President Joe Biden and former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton appeared at the funeral service for Ethel Kennedy, the widow of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, in Washington on Wednesday.
Other than the current and former Democratic presidents, several Democratic Party heavyweights were also in attendance, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the former longtime House speaker.
Ethel Kennedy, a human rights advocate who was also the mother of former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., died in October. She was 96.
Biden eulogized Kennedy in deeply personal terms at a memorial service, calling her “a hero in her own right, full of character, full of integrity and empathy.”
“We’re a better nation and a better world because of Ethel Kennedy,” Biden said. ”Like she did for the country, Ethel helped my family find a way forward with principle and purpose.”
Obama said her life was marked by more tragedy and heartbreak than most could bear.
“She would have been forgiven, I think, if, at any point, she had stepped away from public life or allowed bitterness to fester after all she and her family had been through,” Obama said. “But that is not what Ethel did because that is not who she was.”
Rare Event
It’s a rare occasion for Biden, Obama, and Clinton to appear in the same place together. Obama had praised Biden after he stepped down as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in July, eventually throwing his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris, who did not attend Kennedy’s funeral service.At one point, Pelosi and Biden were seen speaking to one another at the event, the first time they were seen together speaking in public since Biden left the race. Pelosi had publicly suggested and later urged Biden to drop out of the race over the summer following the president’s only debate with former President Donald Trump, who also did not attend the service.
“But in any event, we just have to win the election,” the former House speaker told the UK newspaper, adding that she and Biden have been friends for many decades.
Pelosi said she has the “greatest respect” for Biden and called him “one of the great consequential presidents of our country.”
“Elections are decisions,” Pelosi said. “You decide to win ... so when you make a decision, you have to make every decision in favor of winning, and the most important decision of all is the candidate and the campaign of that candidate.”
Biden, meanwhile, has said that no one in the Democratic Party influenced his decision to step down and that nobody knew his plans beforehand.
“A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races. And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic—you’d be interviewing me about why did Nancy Pelosi say [something] ... and I thought it’d be a real distraction,” he told CBS News on Aug. 11.
Kennedy died from complications caused by a stroke on Oct. 10, her family said.
