The John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame is a presidential memorial at the grave site of assassinated United States President John F. Kennedy, in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. This permanent site replaced a temporary grave and eternal flame used at the time of Kennedy's state funeral on November 25, 1963, three days after his assassination. The site was designed by architect John Carl Warnecke, a longtime friend of Kennedy. The permanent John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame grave site was consecrated and opened to the public on March 15, 1967.
thumb|left|upright=.95|[[Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis|Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy walk away from Kennedy's casket after lighting the Eternal Flame]]
Initial press reports indicated that Kennedy would be buried at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts, where his son Patrick Bouvier Kennedy (who had died on August 9, 1963, two days after his premature birth) was buried. But the site for Kennedy's grave was quickly changed to the hillside just below Arlington House in Arlington National Cemetery; some months earlier Kennedy had admired the location's peaceful atmosphere while visiting it with his friend, architect John Carl Warnecke.
The initial suggestion to bury Kennedy at Arlington appears to have been made by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy agreed to the change. According to several published accounts, she drew inspiration from a number of sources. One was the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which she and Kennedy had seen during a visit to France in 1961. She also took inspiration from the novel The Candle in the Wind (the fourth book from the collection The Once and Future King by T. H. White), which was part of the inspiration for the 1960 stage musical Camelot (the cast recording was a favorite of the Kennedys). Her brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, counseled against an eternal flame, worried that it might appear ostentatious or that it would compete with other such memorials at Arlington National Cemetery; The Corps also installed a gas line to a propane tank away to feed the torch.