Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended his family’s authorization to wiretap Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. He said that they had no political alternative but were betting on the civil rights movement.

The FBI conducted a sustained campaign of surveillance and harassment against the Civil Rights movement, including mail opening, wiretapping, and bugging of King’s office and hotel rooms.

RFK Jr. said President Kennedy was aware of the eavesdropping and would have fired FBI director J. Edgar Hoover if not assassinated.

Kennedy Jr., now running as an independent to become president, said there was little political alternative then during an interview with Politico published Sunday.

He also said powerful FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wanted King surveilled in 1963 and that his father and others feared political revenge if they didn’t comply.

Hoover was known for his ability to get even.

RFK Jr. also suggested that wire-tapping King in the early 1960s would prove he wasn’t a communist, as Hoover suspected.

Jackie Kennedy was quoted as saying she thought Dr. King was a communist. MLK had allies who were communists.

On a recording released in 2011, Jackie O said she couldn’t look at a picture of MLK Jr. “without thinking…that man’s terrible” – but later came to admire the civil rights leader. Kennedy called King a “phony” and “tricky” during hours of chatty, never-before-revealed interviews with the historian Arthur Schlesinger that he tape-recorded.

The recordings were taken shortly after JFK’s assassination.

“If you asked her what she thought of Martin Luther King overall… she admired him tremendously,” Caroline Kennedy told ABC’s Diane Sawyer.

MLK Jr. might have been a communist or not. We can’t bring him back to find out. His peaceful and courageous movement for equal rights and freedom is what he is best remembered for accomplishing.