1 of 2 | A U.S. Military District of Washington honor guard carries Sen. Robert Byrd's (D-WV) flag-draped casket after laying in repose in the Senate Chamber of the U.S. Capitol on July 1, 2010 in Washington. Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia, was a Senator for 51 years and a member of the House for 6, making him the longest-serving member of the Senate and Congress in U.S. history. Byrd will be taken to West Virginia for his memorial services. UPI/Jim Young/Pool |
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CHARLESTON, W.Va., July 2 (UPI) -- President Obama eulogized Sen. Robert Byrd as a man with "a capacity to change" at a public memorial service Friday at the West Virginia Capitol.
Obama, the nation's first black president, referred indirectly to Byrd's past as an officer in the Ku Klux Klan. But he talked in detail about his own days as a junior senator from Illinois, when Byrd, who was first elected to the Senate more than two years before Obama was born, took him under his wing.
Byrd died Monday at the age of 92 after serving 51 years in the Senate. The service at the Capitol is to be followed Tuesday by a private burial in Arlington, Va., next to his wife of 70 years, Emma.
"The distinguished gentleman from West Virginia could be found at his desk until the very end doing the people's business, delivering soul-stirring speeches, a hint of the Appalachians in his voice, stabbing the air with his finger, fiery as ever years into his 10th decade," Obama said. "He was a Senate icon, he was a party leader, he was an elder statesman and he was my friend. That's how I'll remember him."
Obama joked about Byrd's capacity to get federal money for West Virginia, repeating a story told by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. Kennedy said when he called the state police to report his bus had broken down on Robert Byrd Highway, the dispatcher responded "which one."
The president mainly remembered Byrd as someone who knew "how to run the good and long race."
"Like the Constitution he tucked in his pocket, like our nation itself, Robert Byrd possessed that quintessential American quality and that is a capacity to change, a capacity to learn, a capacity to listen, a capacity to be made more perfect," Obama said.
Other tributes came from colleagues on both sides of the aisle in the Senate and from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Bill Clinton. Victoria Kennedy, Ted Kennedy's widow, said her husband and Byrd had a brief period as enemies before becoming friends and remembered Byrd casting the deciding vote for the health care bill.
"Tears flowed down my cheeks when he said 'Mr. President this is for my friend Ted Kennedy,'" she said.
