Ted Kennedy Laid to Rest at Arlington National Cemetery

Aug. 29, 2009— -- Eulogized by a president, mourned by the powerful and buried among the nation's fallen heroes, Sen. Ted Kennedy was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery this evening following a day of pomp and pageantry befitting the last prince of America's most prominent political family.

His sundown burial in Arlington, 100 feet from where his slain brothers President John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy are interred, followed three days of official mourning after his death from brain cancer late Tuesday night. His body was transported from his seaside home in Hyannis Port to Boston Thursday.

A funeral was held Boston this morning, before an honor guard accompanied Kennedy's body back to Washington for a final visit to the Capitol and burial at Arlington.

Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica in Roxbury, Mass., was filled Saturday morning with the scent of incense and pew upon pew of politicians and dignitaries -- including President Obama, three former presidents and dozens of lawmakers -- who came to pay their respects to a man who spent his life in public service and whose name became synonymous with liberalism for an entire generation.

A military honor guard carried a flag-draped coffin into the church as steady rain fell. As his sons Ted Kennedy Jr. and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., remembered their father, Kennedy's wife Vicki sat stoically, though choking back tears.

Ted Kennedy Jr. spoke from the pulpit about a day shortly after losing a leg to cancer when he was 12 years old, when he slipped walking up an icy driveway as he headed out to go sledding. "I started to cry and I said, 'I'll never be able to climb up that hill,'" he said.

"And he lifted me up in his strong, gentle arms and said something I will never forget. He said, 'I know you can do it. There is nothing that you can't do.'"