younger brother, Richard, known as Chip, a noted photographer and printer, died in 2017.

Mr. Benson’s last monumental work was the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, designed by Lawrence Halprin as a series of outdoor “rooms” made from red South Dakota granite onto which Mr. Benson carved the president’s notable quotations and speeches, including the “Four Freedoms” speech.

In 1993, Mr. Benson turned the business over to his son Nick and returned to sculpture. Like his father, Nick began his apprenticeship at age 15. His father’s praise was hard won, Nick recalled, and was delivered sort of sideways: “Well, Jesus,” he might say, “it doesn’t look like you need me.”

Nick Benson carved the World War II, Martin Luther King and Dwight D. Eisenhower memorials in Washington, and he won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2010 for preserving the art of hand letter carving.

Mr. Benson’s headstones were his bread and butter. His orders, from a who’s who of Americans, were backlogged for months and even years. He made Tennessee Williams’s headstone out of pink Tennessee marble, as he did for George Balanchine. Lillian Hellman’s, a flat slate marker on Martha’s Vineyard, is engraved with the years of her birth and death and is embellished with a delicate feather quill. (Curiously, he ended up carving the gravestone of Ms. Hellman’s nemesis, Mary McCarthy, when she died in 1989, five years later.)

Jean Stafford declared in an article for The New York Times in 1971 that she had ordered hers ahead of time, “because I knew they would make me something beautiful.” (She died eight years later.) Rachel Lambert Mellon, known as Bunny, ordered hers in 1999, when she commissioned one for her husband, the philanthropist Paul Mellon, who died that year. She kept hers in her library in Virginia until her own death in 2014.

“They’re simple, well-established objects,” Mr. Benson told the writer Philip Kopper in 1977. “All you can do is try to make the lettering as beautiful as you can. And that’s a darlin’ way to spend a day or two.”

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Want to own a real T. rex? It could cost you $30 million

Published

5 hours ago

July 12, 2026

Press Room

Want to own a real T. rex? It could cost you million

“Gus,” a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, is pictured during a press preview at Sotheby’s in New York City on July 1.

Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

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Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

If you ever wanted to own an actual T. rex and not just a toy, you now have a chance. But it’s going to cost you some bones. Millions of them.

The Tyrannosaurus rex fossil known as “Gus” will go up for auction Tuesday morning at Sotheby’s New York City office. The starting bid for the dinosaur is $19 million and the auction house estimates it could sell for $20 to $30 million.

Gus was found in Harding County, S.D., on private land in 2021, according to Sotheby’s. The T. rex skeleton, which is 38 feet long and 12 and half feet tall, is believed to be from the late Cretaceous period from about 67 million years ago.

An artistic illustration of the Nagatitan, the largest dinosaur discovered in Southeast Asia.

“Judging from the overall size and degree of bone development it can be determined that Gus’ skeleton belonged to a very large, robust, adult individual,” the auction house said in the listing.

Thomas Heitkamp, president of Theropoda Expeditions, the company that excavated the site, said in a Sotheby’s video about the discovery that nearly a thousand pieces were collected.

The creature is named after the owner of the ranch where it was discovered, Gary “Gus” Licking. He died during the excavation process, which ran through 2023, and was not able to see Gus fully assembled, according to Cassandra Hatton of Sotheby’s.

“Gary had for years roamed around his 6,500 acre property and seeing T. rex teeth and little bits of fossils and such, and he realized that there was probably something really important under the ground,” Hatton said in the video.

In this illustration, a pack of Nanotyrannus attacks a juvenile T. rex. Scientists say a well-known fossil shows that there was more than one tyrannosaur species roaming the Earth.

Gus is one of the largest and most complete T. rex specimens ever found, according to Sotheby’s.

It’s not the first time dinosaur bones have been for sale to the highest bidder.

The first auction for a dinosaur was held by Sotheby’s in 1997. The creature, a T. rex named Sue, was purchased by a few large companies for the Field Museum in Chicago. It went for $8.4 million.

In 2024, Apex the stegosaurus sold for $44.6 million, the most ever for a dinosaur fossil. It was purchased by billionaire investor Ken Griffin, who loaned it to the American Natural History Museum in New York for four years.

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Map: 4.1-Magnitude Earthquake Shakes Southern California

Published

13 hours ago

July 12, 2026

Press Room

Map: 4.1-Magnitude Earthquake Shakes Southern California

Note: Map shows the area with a shake intensity of 3 or greater, which U.S.G.S. defines as “weak,” though the earthquake may be felt outside the areas shown. All times on the map are Pacific time. The New York Times

A light, 4.1-magnitude earthquake struck in Southern California on Sunday, according to the United States Geological Survey.

The temblor happened at 3:38 a.m. Pacific time about 1 mile southeast of Frazier Park, Calif., data from the agency shows.

U.S.G.S. data earlier reported that the magnitude was 4.4.

As seismologists review available data, they may revise the earthquake’s reported magnitude. Additional information collected about the earthquake may also prompt U.S.G.S. scientists to update the shake-severity map.

Aftershocks detected

Subsequent quakes have been reported in the same area. Such temblors are typically aftershocks caused by minor adjustments along the portion of a fault that slipped at the time of the initial earthquake.

Quakes and aftershocks within 100 miles

Aftershocks can occur days, weeks or even years after the first earthquake. These events can be of equal or larger magnitude to the initial earthquake, and they can continue to affect already damaged locations.

When quakes and aftershocks occurred

All times are Pacific time. The New York Times

Sources: United States Geological Survey (epicenter, aftershocks, shake intensity); LandScan via Oak Ridge National Laboratory (population density) | Notes: Shaking categories are based on the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale. When aftershock data is available, the corresponding maps and charts include earthquakes within 100 miles and seven days of the initial quake. All times above are Pacific time. Shake data is as of Sunday, July 12 at 11:54 a.m. Eastern. Aftershocks data is as of Sunday, July 12 at 2:24 p.m. Eastern.

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Mexico-US relations are already strained, but experts say they’re about to get worse | CNN

Published

16 hours ago

July 12, 2026

Press Room

Mexico-US relations are already strained, but experts say they’re about to get worse | CNN

The death of a Mexican man in Houston at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is threatening to upend already-strained relations between Mexico and the United States.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum took the unusual step of announcing at a press conference on Thursday that Mexico is seeking civil and criminal investigations in the US related to the deaths of 17 Mexican nationals during immigration enforcement operations or at detention centers.

These investigations aim to “protect the human rights of Mexicans in the United States,” the Mexican government said.

The impetus for the announcement was the ICE shooting death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas last week. ICE officials said agents shot Salgado Araujo, whom they said was in the US illegally, after he rammed a law enforcement vehicle and refused to follow verbal commands during a traffic stop.

His family has disputed ICE’s account, telling CNN that the 52-year-old father of three would have stopped if he had known the car that followed him belonged to law enforcement.

At her press conference announcing the request for criminal investigations, Sheinbaum also called for petitions to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Asked about Sheinbaum’s comments, the US Department of Homeland Security defended ICE’s actions.

“ICE agents are trained to use the minimum necessary force to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and our officers,” the agency said.

The agency also said that detainees in ICE custody “receive full due process, are provided with adequate food, water, and medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their families and attorneys.”

Analysts who spoke with CNN said that Salgado’s death and Mexico’s response may signal a major rift between Mexican and US authorities.

“This is no minor incident,” said José Luis Valdés Ugalde, academic at the Center for Research on North America at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “It affects the bilateral relationship and the pending issues that Mexico and the United States have before them,” including “security, migration, and trade.”

International affairs expert and newspaper columnist Fausto Pretelin said the relationship between Mexico and the United States was at “its worst moment” in the aftermath of the killing of Salgado Araujo. But he thinks Sheinbaum’s actions will damage relations further, for little more than political points gained within Mexico.

“It’s a performance,” Pretelin said of Sheinbaum’s announcement. “The opportunity to take these issues seriously is lost. And when I say seriously, I mean that diplomatic channels should be used.”

Yet some might argue that diplomatic channels have seen plenty of traffic, especially on this issue. Mexico’s government has already issued 11 diplomatic notes of protest to the US over the deaths of its citizens, Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco told reporters.

Now, his country had to go “beyond the diplomatic realm.”

While Pretelin and Valdés Ugalde have warned that Sheinbaum’s announcement spells trouble for US-Mexico relations, some experts believe that the Mexican president hasn’t gone nearly far enough.

Academic and columnist Tomás Milton Muñoz Bravo, professor of international relations at UNAM, says that this type of response should have come much earlier.

“It’s incredible that 17 deaths had to occur for Mexican authorities to finally announce a strategy that goes beyond the merely diplomatic to the judicial,” said Muñoz Bravo. “Of course, the announcement has been made, but I still want to see the actions that have been stated actually develop.”

Yet Valdés Ugalde points out that the US shows no signs of caring about Mexican criticisms of its immigration policy. Likewise, Valdés Ugalde said, Mexico has not known how to defend the migrant community and has made what he describes as “mistakes” in its foreign policy.

One of these, according to Valdés Ugalde, has been rejecting extradition requests for politicians allegedly linked to drug trafficking on the grounds of national sovereignty. This has given the Trump administration an opening to retaliate in other areas, such as the renegotiation of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which protects many Mexican exports from American tariffs.

“There are no signs of rebuilding the relationship; the relationship is very damaged by the attitudes of both governments and by Mexico’s defensive stance,” Valdés Ugalde said.

Muñoz Bravo said that the November midterm elections in the US could open an opportunity for Mexico if Republicans lose their control of Congress.

“What we’re going to see in November is extremely important,” he said. If Trump “does not have a majority in the chambers, there will be checks and balances that will even allow for room to negotiate with other actors in the United States.”

Until then, tensions between the neighbors remain high, with any further deaths of Mexican migrants threatening to deepen the rift.