Robert Kennedy

This was to have been a week of political and family celebration for Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. It began with a Baltimore fund-raiser and was to conclude yesterday with the wedding on Cape Cod of her youngest sister, Rory.Instead, the wedding was postponed, and Townsend and her family spent the day awaiting word on the fate of her cousin, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife and sister-in-law.Townsend and her husband, David, were among those gathered at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass.

I WAS DRIVING to the funeral of my cousin George Floyd Jr. when I heard the news on a radio broadcast that John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane was missing and that he hadn't been heard from for hours.My heart sank. I feared the worst, and it was confirmed later this week. John F. Kennedy Jr. is dead at the age of 38, killed in a plane crash along with his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette. Kennedy Jr.'s father -- President John F. Kennedy -- was only 46 when he was assassinated in 1963.

WASHINGTON - At the 30th anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's death, why does he still enjoy such a special place in the minds and hearts of millions of his generation?He was not, after all, ever elected president; nor was he even the presidential nominee of his Democratic Party. At the time he was gunned down in a kitchen area of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, dying the next day, he was a candidate only. As a freshman senator from New York, his achievements were modest and largely unheralded.

WASHINGTON -- Nobody seems to have told Paul Wellstone, the low-profile second-term Democratic senator from Minnesota contemplating a long-shot presidential bid in 2000, that liberalism is dead, and public confidence in activist government along with it.While leading Republicans continue, rather successfully, to demonize the philosophy of strong benevolent government as the root of all political evil, and President Clinton rolls along as a self-styled New...

Imagine Robert F. Kennedy is alive and running for re-election to the U.S. Senate today. Would he be on the hustings from early morning to late at night - engulfed by eager men, women and children like those who jammed the streets and cheered him wherever he campaigned in the 1960s? Or would he be confining his campaign to as many slick TV commercials as he could afford and making a few appearances before small, friendly audiences, avoiding press conferences and any other appearance that he could not control, like so many candidates do today?

It's been 30 years since I made the walk from my rowhouse in the 400 block of East 22nd Street down to Penn Station. The walk couldn't have been any more than 10 blocks. I imagine I made it in 20 minutes or so. But I had time. The Train hadn't arrived yet, and wouldn't for a while.Just a few days earlier my mother had risen at her usual hour to get ready for work. She always turned on the radio as she got dressed. That's when she got the announcement. She yelled up the stairs and gave me the news.

WASHINGTON -- While the accounts of President John F. Kennedy's sexual exploits with Marilyn Monroe and others are the juiciest parts of investigative reporter Seymour Hersh's hot book, ''The Dark Side of Camelot,'' some of his political ''disclosures'' are more titillating to the world of political junkies.Foremost is Mr. Hersh's contention that Lyndon Johnson became Kennedy's running mate in 1960 not because Kennedy felt he needed LBJ to carry the South but because Johnson blackmailed him by threatening to tell what he knew about Kennedy's sex life.

"Robert Kennedy: Brother Protector," by James Hilty.Temple University Press. 576 pages. $34.95Before there was Janet Reno, before Richard Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre and before the special prosecutor law itself, there was Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who saw not just his job but his mission in life as protecting his brother, who happened to be president of the United States.A thousand and one Kennedy books are out there, one for every day of John F. Kennedy's mythical reign. But this one, written by a historian, actually provides a useful service.

Whenever I pass Pennsylvania Station I find myself peering at a section of railroad tracks that bends at the northeast corner of the station. If I'm not in a hurry, I'll stop and stare at it and suddenly I'm transported back in time -- 27 years to this very week.I'm looking at the same corner, but I'm 10 years old and sitting in front of a television in a D.C. suburb. Baltimore is just a place where Brooks and Frank Robinson live. But all that is about to change. Baltimore and its railroad tracks are also about to become a part of my understanding of who Robert Kennedy was.The network television cameras were directed toward that northeast bend on that sultry Saturday, repeating the waiting game that had been played out in dozens of railroad stations from New York to Washington.

IT HAPPENED in 1968, although we were not aware of it then. Coincident with the deaths of its two great crusading leaders -- Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy -- the most destructive conflict since the Civil War, and the election of Richard Nixon, American liberalism had suffered a fatal blow. It was to linger, brain-dead, for a quarter of a century until the reality of death was pronounced by the election of Newt Gingrich & Co. It was long overdue. The delusion of vitality, of imminent resurrection, had become a burden to the country and rendered impotent some of its most vigorous political men and women.

For people who think there's no cultural divide in this country, consider the treatment of two women much in the news in 2008. The first is Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. A woman from humble roots and with a blue-collar life story, she worked with her steelworker and professional-fisherman husband to provide a life for their large family. She got involved in the PTA. She became mayor of her small town, then rose, by dint of her dedication and almost naive fearlessness, to the job of governor.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is still moved by the strangers who approach her to describe how her father inspired them. Former U.S. Sen. Joseph Tydings, a Maryland Democrat, says that his dear friend Robert F. Kennedy's murder transformed him into a gun control activist, a move that cost him his political career. And civil rights advocate Kweisi Mfume remembers 1968 as a pivotal year of his life, with Kennedy's death as one in a series of events prompting him to pursue a political career that led him to the halls of Congress.

We hate talking about it. We fear saying something awkward or intrusive. We think we'll only make it worse by acknowledging it, so we fall silent. "I think, in large part," Kathleen Kennedy Townsend says, "we don't have a culture that knows how to deal with death." Townsend, a former Maryland lieutenant governor, is, of course, sadly expert on the subject of death. When she was 12, her uncle was killed; when she was 16, her father. That these intimates were President John F. Kennedy and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is something that is a well-known part of her biography, if not necessarily something that she speaks extensively about in public.

I DON'T KNOW WHY, BUT IT WAS REALLY important to me that my children watch the Sharks' and Jets' playground dance-off in West Side Story. I guess I wanted them to know where Michael Jackson got the idea for "Beat It." And I wanted my daughter to see Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet, too, if she was going to see Claire Danes' 1996 version. I wanted her to see the huge role that costumes alone can play in a movie. And when my husband answered my son's suggestion that he sell the old sailboat under the deck -- the boat that had never been wet except with rain in all the years of his young life -- with the single word, "Rosebud," I wished that my son had understood.

Jack Newfield,66, a muckraking reporter and newspaper columnist who wrote books on Robert F. Kennedy and boxing impresario Don King, died of cancer Monday night at a New York City hospital. Mr. Newfield's career included stints at the Village Voice, the Daily News and New York Post. He won numerous awards, including the George Polk Award and an Emmy. Most recently, he was a columnist at the New York Sun. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Mr. Newfield was drawn to the civil rights movement after college, and his first book, A Prophetic Minority, dealt with his experiences in the South.

Sharp-eyed readers of The New York Times Magazine may have noticed a recent advertisement announcing the sale of the Kennedy family's historic Hickory Hill estate in McLean, Va. The 13-bedroom, white brick Georgian home and surrounding estate is being offered by Sotheby's International Realty in New York City. It sits off Chain Bridge Road on about six acres and has 12 fireplaces, stables for horses, a movie theater, tennis courts, a pool and cabana. The asking price is reportedly $25 million, but Sotheby's officials would not comment for this article.

At 93, Harriet Kennedy isn't so good with dates and places anymore, but she can recall in detail her wedding to Robert Kennedy, now 96, nearly three-quarters of a century ago. "It was a beautiful summer day - July 30, 1929," she said in her home on Putty Hill Avenue in Parkville, which the couple has owned for five decades. "It was nice and warm." Yesterday, the Kennedys were honored at a World Marriage Day Mass as the longest-married couple - at 73 years - in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

In the early stages of her run for governor, Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend seemed reluctant to remind voters of her family roots. Sure, campaign trail introductions frequently included mention of the Kennedy tradition, yet the candidate rarely -- if ever -- talked about her father, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, or her two uncles, President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. It's not that she was hiding anything, but the family's Massachusetts-based tradition of wealth and political power seemed to be played down as her Republican challenger sought to define himself as a man of Arbutus.

Charles Guggenheim, 78, one of the country's most honored and prolific documentary filmmakers and winner of four Academy Awards, died of pancreatic cancer Wednesday in Washington. A pioneer director of political campaign television commercials and films, he was media director for the presidential campaigns of Adlai E. Stevenson, Robert F. Kennedy, George McGovern and Edward M. Kennedy. Mr. Guggenheim began his five-decade career in film in 1952, when he produced TV spots for Stevenson.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend sat scribbling notes at the funeral of Crystal Sheffield, a Baltimore police officer killed in a car crash while answering a call for help. The occasion marked another life cut short in its prime: A dedicated public servant, beloved spouse and parent. Would you like to speak? someone had asked the gubernatorial candidate. Townsend hadn't planned on it. But as she stood to face the silent crowd contemplating a senseless death, she pulled forth words she had memorized as a child.