Hi, this is Lynn in Cincinnati, Ohio, where I just got done dropping off my son for his very first day of kindergarten.

This podcast was recorded at 241 Eastern on Saturday, September 1st.

Things may have changed by the time you hear it. All right, here's the show.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. It's been a week of memorial services for Senator John McCain, first in Arizona than the US Capitol.

Today, leaders from around the country gathered at the National Cathedral, the site of so many big memorial services to say goodbye to John McCain.

I'm Scott Detro, I cover Congress. I'm Kelsey Snell, I also cover Congress.

And I'm Scott Horsley, I cover the White House. So we all just watched this funeral. It was about two and a half hours, president, so bomb a bush, Clinton were there, a ton of other dignitaries.

Scott Horsley, you and I were here in studio and NPR, but Kelsey, you were at the National Cathedral. Just tell us what it was like to be there.

It's really solemn. It was very quiet around the cathedral. It is in this part of Upper Northwest Washington, D.C. That is already kind of a quiet part of the city. The cathedral itself is at the top of a hill and it's very isolated.

It felt like it was just a quiet solemn moment.

And it's just an enormous building and it's the closest that the country has to a Westminster Abbey type national place for big events.

We don't do royal weddings there, but we do go there to honor the lives of people like John McCain.

You have prayer services following the inauguration of several presidents, including Obama, and it was the site of the National Prayer Service for Ronald Reagan after his passing.

Sort of the official religious home for official Washington.

So we're going to walk through some of the key moments from this funeral in a moment. But Scott, I think one of the key moments was when they went to the Vietnam Memorial on the way to the National Cathedral.

Absolutely. And you have to remember that this entire pageant that we have witnessed over the last week since John McCain's death on the 25th has been carefully planned out to sort of illustrate the various stations of John McCain's life.

His adopted home in Arizona, his church in Arizona, the Capitol here where he lay in state.

And then obviously the formal stop in route to the cathedral this morning where the motorcade paused at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Cindy McCain placed a ceremonial wreath there.

And obviously a nod not only to John McCain's own time as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, which is a central piece of the narrative of John McCain, but also a tribute to the tens of thousands who served and died there.

And that's particularly important because McCain was central to the normalizing of relationships with between the United States and Vietnam.

And it's something that he thought was very important was that it was the country needed to remember the war, but they also needed to move on.

And even though the McCain family had said they didn't want President Trump at today's funeral or any of the events this week, when Cindy McCain went and laid that wreath, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis was next to her as was Chief of Staff, John Kelly.

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