Liberal lion ... President Barack Obama, three former presidents and the nation's elite gather to attend the funeral of US Senator Edward Kennedy

PRESIDENT Barack Obama, three former presidents and the nation's elite have gathered at a grand Catholic funeral for Edward Kennedy, America's legendary political patriarch.
Delivering the eulogy at Boston's Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Mr Obama called Kennedy a "champion for those who had none, the soul of the Democratic Party, and the lion of the US Senate".
He said Kennedy - whose elder brothers John F Kennedy and Robert were assassinated in the 1960s - had triumphed over "more pain and tragedy that most of us will ever know".
The eulogy was delivered before a who's who of the country's movers and shakers, including much of the US Congress, crammed into the pews of the historic Boston church.
Kennedy's coffin was then to be flown to Washington for burial at Arlington National Cemetery, alongside his slain brothers.
Kennedy's widow Vicki and three generations of the famed Irish-American clan, all dressed in black dresses or dark suits, fought tears as a priest told them that in Catholic faith "sadness is softened with hope".
But the tears flowed freely when Kennedy's son, Ted Kennedy Jr, gave a moving address about his father's tenderness to him during childhood when he had a leg amputated because of cancer.
"He taught us that even our most profound losses are survivable," Kennedy Jr said.
Recounting how his father helped him climb an icy hill with his new prosthetic leg, Kennedy Jr said: "He taught me that nothing is impossible."
"He was not perfect, far from it. But my father believed in redemption and he never surrendered, never stopped trying to right wrongs - be they his own failings, or ours," Kennedy Jr said. LinkHere