Robert F. Kennedy

Nothing is original in late-capitalist America!

Before Pamela Anderson, Rob Lowe, and Paris Hilton paved the way for sex tapes, apparently, there was a black and white video of Marilyn Monroe performing oral sex, which just sold to "a New York businessman" for $1.5 million, The New York Post reports.

The silent, 15-minute reel of 16 mm footage "appears" to have been shot in the 50's and shows Ms. Monroe performing the act on an unidentified man, who for a long time the F.B.I. tried to prove was John F. Kennedy or Robert F. Kennedy.

In the tape, Ms. Monroe is on her knees and never looks at the lens, while the man’s face is out of the shot, according to the Post.  read more »

After studying the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, linguist Mark Liberman found that their speaking styles are “radically different.”

Then there’s Barack Obama.  read more »

Paris in the springtime is lovely, but for the blossoming female members of the world’s most famous families, autumn will do just fine. After all, that’s when the famed Le Bal Crillon des Debutantes is held, and the singer Phil Collins was among the celebrities in the French capital—17-year-old daughter Lily in tow—to attend the extravagant affair. “Tonight I'm no-one, not a singer, just an emotional dad," Mr. Collins told the AFP. “This great ball is a wonderful tradition."

Among the other young ladies with good heels and better names who “came out” at the Hotel Crillon were Kathleen Kennedy, the granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy; Olivia Pei, granddaughter of architect I.M. Pei; Brazilian soccer phenom Pelé’s goddaughter Gemima MacMahon; Tatiana Mountbatten, great grandniece of the deceased viceroy of India; and Maria Abou Nader, the neice of former Lebanese presidents Amine and Bachir Gemayel. (Last year, as reported by Page Six, the daughters of James Mellon III, real estate maven Janna Bullock and actress Kristin Scott Thomas made their debuts at the same event.)

 

Irwin Winkler’s Home of the Brave, from a screenplay by Mark Friedman, based on an original st  read more »

The History Boys is one of the best, most reverent, comprehensive and seamless transfers from stage  read more »

I hadn’t expected to find a Truman Capote connection. Not to the Bobby Kennedy assassination.  read more »

I hadn’t expected to find a Truman Capote connection. Not to the Bobby Kennedy assassination.  read more »

One Democrat reports getting an interesting polling call from in Manhattan Saturday, one that provides a glimpse into somebody's strategy in the 2006 Senate race.

The poll was at least testing the responses to a Hillary vow not to seek the presidency. (Eat your heart out, John Podhoretz.)

The pollster didn't identify a client, but the poll included fairly in-depth "message-testing," as it's known, into three aspects of the likely Clinton-Pirro match-up: Pirro's selling points, Pirro's negatives, and -- most suggestive -- how Hillary should be responding to questions for her plans for 2008.

According to the detailed, but possibly imperfect, recounting of the poll provided to the Politicker, the pollster asked how the respondent felt about Hillary's not serving a full term, then tested at least three possible responses to the notion that Clinton's presidential aspirations make her unfit to win reelection from New York:

-She's part of a "great tradition" of officials who won't rule out a presidential run, one that includes Bobby Kennedy, Mario Cuomo, and John Kerry.

-It's good for New York to have a New York Senator with a national presence.

-She should vow not to run.

The Pirro message-testing was less provocative. There were a series of question about which element of her record is most appealing: Stopping gangs? Fighting domestic violence? Advocating for abused children?  read more »

There were also a series of possible attacks, none of which mentioned her husband, Al. One, however, did focus on "integrity" and mentioned her tax problems. Another line was that she has "no substance." Another was that she's running for personal advancement.

A Clinton spokesman declined to comment on whether the call came from Clinton pollster Mark Penn. A Pirro spokesman didn't return a call asking if it was her poll. The person who got the poll, a politically sophisticated type whose guess is probably better than mine, felt fairly confident it was from Clinton. But that's only an educated guess.

Back when summer actually meant a few months of relaxing and down time to New Yorkers, one of the mo  read more »

Back when summer actually meant a few months of relaxing and down time to New Yorkers, one of the mo  read more »

Rolling Stone's current issue carries a 630-word editors' note in response to Robert F. Kennedy's feature "Deadly Immunity," which ran in the June 16th issue of the magazine. Kennedy's piece stretched over 4,600 words and alleged that the government had tried to suppress research linking mercury-tainted vaccines with the dramatic increase in child autism.

The note, "Kennedy Report Sparks Controversy," was the magazine's public response to a month-long media backlash, which had included a front-page piece in The New York Times, a critical op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, and a skeptical segment on ABC's World News Tonight, which told viewers that Kennedy "is not a scientist or a doctor"--twice.

Rolling Stone's editors took particular issue with the 2,400-word Times account, co-written by Gardiner Harris and Anahad O'Connor, which described Kennedy's piece as "arguing that most studies of the issue are flawed and that public health officials are conspiring with drug makers to cover up the damage caused by thimerosal." Rolling Stone's editors said the Times' use of "conspiring" was "a word that our story neither used nor implied." Three hundred words into the editors note, however, the editors also addressed six errors in the piece that had gone undetected in fact-checking process--including a misattributed quote, an incorrect calculation of an infant's exposure to mercury and an under-counting of the number of vaccinations a child received.

"We've been fully transparent," Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana said by phone July 25, in response to the correction's low placement in the note. "Even if there weren't the fact-checking problems, we still would have run the note," he said. "We had to answer the critics."

After Kennedy's piece ran last month, Dana said, the magazine received a flurry of letters about the it, and the strength of the response on both sides of the issue--coupled with the critical media reports--motivated the editors' note.

"We were not backing down from the story," Dana said. "Rather, we tried to frame the debate as we saw it with this note Our point is, the argument is more complicated than what was presented in the New York Times as fate vs. science. The conclusions we drew were that there's not enough information to close down this argument. We were certainly citing some troubling questions."  read more »

--Gabriel Sherman

The general feeling among GOP types we spoke to about Bill Weld over the weekend was more Bob Kerrey, less Bobby Kennedy.

But the news did put us in mind of a conversation we had with Weld during the Republican National Convention, where we found him leaning up against a wall during a Republican Majority for Choice event:

"I can't talk about it until after the election," he was saying, "But I've been out of office for seven years. I've tried to do something different every half-dozen years, so I'm over my quota."

We tried to get him to elaborate.

"Call me after the election," he said.

We told him we'd call after the election.  read more »

"I doubt you'll be interested in me then," he said.

But we were, and he didn't return the call!

Letter from America: 1946-2004, by Alistair Cooke. Alfred A. Knopf, 503 pages, $35.  read more »

John Kerry did have a childhood.  read more »

Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism , by Dominic Sandbrook. Alfred A.  read more »

The Bush administration's plan to try terrorist suspects before military tribunals has inspired thou  read more »

" There are many things in this incident … which have remained obscure.  read more »

In Love With Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy , by Ronald Steel.  read more »

The small glass box with the engraved signature of Robert F.  read more »

Way back in the idealistic 1960's-before he became a lawyer, a prosecutor and then a politician-Rudo  read more »

The last time Hillary Rodham Clinton might have run for office was back in 1990, when her husband br  read more »

It was Jacqueline Kennedy who introduced Robert F. Kennedy to the Greeks, to Aeschylus.  read more »

In the dark shadows of the Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel, where Madeline and her friends dance  read more »