"What it was like to cover Beau Biden’s funeral"

"As a pooler, your job is to capture not just the president’s movements but the details others cannot see from a webcast or transcript of the event. Politico’s Edward-Isaac Dovere was serving as the vice president’s print pooler that day, and he relayed several tiny, heartbreaking details in an 11:11 a.m. e-mail to other reporters via Biden’s office:

Just before the door to the hearse opened, the vice president briefly looked up to the sky, and then forward again, his face unmoving. He put his arm around Hallie Biden and then kissed her on the head as they saw the casket, then bowed his head. He reached around his daughter-in-law and rubbed his grandson’s head gently. Biden’s own son Hunter, standing right behind them, reached forward and wrapped his arm around his nephew....

even as I and other reporters typed away, there were moments when there was no way to keep the sheer impact of the Bidens’ public expression of pain at a distance. The raw emotion of Hunter Biden’s recollection of his brother holding his hand in the hospital after a car crash when they were toddlers, saying “I love you” over and over again, Ashley Biden’s description of the sleepovers she spent as an 8-year-old in her brother’s college apartment; it was impossible to stay aloof. Every single journalist in that back pew cried at some point."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/06/08/what-it-was-like-to-cover-beau-bidens-funeral/?tid=sm_fb