Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was laid to rest Saturday night alongside slain brothers John and Robert on hallowed ground at Arlington National Cemetery, celebrated for "the dream he kept alive" across the decades since their deaths.
Crowds lined the streets of two cities on a day that marked the end of an American political era -- outside Kennedy's funeral in rainy Boston where he was eulogized by President Barack Obama, and later in the day in humid, late-summer Washington.
With flags over the Capitol flying at half-staff, his hearse stopped outside the Senate where he served for 47 years. His widow, Vicki, embraced former staff members in the crowd.
Later, at a graveside enveloped in deepening darkness, Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick offered sympathies to Kennedy relatives and "an extended family that must probably include most of America."
A squad of seven riflemen fired three volleys in a traditional military funeral ritual, and a bugler sounded taps. Lightning flickered across the sky.
Hours earlier, Obama delivered the eulogy in Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in Boston, packed with row upon row of mourners -- including former presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.
"He was given a gift of time that his brothers were not. And he used that time to touch as many lives and right as many wrongs as the years would allow," Obama said in remarks that also gently made mention of Kennedy's "personal failings and setbacks."
As a member of the Senate, Kennedy was a "veritable force of nature," the president said. But more than that, he was the "baby of the family who became its patriarch, the restless dreamer who became its rock."
Kennedy's freshly excavated gravesite was on a gently sloping Virginia hillside, flanked by a pair of maple trees. His brother Robert, killed in 1968 while running for president, lies 100 feet away. It is another 100 feet to the eternal flame that has burned since 1963 for John F. Kennedy, president when he was assassinated.
The youngest brother died Tuesday at 77, more than a year after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. An oak cross, painted white, marked the head of his grave, and a flat marble footstone bore the simple inscription, "Edward Moore Kennedy 1932-2009."
