Reply #61: Of course they were shamelessly self-interested

[Ken Burch]

That's part of the dark side of that family's legacy.

And I wasn't trying to preserve anybody's hagiography. I never thought JFK was a saint(it's always struck me that there was a unique paradox in the fact that JFK was a great orator who had no strong personal convictions about anything, other than his mindless support for the Cold War).

Bobby I see as a guy who started out as a total bastard and then(at least somewhat)"got it", and thus ended up giving his life in what may have been this country's last "truth to power" presidential campaign. No saint, hardly imperfect, but a person who was ennobled and humanized by the pain of his brother's murder. To me, that transformation is the only reason that he could end up saying something like the quote on the Gross National Product that I use in my posts.

But you would also have to acknowledge that, on some issues, they were at Hoover's mercy, due to the, er, dicier moments in their private lives. Hoover's specialty was using sexual indiscretions as blackmail gold. It's naive to think that that didn't come in to play with the decision to wiretap Dr. King.