National leaders joined thousands of mourners in Charleston on Friday at the memorial service for Sen. Robert C. Byrd.
President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, former President Bill Clinton and other dignitaries were in attendance at the 2 1/2 hour ceremony at the Capitol building, where Byrd, who died June 28, was eulogized as a champion for West Virginia and a master of rules and history of the U.S. Senate.
“The Senate chamber was Robert C. Byrd’s cathedral, and West Virginia was his heaven,” Biden said.
As chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Byrd became famous for the funding he directed to his home state. His reputation was criticized by opponents as pork barrel spending, but Byrd took pride in the money he sent to West Virginia.
“You’re looking at Big Daddy,” he remarked at the dedication of Marshall University’s Robert C. Byrd Biotechnology Center in 2005.
Much of the state infrastructure Byrd helped to fund bears his name. “(Byrd’s) early rival and late friend, Ted Kennedy, used to joke about campaigning in West Virginia,” Obama recalled. “When his bus broke down, Ted got hold of the highway patrol, who asked where he was. And he said, ‘I’m on Robert Byrd Highway.’ And the dispatcher said, ‘Which one’’”
Mistakes in Byrd’s past did not go unrecognized. Byrd was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan who filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He later apologized for his choices. “Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times … and I don’t mind apologizing over and over again. I can’t erase what happened,” Byrd said in 2005.
Clinton directly acknowledged Byrd’s Klan membership. “He was trying to get elected,” Clinton said. “And maybe he did something he shouldn’t have done, and he spent the rest of his life making it up. And that’s what a good person does.”
Byrd represented West Virginia in the U.S. Congress for more than half of a century. He was recognized by many of the speakers as a tenacious but tenderhearted leader who set the tone of the Senate.
“Robert Byrd was a mountain eagle, and his lowest swoop was still higher than the other birds upon the plain,” Obama said.
As Byrd’s casket was carried out of the memorial service, the 249th Army Band played “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Mourners joined to sing.
Byrd was buried Tuesday at Columbia Gardens Cemetery in Arlington, Va. next to his wife, Erma. Family members say they intend to have the Byrds reinterred in West Virginia once a suitable burial location is found.