It must be nice to be a Kennedy. To paraphrase American Express, privilege has its privileges. According to theBoston 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.