Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's body will travel more than 70 miles from his Cape Cod home to Boston to lie in repose in a presidential library he helped develop in tribute to one of his slain brothers.
Family members will attend a private Mass at Kennedy's Hyannis Port compound at noon on Thursday, and the motorcade is scheduled to leave around an hour later. It will pass sites that were significant to the senator on the way to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, where his body will lie in repose until Friday, a Senate office statement said.
The motorcade will go by St. Stephen's Church, where his mother, Rose, was baptized and her funeral Mass celebrated; cross the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, the Boston park that he helped create and that is named after his mother; pass historic Faneuil Hall, where Boston Mayor Thomas Menino will ring the bell 47 times, once for each year Mr. Kennedy served in the Senate; and then move by the site of Kennedy's first office as an assistant district attorney.
Plans are being finalized for a private memorial service at the presidential library on Friday evening and for the funeral Mass on Saturday morning at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica — commonly known as the Mission Church — in Boston's Mission Hill neighborhood.
U.S. President Barack Obama is scheduled to speak at the funeral.
A church official said former Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush also are expected to attend the Mass at the cavernous basilica, built in 1878.
Shortly before the Mass, 44 sitting senators and 10 former senators will be among a group of approximately 100 dignitaries who will pay their respects to Kennedy at the library.
Included in the group is former U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana, who pulled Kennedy from the wreckage of a small plane that crashed near Springfield, Massachusetts, in June 1964. The pilot and a legislative aide were killed, and Kennedy suffered a broken back.
``The Impossible Dream,'' Kennedy's favorite song, will be played at one of the services, according to the person familiar with the arrangements.
Mr. Kennedy will be buried Saturday evening near his slain brothers — former President Kennedy and former Sen. Robert F. Kennedy — at Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia. Other family members buried on the famous hillside include former first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and the former president's baby son, Patrick, who died after two days.
