Profiles in Courage. John F. Kennedy.

Profiles in Courage
John F. Kennedy
Garden City, New York: International Collectors Library. 1955.

Why read it? This book is as much about abuse as it is about courage. It puts political courage into the context of the forces with which politicians must concern themselves, including loss of their careers if they act courageously. This book is as much about the abuse that they suffered in public as it is the tenacity with which they voted according to conscience.

When the book was published, much was made of the issue about whether JFK wrote this book or whether it was written by Ted Sorenson. They wrote it together. My experience has been that when two or more people get together to write a book, they do not carefully note who does what in complete detail. If they worry about who gets the credit, the book will never be written.

They work together to produce the book. In Sorenson’s Kennedy, written after the assassination, Sorenson said that he researched many of the details from history, but much of the writing was done by Kennedy and the two together polished the final product. My reaction to this brouhaha is that I couldn’t care less who did what. What matters is the ideas in the book and their presentation for generations of Americans to learn and not to forget. (If people in the future still read books. The reason for this blog is my belief that future generations will no longer read the rich treasure of ideas found in books like this one. That is why I am trying to preserve them.)

I first used the book in one of my English classes. Students had read a short story entitled “The Devil and Daniel Webster” by Stephen Vincent Benét and I wanted the students to compare the story with the factual report about the courage of the real Daniel Webster in Profiles in Courage. The students enjoyed that piece so well that many willingly read the rest of the stories of political courage on their own.

Some sample ideas from the book: “These, then, are some of the pressures which confront a man [politician] of conscience. He cannot ignore the pressure groups, his constituents, his party, the comradeship of his colleagues, the needs of his family, his own pride in office, the necessity for compromise and the importance of remaining in office.” “The voters selected us because they had confidence in our judgment and our ability to exercise that judgment from a position where we could determine what were their own best interests, as part of the nation’s interest; this may mean that we must on occasion lead, inform, correct and sometimes even ignore constituent opinion.”

“Indeed it is frequently the compromisers and conciliators who are faced with the severest tests of political courage as they oppose the extremist views of their constituents.” “And so, in 1820, 1833 and 1850, he [Henry Clay] initiated, hammered and charmed through reluctant Congresses the three great compromises that preserved the Union until 1861, by which time the strength of the North was such that secession was doomed to failure.” “To the half-mad, half-genius John Randolph of Roanoke, he [Henry Clay] was, in what is perhaps the most memorable and malignant sentence in the history of personal abuse, ‘a being, so brilliant yet so corrupt, which, like a rotten mackerel by moonlight, shines and stinks.’ ”

Daniel Webster: “Mr. President: I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American and a member of the Senate of the United States. I speak today for the preservation of the Union.” “The Senate’s main concern, he [Daniel Webster] insisted, was neither to promote slavery nor to abolish it, but to preserve the United States of America.” “…for in his last words to the Senate, Webster had written his own epitaph: I shall stand by the Union…with absolute disregard of personal consequences.”

Quote. EG Ross on voting not to impeach President Johnson: “I almost literally looked down into my open grave: friendships, position, fortune, everything that makes life desirable to an ambitious man were about to be swept away by the breath of my mouth, perhaps forever.”