Family, friends and dignitaries are streaming into the Mission Church in Boston for the funeral of Ted Kennedy this morning. The burial itself will be at Arlington later in the day, not far from the burial sites of John and Robert Kennedy. We’ll be bringing you updates, photographs and live video through the morning.
Watch live video here.
It’s hardly surprising. But it is striking to watch an event with so many political dignitaries and luminaries from the history of the last half century assembled together in one place. It is difficult to imagine — indeed, when you consider it, in many ways frightening to imagine — any event that would bring together such a group again.
10:11 AM: I’m watching the attendees mill around and talk before Sen. Kennedy’s funeral service gets underway. And I’m struck by the smiles. Death is always a sorrowful event, particularly for the close loved ones. But after a full life and when the passing has been presaged by a long illness, the sorrow is of a different character. This funeral in some ways closes the final chapter on the earlier funerals of John and Robert Kennedy. And there’s something reassuring, calming about seeing a Kennedy brother’s funeral that is sad, sorrowful, but not at all tragic.
10:24 AM: TPM Reader BL writes in: “Reading your post this morning on TK’s funeral and the range of luminaries in attendance, I thought I ought to pass on a bit of related Canadiana. When ex PM Pierre Trudeau passed away nine years ago, Honorary pallbearers included Jimmy Carter, Leonard Cohen, Aga Khan and Fidel Castro. As you might suspect, there wasn’t a lot of coverage in the US media.” I would say that is another collection we shall not see again.
11:30 AM: I expect sermons, even at the funerals of the famous, to be fairly perfunctory. But I must say the priest’s comments are quite moving, both in religious terms and also in terms of Sen. Kennedy’s life, and of course in weaving the two together.
