Unseemly conduct disqualifies a person

In his Sept. 6 op-ed titled “Sen. Kennedy pushed for country's betterment,” professor Doerge uses the term “unseemly personal incidents” and writes, “I learned from Sen. Kennedy that no one is just one thing, one persona defined by one characteristic, one achievement, or one mistake.”

I have a problem with our country being run by people whose lives include “unseemly personal incidents and one mistake.” Can you imagine a married man leaving a party on an island at a late hour with a single girl, driving into the ocean, escaping the submerged auto without the girl, returning to the party, then to the scene of the occurrence with two others from the party, then swimming to the mainland, not reporting it until many hours later, and not be arrested?

Yet such people not only run our country, they sometimes are, as in this case, idolized. Until recent decades, I thought such conduct, regardless of other attributes that might be described as saintly, disqualified a man from serving in the U.S. Senate or other public office.

Dick Hansen

Cedar Rapids