Camelot

WASHINGTON -- This is no book tour.Seymour M. Hersh blows into the hotel lobby like a cyclone in a suit and declares: "I'm in a war."At the end of week one of what he calls "pimping away" -- traveling around the country to promote his controversial and much-maligned new book on John F. Kennedy -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist has arrived for an interview armed and combat-ready.His briefcase is stuffed with documents to back up the many sensational and devastating charges he's made in "The Dark Side of Camelot" (Little, Brown, $26.95)

SLOW NEWS DAY? Well, somewhere a Kennedy is in trouble, soon to pay the media price for the celebrity of our own royal family. But that's the way they wanted it -- or, that's the price they will forever pay for the ambitions of their grandfather and their Uncle Jack, the president.There are dozens of Kennedy ''kids'' now, enough to keep hundreds of reporters employed covering the triumphs and trials of the children of President John F. Kennedy and his seven brothers and sisters. That is, if you can still use ''kid'' to describe Robert F. Kennedy's eldest daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the 45-year-old lieutenant governor of Maryland and mother of four children of her own.She is the eldest of the new generation and more typical than some of her male siblings, who are periodically in trouble involving sex, drugs, alcohol and reporters.

FRANKLIN CENTER, Pa. -- Alongside the dolls, model cars, commemorative ingots and other collectible bijoux, such as "Faberge eggs," that are its stock-in-trade, the Franklin Mint Museum will offer visitors a look at some actual historical objects over the next six weeks -- memorabilia from the lives of President John F. Kennedy and his family."

He's just a small-time guy with a big-time collection that's looking for a home.For Catonsville collector Robert L. White -- a man well-known for owning the nation's largest private collection of John F. Kennedy memorabilia -- that home could be Annapolis.White, whose 100,000-item collection includes everything from the 35th president's reading glasses to a lock of his hair, has been searching for a museum with little success for years.But after the recent astronomical bids for JFK memorabilia at the Sotheby's auction in New York, White is being wooed by the city of Annapolis with the promise of his very own museum.

IT RANKS AS the celebrity auction of the century. Collectors were stunned by the frenzy to purchase something -- at any price -- from the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Bids soared into orbit, unrelated to an item's intrinsic value: Over $1 million for golf clubs and bags; $211,000 for a triple strand of fake pearls; $574,000 for a walnut cigar humidor; $442,000 for one of many rocking chairs owned by John F. Kennedy; $90,000 for a $500 saddle; $85,000 for JFK Jr.'s rocking horse; $65,000 for a $300 putter; $9,200 for two wicker baskets; $2,000 for a $30 reproduced etching.

NEW YORK -- The long-anticipated auction of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' possessions last night featured fierce battles among telephone buyers who were clearly willing to ignore the estimated prices.A rocking chair that President John F. Kennedy used to ease his back pain fetched $442,500, nearly 90 times the price it was expected to command in an auction of Mrs. Onassis' estate.The oak chair, which Sotheby's auction house had expected to go for $3,000-$5,000, was sold to a telephone bidder.

THEY ARE ALL wrong. All of them. Those who see in the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin the diminution of the historic Jewish ethic against violence misread this event's meaning.Mr. Rabin was a soldier in the best sense of that profession. He abhorred war. His purpose was the defense of country and the advancement of peace. He never demonized the enemy. That he was murdered has shocked every thoughtful, decent Jew and stunned the world's observers of the Jewish people and their millennial struggle to live within ethical boundaries despite calumny, humiliation and persecution in every age and in almost every place.

From "Knights of the Round Table" to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," from "Camelot" to "Excalibur," the legend of King Arthur has always intrigued filmmakers.Whether reverent, pompously mock-reverent, outright mocking or musically rendered, the medieval tale of Arthur and his knights Camelot has always made for a good yarn. But ask the principals of "First Knight" -- the latest, wildly romantic, incarnation of Arthurian legend -- to describe their film's inspirations, and the viewpoints become widely skewed.

Washington -- On a rainy, tempestuous winter night, a week after cradling her slain husband in her lap in Dallas, Jacqueline Kennedy summoned a trusted journalist friend to her home in Hyannisport, "obsessed," to use her word, with the notion that her husband be remembered as a hero.With the clarity and political canny of a master spin artist, the 34-year-old widow spoke to the writer, Theodore H. White, for four hours, urging him to tell the world -- via Life magazine -- that Kennedy was truly "a man of magic," that his presidency was truly special, that the era was, to use the words she borrowed from a recent Broadway musical, "one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot."

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water at Hyannis Port . . ."The Kennedy Women," which spans five generations in 895 pages, arrived in bookstores Monday and is already No. 15 on the Wall Street Journal's best seller list. Within two weeks, insatiable Kennedy-philes can pick up "The Other Mrs. Kennedy," 512 pages about Ethel Skakel Kennedy, with surprisingly little overlap with "The Kennedy Women."Those who can't wait for the second book can check out an excerpt in this week's New York magazine, detailing Mrs. Kennedy's sometimes bizarre behavior in the wake of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination.