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this is his Achilles' heel. It's the thing that will get Adam in the end, is the fact that he does not have a modicum or a stabilizing amount of morality; that he -- I mean, I think Ray and I used to philosophize about the fact that Adam could have been one of the most powerful black elected officials in the nation, if he were not so -- you know, obsessed with personal, immoral, hedonistic games.

But that didn't affect the fact that Adam won, you know. Up until the time that he lost totally. And that was tragic. If Adam had listened just a little to a few of us, he could have been respectably corrupt and not lost.

That's a terribly statement I just made, “respectably corrupt.”

It's the accommodation that some of you would have beenwilling to make with him.

Well, you had to. Knowing Adam, you had to make the accommodations Adam was for Adam. But he could have been for Adam, in pretty much the same way Roosevelt was for Roosevelt, and at the same time, made some solid, major, serious contributions to the welfare of others.

And, by the way, he did -- in the early stages of his life, Adam did make some significant contributions to racial progress, in the United States. Adam did organize people to picket 125th St. to get blacks jobs in those stores. Adam did have the famous Powell Amendment to almost all appropriations. You know, Adam made visible the aspirations of black people, at a time long before the momentum of the civil rights movement, and long before Martin Luther King