Washington ? With a pageantry seldom seen in Washington, the body of Ronald Reagan will be returned today to the capital city he dominated as president, and honored with a formal, three-day state funeral.

The elaborate, centuries-old rite will commence with Reagan’s flag-draped coffin carried to the Capitol this evening by horse-drawn caisson, followed by a riderless horse bearing Reagan’s own boots turned backward in the stirrups, the stirring symbol of a leader lost, never to return.

The invitation-only state funeral service will be this evening in the Capitol. It will be followed by round-the-clock public viewing from tonight to early Friday morning, a religious funeral service at the National Cathedral later Friday morning and a return to California in time for burial just before the sun sets.

It will be the first state funeral in Washington for a president since Lyndon Johnson was buried in 1973.

A chosen few

By law, state funerals are for presidents, former presidents, presidents-elect or anyone designated for one by the president. The family must agree, and not all have. Harry Truman died less than a month before Johnson in 1973, for example, but his widow, Bess, was ailing and didn’t want to travel to Washington. Richard Nixon died in 1994, but the only president to resign didn’t want his body returned to a capital city he found hostile. He was buried after a state funeral in California.

The first state funeral in the United States was for President William Henry Harrison in 1841. The first one that involved national recognition and mourning was for Abraham Lincoln, after he was assassinated in 1865. “Lincoln was the first to die when there was a telegraph system. There was more of a national sense of mourning,” said Don Ritchie, a Senate historian.

Nearly a century later, in 1963, a grieving Jacqueline Kennedy asked that Lincoln’s state funeral be the model for ceremonies honoring her slain husband, John F. Kennedy.

Elaborate ritual

A horse-drawn coffin is brought to the U.S. Capitol building during a practice run of the proceedings for former President Ronald Reagan's state funeral in Washington. Reagan's remains will arrive today at the Capitol.

Soon after Kennedy’s death, the Military District of Washington drew up a formal plan for state funerals that remains the template today. It spells out in exacting detail who marches where, how fast a funeral procession moves and who outranks whom in seating at services. (Visiting heads of state, for example, sit ahead of members of Congress.)

After arriving this afternoon at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, Reagan’s coffin will be carried by hearse into the city, to a spot along Constitution Avenue within sight of the White House.

There, his coffin will be transferred at 5 p.m. CDT to a horse-drawn caisson for a solemn procession up Constitution and Pennsylvania avenues to the Capitol.

Under plans first drawn up in 1965, every step of today’s procession will be choreographed. The police escort drives at 3 mph. Marching members of the honor guard walk at a precise cadence of 100 steps per minute. A group of 21 jets will fly over as the procession crosses Constitution Avenue and Fourth Street N.W.

In the Rotunda, Reagan’s coffin will sit atop a catafalque, or funeral platform, made of rough pine boards and covered with black cloth.

The catafalque was built quickly in 1865 to bear Lincoln’s coffin. It’s kept in a room beneath the Rotunda intended — but never used — as Washington’s tomb. It’s borne the coffins of all other presidents who’ve lain in state in the Capitol since then, according to the architect of the Capitol.