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If the rhythm of jazz pulsing through the halls of the Turkish ambassador’s residence in Washington sounded a bit unusual last night, all the more so in the days of the Great Depression when the teenaged sons of the ambassador welcomed jazz musicians to perform in the mansion.

On Tuesday night, the Turkish embassy in Washington in conjunction with Jazz at Lincoln Center kicked off a six-part series of tribute concerts to the brothers, who went on to found and lead Atlantic Records in 1947.

The concert, marking Black History Month, was held in the music room of the ambassador’s residence (formerly the embassy) where Ahmet and Nehusi Ertegun, the sons of Münir Ertegün, the ambassador of the young Republic of Turkey, flouted the social mores of segregation to invite the likes of Joe Marsalis, Duke Ellington and Count Basie for jam sessions.

Due to the room’s seating capacity, these concerts are by invitation only, although the embassy has made some tickets available to the public on Facebook

Among the attendees Tuesday night were Mica Ertegun, Ahmet’s widow, and Delia Gottlieb, who attended the jam sessions. Representatives John Conyers of Michigan, the dean of the Congressional Black Caucus; Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas; and Frederica Wilson, a freshman lawmaker from Florida, were also guests. The Orrin Evans Trio played.

Mrs. Gottlieb, now 91 years old, frequented the ambassador’s residence in northwest Washington with her husband William Gottlieb, the late Washington Post jazz columnist and photographer. His photos are now in the Library of Congress.

“We just had fun,” she said on Tuesday.

But back then, not everyone was entertained the sight of blacks entering and exiting the ambassador’s residence through the same front door used by everyone else. Namik Tan, the current Turkish ambassador, said nearby embassies complained.

He told the story Tuesday night of a former senator who wrote a letter to Mr. Ertegun, the ambassador at the time, asking why blacks were allowed to enter the residence through the front door. Mr. Tan said the ambassador replied with an invitation for the senator to join them with one caveat: “We’d definitely welcome you through the back door.”

The brothers’ concerts spread to the Jewish Community Center and the National Press Club, places that would allow mixed bands and mixed audiences.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 2, 2011

An earlier version misstated the home state of Representative Frederica Wilson; it is Florida, not Louisiana.

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Charles Dharapak/Associated Press Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah and the current ambassador to China, arrives on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington.

Word that Jon Huntsman, the American ambassador in China and a possible 2012 Republican presidential candidate, has a television crew following him around in Beijing has gotten the political world all, well, a-Twitter.

Reuters broke the original story, noting that the ambassador “has allowed a video crew to follow him in a range of settings over the past year” and musing that “it would undoubtedly come in handy in any political campaign.”

National Journal picked the story up in a little item. Politico went further on Thursday, quoting a law professor as saying that “If he gave this video crew any special access, or allowed them to do anything other video crews would not be allowed to do, then it would be a serious problem under the Hatch Act if the video were to be used for campaign purposes.”

And that notion bounced around in Twitter messages for the last 24 hours. One person wrote: “RT @pwire: Huntsman has a video crew following him in China… http://pwire.at/i2YBci | Hatch act violation?”

It’s a dramatic — and potentially illegal — notion: the idea that Mr. Huntsman, who has resigned his post effective the end of April, might have hired a television crew to document his time as ambassador for use in a potential presidential campaign.

But the truth seems to be far less sexy than all that. The Academy Award-winning producer of the documentary told The Caucus in an interview Thursday that she is making a film about diplomacy between the United States and China, and that Mr. Huntsman’s abrupt decision to resign has complicated her life.

“Bummer for us,” said Geralyn White Dreyfous, who said the film was not a campaign effort or in any way controlled by Mr. Huntsman. “We got permission from the State Department to make this film. We’re not making a film about Mr. Huntsman.”

The Huntsman family was at the center of the film, she said, which seeks to use his arrival in the country to tell the story about the pace of change in diplomacy over the past 30 years. She said she jokingly refers to them as the “Von Trapp family who arrives in Beijing — six kids, two dogs.” (It is a reference to the large family portrayed in the movie “The Sound of Music.”)

“We’re making a film about Chinese-U.S. diplomacy,” she said. “What better way to see it than to do it through this family?”

The future direction of the film is now in doubt, however. Ms. White Dreyfous said there is no chance that she will shift focus to Mr. Huntsman’s political ambitions and that his departure from China might mean that the film has to find another main character — perhaps the new ambassador who replaces him.

But that’s a daunting thought after 18 months, nine trips to China,and numerous interviews with Chinese scholars and others.

“Obama picks this very talented and unusual choice,” she said, explaining the initial motivation for the film. “It’s a new era. We’re going into the days of China being a superpower. What does our diplomacy have to be?”

The movie was originally scheduled to be finished in 2013 or 2014, after Mr. Huntsman had served as ambassador for a full four-year term. Now, the earliest the movie could be completed would be the first of the year, she said. But it is likely to take far longer than that if they have to go back to the drawing board.

Ms. White Dreyfous said she had never suspected that Mr. Huntsman might quit early or run for president in 2012. She said members of the Chinese media had repeatedly asked Mr. Huntsman that during his tenure there, and that he always just laughed.

Now, though, she’s dying to know whether he’s going to run.

“I’ve asked him,” she said. “He’s said he’s not doing anything until he comes back to Washington. He hasn’t said a word to me about it. I keep trying to get his wife and kids to talk to me about it. I really could not have predicted.”

Tim Miller, a spokesman for the Horizon Political Action Committee, which is serving as a possible campaign-in-waiting until Mr. Huntsman returns to the United States, said, “The PAC has absolutely no connection to the documentary, nor any formal or informal relationship with Ambassador Huntsman.”

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Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Super Bowl XLV fever hits the Sunday television talk shows, as policymakers, diplomats and football players split airtime assessing the matchup between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers. But the political turmoil in Egypt remains the center of attention.

“Fox News Sunday” broadcasts from Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Tex., the site of the championship game.

Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League, will talk about the state of professional football and the stalled negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement between the league owners and the players’ association. Lynn Swann, a former wide receiver for the Steelers, and Jerry Kramer, a former offensive lineman for the Packers, are also guests.

Shortly before the game, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly will interview President Obama at the White House, continuing a novel tradition for the network broadcasting the game. (Mr. Obama is hosting his own Super Bowl party with more than 200 guests.)

Bloomberg TV’s “Political Capital” prepares for the big game with Steve Sabol, the president of NFL Films. The show segues to the conflict in Egypt with Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and opposition leader in Egypt, and Sameh Shoukry, the Egyptian ambassador to the United States, appear on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” They’re followed by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

The show’s round table discussion will be broadcast from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., where Republicans are gathering this weekend to celebrate the 40th president’s 100th birthday. Panel guests include James A. Baker III, Mr. Reagan’s chief of staff, Peggy Noonan, one of Mr. Reagan’s speechwriters, and Willie L. Brown Jr., a former mayor of San Francisco.

ABC’s “This Week” broadcasts from Cairo for the second week, interviewing Mr. Shoukry.

Mr. ElBaradei also appears on CNN’s “GPS.” David Cameron, the prime minister of Britain, is also a guest.

CBS’s “Face the Nation” features Martin S. Indyk, who is best known for his role as a lead negotiator of the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel, and Thomas Pickering, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations.

CNN’s “State of the Union” has former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who served during the Clinton administration. Also weighing in are Edward S. Walker, the former United States ambassador to Egypt, and John Negroponte, the former United Nations ambassador.

Also on “State of the Union,” Alan Simpson, the Republican co-chairman of the White House deficit commission, will discuss the Obama administration’s fiscal policies.

Univision’s “Al Punto” lineup features Jose Fernandez, the assistant secretary of state for economic, energy and business affairs; Jorge Castañeda, the former Mexican foreign secretary; and Jean-Claude Duvalier, the former Haitian dictator.

C-Span’s “Newsmakers” has Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

Austan Goolsbee, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, is a guest on TV One’s “Washington Watch.”

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Andy Wong/Associated Press Jon Huntsman, the ambassador to China, is surrounded by journalists after a speech at Tsinghua University in Beijing on March 18, 2010.

2:26 p.m. | Updated Of all the White House visitors in from China on Wednesday, one may be having a particularly awkward day: Jon Huntsman.

At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, President Obama joked about reports that Mr. Huntsman, his ambassador to China, is contemplating a run for president against Mr. Obama in 2012.

“I’m sure the fact that him having worked so well with me will be a great asset in any Republican primary,” Mr. Obama said, with a wry smile at the press conference with visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Mr. Huntsman is in Washington to help shepherd President Hu through his first official state visit with Mr. Obama.

A State Department spokesman confirmed in an e-mail that Mr. Huntsman “is here and will be a full participant during today’s activities.”

But the visit comes just weeks after Mr. Huntsman, the charismatic former Republican governor of Utah, appeared to indicate in an interview that he might be interested in challenging his boss — Mr. Obama — in the 2012 presidential election.

“You know, I’m really focused on what we’re doing in our current position,” he told Newsweek this month. “But we won’t do this forever, and I think we may have one final run left in our bones.” Asked by the Newsweek reporter whether he was ruling out a challenge to Mr. Obama in 2012, Mr. Huntsman declined to comment.

The prospect that Mr. Huntsman might run for president still seems somewhat remote. His remarks to Newsweek were vague enough that they could be interpreted any number of ways. And there are plenty of reasons why Mr. Huntsman might decide that 2012 is not the right year to seek higher office.

And yet there are no doubt that some people inside the White House — the president included — wouldn’t mind a bit of face time with the man they recruited to join the administration. (There’s not an official woodshed in the White House, but the Oval Office can surely feel like one at times.)

Mr. Obama praised Mr. Huntsman’s performance as ambassador, saying he has done an “outstanding” job in the past two years.

“He is a Mandarin speaker. He has brought enormous skill, dedication and talent to the job and you know the fact that he comes from a different party I think is a strength, not a weakness because it indicates the degree to which both he and I believe that partisanship ends at the waters edge and that we work together to advocate on behalf of our country,” Mr. Obama said.

When the White House sent Mr. Huntsman to China, it seemed like a master political stroke, a way of taking a potential rival out of contention by bringing him into the fold — and sending him halfway around the world. Chris Cillizza, who writes  The Fix politics blog at The Washington Post, wrote at the time that the move “almost certainly forecloses the possibility that he will be a candidate for national office in 2012.”

Now the president’s political advisers have to consider the possibility that Mr. Huntsman could try to use his employment as an ambassador for the president to his advantage, casting himself as a candidate with great appeal to independent voters looking for evidence that the two parties in Washington can work together to solve problems.

That would infuriate Mr. Obama’s team, which has long seen Mr. Huntsman as a potent danger to the president’s re-election. David Plouffe, one of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers, spoke admiringly of Mr. Huntsman’s political skills in May 2009, saying, “I think he’s really out there and speaking a lot of truth about the direction of the party.”

The visit of President Hu is filled with ceremony and substance that will no doubt distract Mr. Obama and his top aides from dwelling on Mr. Huntsman’s comments or his possible challenge in 2012.

But there are likely to be more than a few moments in the course of the day when Mr. Huntsman will find himself, awkwardly, standing at a reception or sitting at the state dinner across the table from Mr. Obama, Mr. Plouffe or one of the president’s other senior advisers.

An admirer of the former governor said Wednesday that Mr. Huntsman would not be measuring the drapes in the White House during his visit there Wednesday.

“But,” he joked morbidly, “maybe finding a food taster.”

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It’s a day full of presidential protocol on Tuesday, Aug. 10. Obama will begin the day urging the House to pass a teacher jobs bill (widely expected to be voted upon partisan lines), and in the afternoon, he’ll participate in a credentialing ceremony for foreign ambassadors. Here’s what’s on tap: 10:00 a.m. — The president [...]