NYPost

RFK's LEGACY

November 24, 2001 -- What's another name for ingratitude?

Kennedy, perhaps? (Or Cuomo?)

President Bush earlier this week renamed the Justice Department building in Washington after former Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Considering that Bush is a Republican and Kennedy was a Democrat - and his party's likely 1968 presidential nominee had he not been assassinated - this was a signal of remarkable magnanimity.

Apparently, though, not enough for one member of the fabled Kennedy clan.

Despite Bush's gesture, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo - the wife of Andrew Cuomo, and so the would-be first lady of New York - clumsily attacked Bush's anti-terror policies on Tuesday, just hours before the president so very publicly honored her father.

She termed the Bush policies a betrayal of what Bobby Kennedy stood for.

At a Washington ceremony for a recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, she declared that her father "was determined to use the law to bring criminals who threatened our country to justice. But that eagerness was always tempered by his commitment to protecting civil liberties even when it meant letting the accused . . . go free."

Oh, really?

Ask Martin Luther King, Jr.'s family about the extent of Bobby's "commitment to protecting civil liberties." The late attorney general was responsible for bugging the civil-rights leader's bedroom - largely because RFK didn't have the nerve to stand up to J. Edgar Hoover.

And what about his work for Sen. Joseph McCarthy, way back when during the Army-McCarthy hearings? (Not that Tail-Gunner Joe was as wrong about communism as today's political myth would have it.)

And all the anti-Mafia break-ins and other shenanigans conducted by the Kennedy Justice Department? (Not that Jimmy Hoffa and his mob leg-breakers didn't deserve the attention.)

Legacies can be complicated.

And memories can be selective.

But ingratitude is forever.

-- Anonymous, November 24, 2001