Nation: A LIFE ON THE WAY TO DEATH
(10 of 10)
It was Ted who acted as paterfamilias. His determinedly brisk voice betrayed him a few times, but the occasional hesitation only added to the power of his eulogy. "He loved life completely and lived it intensely," Ted said, in a reading that was unusual for a Roman Catholic funeral. Frequently using Bobby's own words, Ted concluded with the lines adapted from George Bernard Shaw that Bobby used to end many of his own speeches: "Some men see things as they are and say 'Why?' I dream things that never were and say 'Why not?' " The service also showed ecumenical and modernist influences. The Mass was entirely in English. Some of the musical selections were strange to traditional Catholic rites.
Arlington. The Battle Hymn of the Republic, that fierce old war song chanted tenderly by Andy Williams at the end of the funeral, was to be heard again and again during the afternoon as the special 21-car train bore the Senator and his family and his friends south to Washington. There were crowds and choirs at many of the communities along the right-of-way, more tears and dirges—and there was still more death. Two waiting mourners at Elizabeth, N.J., were killed by a train roaring in the other direction.
The funeral train inched on and on through the waning day, hours behind schedule. From the rear platform, Ted Kennedy, with short, sad gestures, thanked the people for coming out. At Baltimore, a memorial service was held on the platform as the train passed through.
Long after nightfall, it arrived in Washington. Along the lamplit streets, past a luminescence of sad and silent faces, the cavalcade wound through the federal city and across the Potomac, where in a green grove up the hill in Arlington, John Kennedy's grave looks out over the city and the river. The moon, the slender candles, the eternal flame at John's memorial—47 feet away and the floodlights laved Robert Kennedy's resting place beneath a magnolia tree. It was 11 o'clock, the first nighttime burial at Arlington in memory. There was no playing of taps, no rifle volley. After a brief and simple service, the coffin flag was folded into a triangle for presentation to Ethel, and the band played America the Beautiful.
* "Long rifle" bullets are the most lethal of three types commonly used in .22-caliber weapons. "Shorts" are tiny, "longs" the intermediate size. Hollow-nosed bullets are particularly vicious because they spread on impact, enlarging the area of damage.
*The word derives from the Arabic hash-shashin, "those who use hashish." At the time of the Crusades, a secret sect of the Mohammedan Ismailians employed terrorists while they were ritually high on hashish, which is similar to marijuana.