- Self - Author, Bearing the Cross: The FBI was not a renegade agency. It was fundamentally a part, a core part of the existing mainstream American political order.
- Self - Yale University, Author, G-Men: J. Edgar Hoover and the American Century: I think it's easy for us to look back at what the FBI was doing during Hoover's years and be outraged by it, and rightly so, but I also think there's an image of J. Edgar Hoover as being some sort of a rogue actor, behind the scenes, and being kind of out of step with the American mainstream. But the truth is that a lot of this wasn't particularly secret. A lot of people understood what the FBI was up to, and in fact, they supported it.
- Self - Yale University, Author, G-Men: J. Edgar Hoover and the American Century: So, when these tapes come out in 2027, I think it's gonna be very interesting to see what the reaction is. I don't know that it will create a fundamental re-understanding of King as a political figure, but I do think that it will probably give us a slightly more complicated sense of him as a human being.