Did Jackie Call Marilyn’s Bluff?

--A new book about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis says she once told Marilyn Monroe that she would divorce President John F. Kennedy if Monroe would marry him and move into the White House. C. David Heymann, author of the unauthorized biography, “A Woman Named Jackie,” said he got files from the Secret Service, FBI and CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, obtained the former First Lady’s social files and interviewed 825 individuals. Onassis had no comment on the book’s content, her spokeswoman, Nancy Tuckerman, said. Actor Peter Lawford, Kennedy’s late brother-in-law, is quoted in an excerpt as saying that Jacqueline Kennedy offered to step aside when the actress called her, but also said that “if Marilyn wasn’t prepared to live openly in the White House, she might as well forget about it.” Among other stories in the book, to be excerpted in a supermarket tabloid and elsewhere, is one from Kennedy legal consultant Langdon Marvin Jr.--also now deceased, a publisher’s spokeswoman said--about President Kennedy sneaking away from his Secret Service guards for a sexual liaison without taking the codes he would need for retaliation in the event of a nuclear attack. The book also says Kennedy had illicit sexual encounters on the night of his inauguration and before the debates with Richard M. Nixon.

--A daughter of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and a son of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who say the death penalty would not bring back their fathers, helped start a campaign against capital punishment at the Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. M. Kerry Kennedy said some killers should be imprisoned forever, but that executions “won’t bring back my father; they’ll only take someone else’s father.” Martin Luther King III said: “If we believed in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, most of us would be without eyes and without teeth.”

--Every father wants his son to achieve things he never did. So it was a proud Evel Knievel who watched his son, Robbie, soar over the fountains at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, completing a motorcycle stunt that nearly killed the elder Knievel. “That was for you, Dad. I love you,” Robbie told his father, who ran to hug him after the jump. “I’m not the greatest daredevil in the world, I’m the father of the greatest daredevil in the world,” Evel said. About 20,000 people watched the younger man’s perfect 180-foot flight, among them a brain surgeon and paramedics who stood by in case accidents ran in the family. Evel was in a coma for 30 days after he tried the jump and missed in 1967.