Bobby Kennedy

Crime fiction doesn't get much darker or more raw than it does in James Ellroy's novels. There's no notion of a brave man or woman walking down those mean streets, fortified only by a personal moral code. That's because moral codes can get you killed.In his L.A. Quartet, an ambitious set of novels that concluded with 1993's "White Jazz," Mr. Ellroy explored the underside of his native Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s. The city as he described it was a cesspool, filled with the corrupt, the ruthless and the venal.

THE OTHER MRS. KENNEDY/Ethel Shakel Kennedy: An American Drama of Power, Privilege, and Politics. By Jerry Oppenheimer. St. Martin's Press. 540 pages. $24.95.THIS IS an unnecessarily cruel, vicious biography of a woman who has never run for public office. Not content to attack the late Kennedy husbands, it seems that writers now must assail their widows as well. Kennedy lovers will hate it, and Kennedy haters will love it.The book has particular relevance for Marylanders, however, since Ethel Kennedy's eldest child, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, is now the Free State's first female lieutenant governor, and thus a likely future gubernatorial contender.

Read together, "The Kennedy Women" and "The Other Mrs. Kennedy" are an almost overwhelming catalog of tragedy, dysfunction and scandal, along with endless details on clothes, china and silver patterns. Inevitably, gossip columns have started to seize on what is new, emphasizing the more sensational revelations. These include:* Adultery: According to "The Kennedy Women," Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy not only ignored the philandering of Joseph Kennedy Sr.; she advised her daughters-in-law that that was their lot as well.

It was 25 years and a lifetime ago, and yet I remember it so clearly. Every detail.All I have to do is close my eyes and it's all there. The shots. The blood. The cradled head. The gun knocked from the assassin's hand. Rosey Grier bear-hugging the man we would come to know as Sirhan Sirhan, as if trying to squeeze his life's breath into the body of the fallen son.I screamed. I must have."They shot Bobby. They shot Bobby."It was late, just after 3 a.m. in the East. I had been up watching the California primary returns in that most political of seasons and had fallen asleep in front of the TV. But something woke me. The gunshots?

NEW YORK -- Rico Riley takes America's political pulse from behind an upturned cardboard box in Times Square. He hawks campaign buttons, and he knows what sells.Slap a mug of Dan Quayle and a rude comment onto a little aluminum circle and plasticize it, you've got a winner. Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore or any combination, that's good business this week.And the Kennedys, John or Robert, alone or together -- a tour de force for any button man."OK, these guys, there's just something about 'em that gets people," Mr. Riley said.

It is certainly true that "the Kennedys have brightened the American landscape with their triumphs and darkened it with their tragedies," as a scroll contends at the beginning of an interesting historical documentary on cable tonight.But far from obvious in "Bobby Kennedy: In His Own Words" (premiering at 8 on the HBO premium channel, with repeats Nov. 24, 26 and 28, and Dec. 2 and 6) is any understanding of those tragedies, the assassinations of President Kennedy (27 years ago Thursday) and his younger brother Bobby (in June 1968)