Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was buried on Monday at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington beside an eternal flame she lighted three decades ago at the grave of her assassinated husband, the 35th president of the United States.
Her two children, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, joined 100 close friends and family members for a final good-bye, each kneeling and kissing her mahogany casket. Mr. Kennedy leaned to touch his father's gravestone as well.
The moment was poignant and painful for millions of Americans who had strong memories of a 34-year-old widow escorting her two young children during the funeral for President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
American television networks interrupted their programming to bring live coverage of the Onassis funeral and burial, interspersed with historical footage from the Kennedy years. Earlier in the day, thousands of mourners stood behind police barricades outside the private funeral in New York.
President Bill Clinton, long an admirer of President Kennedy and more recently an acquaintance of Mrs. Onassis, offered a brief graveside eulogy, saying: "God gave her very great gifts and imposed upon her great burdens. She bore them all with dignity and grace and uncommon common sense.
"May the flame she lit so long ago burn ever brighter here and always brighter in our hearts. God bless you friend, and farewell."
Mrs. Onassis was 64 when she died of cancer last week at her apartment in New York, where she had worked as a book editor and doted on her daughter's three children.
She was eulogized by her brother-in-law, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, at a funeral Mass in the same New York church, St. Ignatius Loyola, where she had been christened. As he had done so many times at funerals for members of the Kennedy family, the senator mixed humor with somber affection.
He recalled that Mrs. Onassis had invited the Clintons aboard the family yacht during a vacation at Martha's Vineyard last year. She urged the senator to step off the boat and greet the president, instead of leaving that duty to Maurice Tempelsman, her longtime companion.
"I said, 'Maurice is already there,'" the senator said.
"And Jackie answered with a smile: 'Teddy, you do it. Maurice isn't running for re-election.'"
Mr. Kennedy went on to praise his sister-in-law as a woman with a strong sense of self and an equally strong devotion to her children.
He recounted a remark she had made of her first husband the month after his assassination: "They made him a legend, when he would have preferred to be a man."
He explained her struggle for privacy this way: "She never wanted public notice - in part, I think, because it brought back painful memories of an unbearable sorrow, endured in the glare of a million lights."
Caroline, 36, and John Jr., 33, read selections from the Scriptures and their mother's favorite poems at the funeral Mass, including "Memory of Cape Cod" by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Mr. Kennedy said the family had sought to capture "my mother's essence" in selecting the readings, "her love of words, the bonds of home and family and her spirit of adventure."
Jessye Norman, the opera soprano, sang "Ave Maria," and Mike Nichols, the movie director, read from the Scriptures.
Mrs. Onassis, who married Aristotle Onassis in 1968, was ill with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma when she reportedly made the decision to buried at Arlington.
