Dani 📓

Album title: Ruthless and Gentle by Bobby Kennedy

Track 1. Runt

Track 2. Survivor

Track 3. Enemy from Within

Track 4. Ethel

Track 5. HOFFA

Track 6. "Protector"

Track 7. Arthur & Lancelot (featuring Jack Kennedy)

Track 8. Knight

Track 9. Ruthless & Gentle

Track 10. California

Track 11. Ruthless and Gentle (repraise) (featuring Kerry Kennedy)

Bonus track: Family (instrumental)

The album cover ⬇️

Robert Kennedy attending the funeral of Cardinal Spellman on December 7, 1967. When the U.S. entered the Vietnam War, Spellman staunchly supported the intervention and called the war a “war for civilization” and “Christ's war against the Viet Cong and the people of North Vietnam.”

Heretical was Kennedy's mood at Cardinal Spellman's funeral. The Kennedy family had long been at odds with Spellman, who favored Nixon for the Presidency in I960. Riding to the services at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Kennedy was complaining that he would have to sit through a boring, three-hour service next to Lyndon Johnson, while keeping a solemn expression on his face. When I offered him a copy of The Village Voice to read, he got an even more irreverent idea, and dispatched an aide to find him a copy of the Old Testament, which he would covertly read all through the services. The next day I asked him if he had actually read the Old Testament. He answered, “All the way up to Absalom, Absalom. Test me, and I'll prove it.”

─ Jack Newfield

Photo by Jean-Pierre Laffont

Happy New Year / Bonne Année

I hope you’ll excuse me. It’s not that we’ve run out of combs, it’s that they didn’t seem to last very long. – Bobby Kennedy

+

Björk, 1993

"He attracted the adulation and the rage which his clan, with their splendid, doomed lives, aroused in a nation that had never seen such a compelling collection of human beings, so beautiful, so armored, and so vulnerable. He was, at the very least, a magnificent boy, who always did his best."

Robert Francis Kennedy (November 20, 1925 – June 6, 1968)