Kennedy: I thought we heard the last of him

Will we find out that I was right about this scum bag all along? ~ N.E.H.

No special privileges for Kennedys

Examiner Editorial
April 13, 2010

It must be nice to be a Kennedy. To paraphrase American

The FBI is giving the family of Edward M. Kennedy “a rare opportunity to raise objections” about anything in the late senator’s FBI file before it is released. (Susan Walsh/AP file)

Express, privilege has its privileges. According to the Boston

 Globe, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's family is to be given "a rare opportunity to raise objections" to anything in the late senator's 3,000-page FBI file before it is released to the public. This extraordinary concession is being granted because, "the family of a deceased person may have a privacy interest," according to Dennis Argall, an FBI spokesman. Argall further assures us that the family can't object to removing portions of the document simply because it is "embarrassing." What he doesn't say is this: It will be impossible for the public to know exactly what information was withheld at the family's request and why.

There would be a multitude of possible explanations, however, because the Kennedy family has produced a president, multiple senators, congressmen, and ambassadors during the past five decades. JFK Jr. even founded a magazine that traded in political and celebrity gossip. Privacy seems like a poor excuse for a family that has so consistently sought and cultivated the limelight -- and whose members continue to seek it, as seen by Caroline Kennedy's cartoonish run at a U.S. Senate seat from New York last year.

Any Kennedy hoping to get elected in the future should understand that there is a very fine line between respecting a family's privacy and sparing it further embarrassment, particularly since Ted Kennedy's life left more than a few prominent blots on the family escutcheon. The most prominent were Chappaquiddick, the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, and the scurrilous 1983 entreaty to the Soviets to help undermine President Reagan in exchange for assistance in electing Democrats.

In any case, Kennedy's life, warts and all, is now part of American history and thus deserves to be analyzed as dispassionately as possible, which requires having access to all of the facts, including those that might embarrass the Kennedy clan. It's not for either the Kennedy family or the FBI to decide what details of his public life are inconvenient. The very fact that the Kennedys appear so eager to censor what the public is ultimately able to learn about the family suggests the importance of protecting access to all of the documents in that file for the public today and for historians tomorrow.

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Bonus Video...just a lot of crap