John Kennedy

In his later years, John Kennedy's favorite activity at family gatherings was to sit off to the side, survey the scene and listen to all the chatter. Two topics, though, were sure to get him to contribute. "Baseball and the Bible - the two B's," Kennedy's daughter, Tazena Kennedy, said warmly. "He loved those two. When the talk was about something else, he usually stayed quiet. " Kennedy, a shortstop who in 1957 gained fame as the first African-American to play for the Phillies, died Monday in Jacksonville, Fla., of heart failure.

The pitch catches the outside part of the plate, the umpire shouts "Strike threeeeeee!" and John Kennedy heads back to the bench. Glancing over a shoulder to register his disagreement with the call, he steps inside the dugout, props his bat against a wall and finds a seat among his teammates. There, he peers out at the high school field as a cluster of storm clouds begins building on the far horizon. "That pitch was high, John," says a teammate. "Sure was," the old man replies softly.

One last mission for the World War II generation. With that theme, Bob Dole launched his bid for the presidency in New Hampshire. The gambit, which at once invokes his war record while defusing the age issue, has been widely noted as politically brilliant. What has been less widely noted is how deeply ironic it is. Generational politics - appealing not to the classic identities of race, class, geography, ethnicity or even ideology but to birth cohort - was in recent times a project of Pat Caddell, once Jimmy Carter's pollster.

A former aide to Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy has disclosed racy details of Washington life in a new book proposal, the Washington Post said yesterday. But it said author Joan Braden was embarrassed about the book proposal written with a collaborator and quoted her as saying she planned to change it. Braden, wife of newspaper columnist Tom Braden and the mother of eight, worked for Nelson Rockefeller when he was in the Eisenhower administration. She also worked on Kennedy's 1960 campaign.

THE NEGATIVE LEGACY OF THE '60S Making sense of the '60s is important unfinished business because the widespread misreading of that curious and critical decade is one of the reasons it is so hard for anyone . . . to succeed as president. The inflation of John Kennedy's short-lived presidency into the nonsense of Camelot needed to be punctured, but revisionist historians and ideologues have deflated and distorted that period in American politics almost beyond recognition. In doing so, they contributed to the cynicism about all government that has paralyzed politics.

It's a sentiment that has been so often repeated as a part of Memorial Day rhetoric that at times we may forget that it is really true - that Americans who have fallen in battle have done so in the cause of freedom. At times in the past we may have repeated this maxim of the American Faith more out of hope than conviction, saying it to keep belief in it alive. There have been times when the forces opposed to freedom have seemed to be moving forward everywhere on their malevolent march.

You can already tell that the media - those villains, those arch-fiends, those ceaseless perverters of truth - have got it wrong. They're calling the yet-to-be-born Clinton administration "Camelot with a Southern accent. " If I hadn't sworn I'd never use that hackneyed, tired cliche-of-the-year "Not!" that's what I'd stick in here. (Have I been covering politics long enough to have it both ways, or what?) Anyway, John Kennedy may have been young Bill Clinton's first political hero, but Bill Clinton is no John Kennedy.

The Democrats are doing their best to wrap Bill Clinton in the mantle of John F. Kennedy, but when you think about it, the comparison just doesn't work. I've been thinking about it a lot, after watching the admirably unsentimental, four-hour Public Broadcasting System documentary on the Kennedys and then coming here, the next day, to the city where JFK's saga ended in bloodshed almost three decades ago. In the film biography of Clinton that introduced his acceptance speech at last summer's Democratic National Convention, the governor's media team made much of the handshake Kennedy gave Clinton when the youth from Arkansas came to Washington with other participants in the American Legion's Boys' Nation.

WHEN BALA CYNWYD native Chuck Barris left the city for New York, he says, he got so home sick he would call information locally to hear the operator's Philly accents. He's out this week with his newest book "The Big Question," (Simon & Schuster, $24). The creator and producer of "The Dating Game" and "The Gong Show" and other classic television has written a novel set in 2011 about a TV show in which contestants compete to win a hundred million dollars, but are executed on live TV if they lose.

Well, at least one Republican believes nature abhors a vacuum. John Kennedy, the former state representative from Cumberland County, is stepping into the GOP's still-empty holding pen of candidates likely to run for governor next year. In an interview Wednesday, Kennedy said he was casting his net for money and support and waiting to see what he pulled in before deciding whether to challenge Democratic Gov. Casey. He said he was initially considering running for lieutenant governor.

I realized that we were in a rough primary-election season when the martyred president of my youth was dragged from his grave and used as a campaign foil by one of the candidates. Rick Santorum has said that reading John Kennedy's speech about the separation of church and state made him feel like throwing up. Tough campaign talk from a tough guy - with a weak stomach. Kennedy was a flawed man, but Catholic schoolboys like me didn't know it when he was alive. Since those innocent days, most of us have figured out that there are more than a few flawed people out there, many of whom can be spotted in the mirror in the morning.

Chris Matthews is the author of Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero (Simon & Schuster) and host of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews and NBC's The Chris Matthews Show We once had a hero for a president. As a young Navy lieutenant, John F. Kennedy saved his crew in World War II. He carried one man on his back for four hours as he swam through Japanese-held waters of the South Pacific. As president, he may well have saved far more lives. Faced with evidence that the Soviets had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, Kennedy faced pressure to attack.

John H. Kennedy, 81, chairman and chief executive of the former Alco Health Services Corp., a pharmaceutical distributor in Valley Forge from 1984 until his retirement in 1990, died Thursday, Sept. 1, of complications from diabetes at Dunwoody Village, the retirement community in Newtown Square where he had lived since March. He had resided in Haverford since 1964. At the time of his death, his son Paul said, Mr. Kennedy was a director of HTV Industries Inc., a private investment firm in Cleveland.

Hello there Cathy and John each spent their 20s and 30s focused on their careers - hers in nursing, his in the nuclear energy industry. Any leftover hours were filled with happy times with friends and family. "It was good," Cathy said. "And then I hit 40. " "The time when you're enjoying the single life and your career, it slips by quickly," John said. "And then I was like, wait a minute, I'm kind of missing something. " In August 2001 Cathy was drawn to an ad John placed in Philadelphia magazine.

The only shooting for St. John's senior D.J. Kennedy at this NCAA tournament involves a video camera. Kennedy suffered a torn ligament in his right knee during the Big East tournament, reducing him to the roles of coach and cheerleader. He's capturing his team's journey with his camera as the sixth-seeded Red Storm (21-11) face 11th-seeded Gonzaga (24-9) Thursday night in the Southeast Regional in Denver. Kennedy, who averaged 10.4 points per game, said with a smile that he was available to shoot late free throws.

The decision of a Democratic lawmaker representing the West Chester region to reverse course and seek a third term will make a key Chester County race more competitive, analysts said Friday. Barbara McIlvaine Smith, who represents the 156th District in the Pennsylvania House, said Friday that she had decided to try to retain her seat after she learned that Mark Stevens, the Democrat hoping to succeed her, had to withdraw from the race because of a severe back injury. In November, McIlvaine Smith cited frustration with the legislative status quo as her reason for leaving politics, a decision she said she recently began to second-guess.

AS AN ELDER of our human tribe, at four-score-and-two, I've seen the ups and downs of 14 presidents - and how in the sweep of history there are real turning points. These are years when the upward movement in human affairs goes way up and changes the course of our country for the good, or the down times that go far down and change our nation's course for the worse. Forty years ago, 1968 became one of those years when the downward move was deep and long-lasting. "How lucky you were to work directly with John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King," a reporter told me during my 1991 race for the U.S. Senate.

Towing the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy to Philadelphia for storage has proved to be a complex ordeal. There's only a 20-minute window each day when it can be safely eased alongside Pier 4 in South Philadelphia, where it will be stored. That's the daylight high tide, when the swift current is slack. High winds kept the big ship at sea Thursday and yesterday, with its small crew of line handlers camped out on the vast empty and cold ship. The Kennedy was scheduled to enter the Delaware Bay at 9 last night and begin a slow 18-hour trek to Philadelphia.

WHEN BALA CYNWYD native Chuck Barris left the city for New York, he says, he got so home sick he would call information locally to hear the operator's Philly accents. He's out this week with his newest book "The Big Question," (Simon & Schuster, $24). The creator and producer of "The Dating Game" and "The Gong Show" and other classic television has written a novel set in 2011 about a TV show in which contestants compete to win a hundred million dollars, but are executed on live TV if they lose.

Strangers on a train It's the Democrats' town for the week, abloom with Kerry-Edwards buttons and signs. But there's no shortage of alternate views. Amtrak's service from New York to Boston on Saturday was full of conventioneers, media types - and opinions. One man, sure he had a Kerry supporter at his side, immediately made clear his ill feelings about Democrats, and more. This Columbia University professor, a one-time Democrat, admired John Kennedy and Harry Truman, "hated, hated, hated Lyndon Johnson," and hasn't been able to respect "as a man" anyone the Democrats have nominated for president since.