Kennedy

In a Sunday story in the New York Times, former congressman Patrick Kennedy alleged "quid pro quo" access to the White House.

Did John F. Kennedy really write Profiles in Courage? It’s a question that has been on the table ever since Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957, and with the death of Theodore Sorensen—Kennedy’s able speechwriter—the issue of authorship has again surfaced. It’s an appropriate time to add new elements to an old story.

Might voters replace another New England Kennedy with a Republican? A new poll, commissioned by the National Republican Congressional Committee and conducted by Public Opinion Strategies, shows that Rhode Island’s First Congressional District is in play, with Republican state representative John Loughlin tied with Providence’s Democratic mayor David Cicilline at 41 percent.

You might have thought that Kennedy kitsch was not likely to proceed much further beyond The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, edited by Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg (2005), or that the gold standard had long ago been established with Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, edited by Kenneth O’Donnell (1972). But you would be wrong.

My Three Fathers

President Obama’s theory has always been that once health care reform passed, people would rally to it.

Boston 
 
To the Boston left, "anger" and "Washington" explain Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts senate race, but the win was also a shaft of common sense hitting Bay State's echo chamber of liberal self-righteousness. "Voter anger caught fire in final days," said Wednesday's Boston Globe. "Massachusetts voters sent Washington a ringing message." Yet it wasn't anger, the final days, or just Washington, as the Globe suggested.

PRESIDENT BUSH has a surprising defender of his contention that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction--Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. "The intelligence from Bush 1 to Clinton to Bush 2 was consistent" in concluding Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was trying to develop a nuclear capability, Clinton said this morning.

HAVING SAVED THE WORLD many times over in one hit movie after another, Arnold Schwarzenegger now has the chance to breathe life into two real-world but comatose bodies: the Republican party of California and the Kennedy machine. Both once were fountains of power and energy.

SENATOR EDWARD KENNEDY is more politically astute than Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle. He understands the legislative process far better than Senator Hillary Clinton does. He is a much cooler head than Senator Jay Rockefeller. And there's a good chance he'll turn out to be smarter than the entire Bush administration on the subject of Medicare and a prescription drug benefit for senior citizens.

Kennedy was the key figure in last week's Senate approval of a drug benefit and modest Medicare reforms. Without his support, the measure would not have passed.

ALL THE TALK about President Kennedy and his sexual exploits with a White House intern is full of leers and jeers and smutty comparisons to President Clinton. There has been little talk, though, about how reckless behavior may have affected his ability to function as chief executive.

There is some evidence that those around Kennedy treated him with less respect than is due the American president. Could it be because they perceived him as the priapist he was and were contemptuous? Turn, for example, to the marvelous narrative history published in 1991 by Michael R.