Dozens of Washington's most powerful lawmakers and dignitaries bid a sad farewell Monday to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, remembering the former Democratic senator as a visionary who never forgot his humble roots.
"We shall miss Pat Moynihan. How can we ever forget him? We all loved him in life. May we never forget him in death," said Monsignor Peter Vaghi, who presided over the funeral Mass at St. Patrick's Church in Washington.
Moynihan, who died last week at age 76, was a New York senator for 24 years, an ambassador and an aide to four presidents. During mass, his casket was draped by a simple white cloth, which was later replaced by an American flag as pallbearers removed the casket from the church.
An interment was scheduled later Monday at Arlington National Cemetery for Moynihan, who served in the Navy from 1944-47.
"Pat Moynihan was a man of quiet faith," Vaghi told about 700 people gathered for the mass. "For him, this found expression in his long commitment to the body politic, the pursuit of the common good, and his special care for the poor, the family structure, and the most needy in our midst."
Current and former senators who befriended Moynihan during his life attended the short, simple ceremony. Federal Chairman Alan Greenspan, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft also were among those in attendance.
"He's a great American story," Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said after the Mass. "He did so many things and did them all so well. He was a visionary who understood American history."
"He was just a good decent guy. he was my friend," said former Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas.
Moynihan's reputation as a great mind of politics grew not only from his oratory flair, his love of history and a professorial demeanor. It was also his prescience that impressed.
From unwed mothers to the demise of the Soviet Union to highway deaths, Moynihan seized on trends and problems years, sometimes decades, before the rest of the nation caught up with him.
After his death from complications stemming from a ruptured appendix, Moynihan was called "an intellectual pioneer" by President Bush and "a prophet" by former President Clinton.
Moynihan "saw over the horizon of his time," wrote columnist George F. Will.
Moynihan, a Democrat, bemoaned the breakup of black families in a 1965 report to President Johnson, forecasting that the trend would lead to generations of social problems. Critics denounced the idea as racist. But over the decades, the rise in single-parent families among blacks, as well as whites and others, has come to be widely viewed as a damaging social problem.
He was an early advocate of mass transportation and historic preservation _ taking on the revitalization of Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House as a decades-long commitment.
In 1980, when many of his fellow anti-Communists saw the Soviet Union as a growing menace, Moynihan saw it weakening. He predicted that "the defining event of the decade might well be the breakup of the Soviet empire."
He had a knack for recognizing and embracing others' insights.
Moynihan's interest in highway safety was inspired by William Haddon, at the time an unknown doctor who believed traffic deaths should be treated as an epidemic. It was Moynihan who brought a young lawyer named Ralph Nader into the government and launched him on an auto safety crusade.
Moynihan had "this uncanny ability to know who to trust about any particular subject," said Tim Russert of NBC, for years a Senate aide to Moynihan.
Russert recalled preparing the senator to appear on a New York talk show the day the Yankees were to play the sixth game of the 1977 World Series _ a subject the cerebral Moynihan knew nearly nothing about.
On the air, Moynihan predicted with confidence a Yankee championship: "If the Yankees don't do it today, (pitcher) Mike Torrez will do it Tuesday," he declared.
"I fell out of my chair," Russert recalls. "How did you know about Mike Torrez?" he asked afterward.
"If you can't trust a 10-year-old with a Yankee hat, you can't trust anybody.'"
The Yankees won the World Series in six games.
AP writer Marc Humbert in Albany, N.Y., contributed to this story.