Robert Kennedy

The money, muscle and influence of organized crime helped John F. Kennedy win the closely contested 1960 election, investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh contends in a new book on the Kennedy presidency. And once Kennedy was inaugurated, Robert F. Kennedy, his brother and attorney general, refused to pursue FBI evidence into widespread voting fraud, Hersh alleges.

The trial of a son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy on misdemeanor charges he scuffled with nurses when he tried to take his newborn son out of a hospital resumed Tuesday morning in suburban New York. It was the second day of the proceedings in the Mount Kisco Town Court where Kennedy faces charges of harassment and child endangerment in connection with the incident. The trial resumed Tuesday morning, broke for lunch and will resume in the afternoon, a court spokesman said by telephone.

Sometimes they're adored. Sometimes they're scorned. The Kennedys are always fascinating, though, a remarkable family that has worn its epic problems on the nation's sleeve, a family whose own tragedies are America's tragedies. Those memories are painfully recalled in "Robert Kennedy and His Times," the seven-hour CBS miniseries premiering at 8 p.m. Sunday (on Channels 2 and 8) and continuing at 8 p.m. Monday and 9 p.m. Tuesday.

I go to the Beverly Hilton to interview Ethel Kennedy, the subject of a new HBO documentary, "Ethel," which airs Oct. 18. The film is by her youngest daughter, Rory. I walk through the door and there she is, straight up and picture perfect, and for one heart-stopping, utterly unanticipated minute I am 4 years old again, watching my father sob in our living room. He was always a big man, quiet and calm, but now his glasses are on the floor and his face is in his hands and the sound he makes is frightening enough to send me out the front door and onto a neighbor's lawn.

In politics, names can become synonymous with an idea. “Reagan” connotes the best of what the Republican Party imagines itself to be. “Paul” - by way of perennial presidential candidate Ron and his son and current senator, Rand - evokes individualism and libertarianism. But in all American politics, there is hardly a name that's more synonymous with tragedy than “Kennedy.” Every story that arises about the storied family only seems to make that bond  harder to dissolve.

There was a rather quiet moment, smack in the middle of Sunday night's opening segment of "Robert Kennedy and His Times," when it all came home. In the CBS-TV miniseries, Kennedy, portrayed by Brad Davis, is seen as attorney general in shirt sleeves in his office--J. Edgar Hoover in attendance--tacking his children's crayon drawings to the ornate Justice Department walls, his lumbering black dog Brumus on patrol.

Did Marilyn dump RFK? . . . Cher dumps her contractor. . . . Tamagotchis vs. Giga Pets Before she died, Marilyn Monroe wasn't heartbroken over being dumped by a Kennedy; she was the one doing the dumping. So asserts John W. Miner, the former prosecutor who investigated the screen siren's death for the Los Angeles County district attorney's office. He made his assertion during a telephone interview after filing a libel suit in Los Angeles Superior Court against a supermarket tabloid.

I go to the Beverly Hilton to interview Ethel Kennedy, the subject of a new HBO documentary, "Ethel," which airs Oct. 18. The film is by her youngest daughter, Rory. I walk through the door and there she is, straight up and picture perfect, and for one heart-stopping, utterly unanticipated minute I am 4 years old again, watching my father sob in our living room. He was always a big man, quiet and calm, but now his glasses are on the floor and his face is in his hands and the sound he makes is frightening enough to send me out the front door and onto a neighbor's lawn.

Calls for a revival of the ideals of Robert F. Kennedy and expressions of hope that America may soon enter a more progressive political era marked a daylong conference in Los Angeles Saturday commemorating the 20th anniversary of Kennedy's last campaign. Three of Kennedy's children, numerous political associates, farm labor leader Cesar Chavez and former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. joined hundreds of Kennedy faithful in attending the event at Loyola-Marymount University.

Hours after riots erupted in Los Angeles last May, Gov. Bill Clinton debated whether to visit an inner-city neighborhood and speak about racial tensions. The inspiration was political but also historical: During the 1968 presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy had given a dramatic speech in Indianapolis after Martin Luther King Jr. was slain, trying to calm an explosive situation. Clinton was keenly aware of the parallel.

In politics, names can become synonymous with an idea. “Reagan” connotes the best of what the Republican Party imagines itself to be. “Paul” - by way of perennial presidential candidate Ron and his son and current senator, Rand - evokes individualism and libertarianism. But in all American politics, there is hardly a name that's more synonymous with tragedy than “Kennedy.” Every story that arises about the storied family only seems to make that bond  harder to dissolve.

Mary Richardson Kennedy, the estranged wife of Robert Kennedy Jr. who had struggled with alcohol and drugs, died of asphyxiation due to hanging, it was announced Thursday. The body of the 52-year-old was found in a building at her home in Bedford, N.Y., on Wednesday. An autopsy was performed Thursday morning by a Westchester County medical examiner. Officials on Thursday morning released a two-sentence statement, sent by email to reporters: “The Westchester County Medical Examiner's office today did an autopsy on the body of Mary Richardson Kennedy,” the statement said.

NEW YORK - Mary Richardson Kennedy, the estranged wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was found dead on the family's property north of New York City on Wednesday, two years after her husband filed for divorce and following a history of drug and alcohol problems. Kerry A. Lawrence, a lawyer who had represented Mary Kennedy in a 2010 drunk driving case, confirmed the death, but neither he nor police in the town of Bedford in Westchester County, N.Y., released a cause of death. An autopsy was scheduled Thursday, the Associated Press reported.

WASHINGTON — Nicholas Katzenbach, the Kennedy administration lawyer who faced down Gov. George Wallace to enroll the first black students at the University of Alabama and who helped write the landmark civil rights and voting rights acts of the 1960s, has died. He was 90. Katzenbach died Tuesday night of natural causes at his home in Princeton, N.J., according to his daughter, Anne Katzenbach of New York City. Katzenbach was one of the "best and brightest" who were drawn to Washington when John F. Kennedy became president in 1961.

Richard Threlkeld, a former CBS and ABC correspondent who covered the fall of Saigon and helped establish the CBS "Sunday Morning" show with weekly stories that showcased his prodigious energy and incisive writing, died Friday in a car crash on Long Island, N.Y. He was 74. Threlkeld was driving his 2008 Mini Cooper in Amagansett when he collided with a propane tanker, according to the East Hampton Police Department. He was pronounced dead at Southampton Hospital, not far from his home in East Hampton.

Last month his lawyer tried to convince a parole board that Sirhan Sirhan was a brainwashed hit man when he gunned down Sen. Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968. But handwritten notes purportedly from Sirhan, kept for 42 years by a Century City executive, suggest that his behavior was calculated and controlled as he waited to shoot the just-victorious presidential primary candidate in the hotel's kitchen pantry area. Michael McCowan was an investigator and the youngest member of Sirhan's defense team in 1969 when the accused assassin sat down with a yellow legal pad and described his visit to a shooting range before his election-night trip to the hotel.

"My brother need not be idealized in death, beyond what he was in life," Edward M. Kennedy said 25 years ago in a eulogy to his slain brother, Robert. Yet with the passage of time, a generation that knows Robert F. Kennedy only by the tragic legend of his star-crossed family has come to view him with something close to reverence.

Now, one bloodstained glove--brown leather, right-handed, found on the grounds of the O.J. Simpson estate quite early one June morning--will take its place in a vigilantly tended collection of dissonant objects that fall under the plain, broad heading of "evidence." All this week, all the week before, this glove was literally the gauntlet thrown down as defense and prosecution battled eloquently to keep it out, to get it in.

The assertion that autism is linked to childhood vaccinations has run and run, even as study after study has failed to find such a link, either with MMR vaccines or ones containing thimerosal,  an organic compound that contains mercury. One prominent article fingering thimerosal  was  “Deadly Immunity,”  written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , and co-published by Salon.com and Rolling Stone (which fact-checked it) in 2005. Salon on Jan. 16 announced it was removing the story from its website.

Dignity amid tragedy Re "Kneeling again next to RFK," Column, Nov. 21 Thanks to Steve Lopez for his moving column on Juan Romero. May it stand as a reminder that no matter how many draconian Arizona laws or Proposition 187s pass, you cannot take away the human dignity of those who are here to work and make a living. It must bring the Kennedy family some solace that in that horrible moment, on the cold floor of that pantry, there was someone of conscience to comfort Robert F. Kennedy in the only way he could.