Vice President-elect Joe Biden: “We will all miss you, but I assure you, you will not be forgotten.”

NEWPORT — With reverence and humor, a past president, a future vice president, two U.S. senators and a loving grandson paid heartfelt tribute yesterday to Claiborne de Borda Pell at the late senator’s funeral. He was, they all agreed, a rare man whose many contributions to his country will endure.

Hundreds filled historic Trinity Episcopal Church: political luminaries past and present, members of Newport’s old-money set, and ordinary citizens, a blend that symbolized the popularity this son of affluence enjoyed with people of diverse backgrounds. Pell died on New Year’s Day at his Newport home. He was 90.

“He was the right kind of aristocrat,” former President Bill Clinton said in his eulogy. “A champion by choice, not by circumstance, of the common good, our common future, and our common dreams.”

Born to a family whose wealth dated back centuries, Pell married Nuala O’Donnell, who comes from a family that founded the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., the A&P. Democrats both, the Pells believed in noblesse oblige, with Claiborne in his 36 years as senator an ardent supporter of the environment, the arts and education, and a considerable force in the shaping of American foreign policy.

The Pell Grant program, arguably his greatest achievement, has allowed millions of lower-income students to earn a college degree.

“This remarkable man cared about people who, unlike him, could not afford to go to college without a little help from their government,” Clinton said.

The former president recalled being a young university student in Washington in 1964 and looking out his dorm window into the backyard of the Pells’ Georgetown residence.

“I got to be a voyeur at all of the dinner parties of this elegant man,” Clinton said, to laughter.

But, Clinton said, again to laughter, he would have to be elected president before he did more than look.

“It took me 29 years and six months to get into the front door of that house!” Nonetheless, Clinton said in a reference to his own working-class roots, Pell had the common touch. “There was something almost magical about this man who was born into aristocracy but cared for the people I grew up with.”

Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy also mentioned Pell Grants in his eulogy. Kennedy described them as one in a “treasure trove of accomplishments” by a man of character and integrity, “a senator for our time and for all times.” Kennedy, who is being treated for brain cancer and walks with a cane, called Pell an “extraordinary man, a respected leader, a valued colleague and a wonderful friend.”

Vice President-elect Joe Biden told of coming to Washington as a new senator in the early 1970s and finding an immediate mentor and friend in Pell. He talked of the car accident, a week before Christmas 1972, that killed his wife and 1-year-old daughter –– and how Pell and Nuala were a great comfort to him.

“There wasn’t anything at all about it that smacked of politics. It was you acting as if your heart was as broken as mine. You made your home my home.”

Biden shared his own Pell anecdotes, including the time the late senator showed up to jog dressed in an Oxford button-down shirt, Bermuda shorts, black shorts and leather shoes. “He was a quirky guy, Nuala!” Biden said.

The soon-to-be vice president closed on a more solemn note.

Looking from the pulpit to the white-linen draped casket in the central aisle of the old church, Biden said: “We will all miss you, but I assure you, you will not be forgotten.”

Sen. Jack Reed, who won Pell’s seat when Pell announced he would retire in 1996, called his late colleague “the commanding political presence throughout my life” and “one of my heroes.” Pell, he said, “dedicated his life to selfless service to Rhode Island and to the nation.” He was, Reed said, “the ideal of what a public servant should be.”

Reed, too, had a funny story: the time in the early 1990s when he was a U.S. representative and Pell told him he was going to Fort Ticonderoga for a family reunion.

Of all places, why a fort for a family reunion? Reed asked.

“Well, Jack, you see, we own it!” Pell said.

Nicholas Lorillard Pell was last to eulogize.

“Always true to his moral compass –– that was my grandfather,” Nicholas said. He, too, drew laughs when describing his grandfather’s legendary frugality –– the beat-up old cars he drove, the less-than-top-shelf wine he favored, the clothes he wore and then wore out.

Among Nicholas’s memories is the last decade, when Parkinson’s disease slowly robbed his grandfather of his mobility and his speech –– but how, with the assistance of caretakers and Nuala, the late senator, his spirit not breaking, continued to welcome visitors and get out into the community.

“While his body gave out long ago,” Nicholas said, “his will to live was of mythic proportions.”

As the nearly hour-and-a-half service neared its end, the Right Rev. Geralyn Wolf, Episcopal Bishop of Providence, commended Pell into the hands of his Savior. A Coast Guard honor guard wheeled the casket to the rear of the church and the mourners left to the strains of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” an old English hymn, sung by Trinity Church Choir and accompanied by the church’s famed pipe organ. Two members of the honor guard, it was learned, had received Pell Grants.

As the Coast Guardsmen brought Pell’s casket out of the church, at about 11:45 a.m., an older woman’s sobs were heard on the quiet street. Angelina Rochefort said she has been the housekeeper for the family for the past 35 years.

“I loved Senator Pell,” she said, crying.

All of Rhode Island’s general officers attended the funeral, along with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and former Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee; Representatives Patrick Kennedy and James R. Langevin; and former Governors Ed DiPrete, Bruce Sundlun and Lincoln Almond. Col. Brendan Doherty, superintendent of the Rhode Island State Police, attended, as did Lichtenstein’s Prince Hans Adam II, a Pell family friend.

A Senate delegation arrived by jet at Quonset and reached the church by motorcade. It included Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.; Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin, D-Illinois; John Kerry, D-Mass; Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.; Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn; Jeff Bingaman, D-New Mexico; Orrin Hatch, R-Utah; Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Dick Lugar, R-Ind.

The senators left the church to return to Washington, where President-elect Barack Obama was holding meetings, but many other mourners traveled down Bellevue Avenue to Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations & Public Policy, where Nuala, her two living children and other family members hosted a reception.

After some two hours, Nuala and her family left Salve in three black limousines, which brought them to Saint Columba’s Chapel in Middletown. By the main door, under a beech tree more than 100 years old, a grave had been opened.

As Coast Guardsmen in blue uniforms and white gloves stood watch, Bishop Wolf led the small gathering in The Lord’s Prayer. The late afternoon was momentarily silent, and then Coast Guardsmen fired a 21-gun salute. A bugler played taps, and the American flag that draped Pell’s casket was folded and handed to Vice Admiral Clifford I. Pearson, Coast Guard chief of staff, whose father served with Pell on a cutter in the years before World War II. Pearson gave the flag to Nuala.

The casket was lowered into the ground, and family members, led by Pell’s wife, each threw a spade of earth onto it.

The family returned to the limousines which drove off into the approaching evening, leaving the senator with his and Nuala’s two other children: Christopher T.H. Pell and Julia L. Pell, who died in 1999 and 2006 respectively, and are buried next to him.

––With reports from projo.com staff writers Maria Armental and Jack Perry and Journal staff writers Kate Bramson and Tom MooneyInside

More photos of yesterday’s services, plus Rhode Islanders remember their senator. B4, B8.

gwmiller@projo.com