Powerful gather in homage, gratitude

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was 20 when she was first wowed by Kennedy’s charisma and enthusiasm, as he greeted her family and dozens of other Maryland delegates at the 1960 Democratic National Convention on behalf of his brother, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy.

“I can remember the smile, the twinkle in the eye, the excitement of his love, obviously, of people and politics and his enthusiasm for his brother,’’ Pelosi recalled yesterday, moments after she arrived in Boston for Kennedy’s funeral.

Pelosi and Jackson, who hail from such markedly different backgrounds, are among the scores of notable figures who have descended on Boston to pay their final respects to Kennedy. They include not just those who have admired and fought beside him, but also those who have tangled with him.

They have come to say goodbye, the dignitaries, foreign leaders, and elected officials who will fill the pews at Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Mission Hill this morning. They bear their own memories of how Kennedy intersected with their lives and influenced them during his half-century in politics and the public eye.

In that way, these boldfaced names are no different from the tens of thousands of everyday citizens who recalled personal encounters with Kennedy with a mix of awe, affection, and solemnity as they gathered from Cape Cod to Boston over the past few days to witness the passage of his cortege and to pass before his flag-draped coffin.

“I feel, as a civil rights activist and leader, a keen sense of debt and obligation and responsibility to be here,’’ said Jackson, now 67, calling Kennedy “one of the founding fathers of a new America.’’

Picking up after the too-brief careers of brothers John and Robert, Kennedy became a vocal and resolute advocate, Jackson said, for minorities, for the poor, for women, for those with disabilities, and for people who lacked health care, well before such causes defined what the civil rights leader called the “moral center’’ of the country.

“He’s peerless,’’ Jackson added. “He built a canal that helped to change the course’’ of American history.

Not everyone in attendance today, of course, always hailed Kennedy with such warmth. He was, in earlier decades, notoriously self-destructive; he took years to grow into his role as standard-bearer for the Kennedy name and mystique, for the liberal cause; he was, across generations, a favorite bogeyman of the right. But the diverse contingent who have come to Boston reflects a bipartisan respect that perhaps no other public figure could claim.

“He had such a deep intellect and passion for what he believed in, and that made him very respectful of what others believed in, too,’’ Pelosi said. “While he may have disagreed with them, he respected their commitment to their beliefs. And I think that’s one of the things you saw in how he conducted himself as a senator: an ardent, progressive Democrat . . . able to negotiate and work closely with people from across the spectrum.’’

Even some in Kennedy’s party have clashed with him in the course of his long political career. In the 1980 presidential campaign, when he was considering a challenge to the sitting Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, the incumbent famously said, “I’ll whip his ass.’’ Early last year, Kennedy’s relationship with Bill Clinton frayed after the senator threw his influential endorsement to Barack Obama, not Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the Democratic presidential primary.

All of that now is history. Carter cut short a Middle East trip to fly to Boston for this morning’s Mass. The Clintons are scheduled to be here, too.

On the Republican side, former president George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, are flying in from Texas. Senator John McCain, last year’s Republican nominee and a coauthor with Kennedy on significant legislation, arrived from Arizona in time to speak on another bipartisan bill: the roster of speakers at the private “Celebration of Life’’ memorial service held for Kennedy last night at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Kennedy’s death has also drawn leaders from overseas, including the United Kingdom, where Kennedy, a proud Irish Catholic, worked to help broker an end to “The Troubles’’ in Northern Ireland.

“Our appreciation for his efforts knows no bounds,’’ said Martin McGuinness, a Sinn Fein politician and former Irish Republican Army leader who now serves as deputy first minister of Northern Ireland. “He made a mighty contribution to the work of peace in Ireland.’’

Shaun Woodward, the British politician who serves as secretary of state for Northern Ireland, called Kennedy “one of the great peacemakers’’ in bringing the two sides together.

“What I was always struck by with him was that he was somebody who never accepted the world as it was and as it is and always dreamed of how it might be,’’ Woodward said. “In Northern Ireland you saw those things very strongly, because he saw the injustices of the past and believed very strongly that it had to be different. And he fought for that.’’

As much as they recalled his record, those who worked closely with him remembered his charm, his smile, his booming voice, and the full measure of his personality.

Pelosi, 49 years removed from her first glimpse, described Kennedy’s return to Washington last spring to witness President Obama’s signing of a national service bill to triple the size of the AmeriCorps program, which Kennedy had championed alongside Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, a committed Republican and Kennedy friend.

Despite his fight against brain cancer, Kennedy managed to project a singular glow.

“He was as dynamic and youthful, and with as magnificent a smile, as when I first saw him decades ago,’’ Pelosi said. “In a special family, there was something very special about Senator Kennedy.’’