Dusty Bookshelf Review: Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006 (update of Harper and Brothers edition, 1956). 244 pp. (with 32-page supplement) Paperback $15.77.

About half of John F. Kennedy’s most famous book is about the Civil War era.

Kennedy ended up as a famous civil-rights President by the end of his tragically-curtailed life. His Presidency didn’t start out that way, but by the time of his assassination, circumstances had convinced him to become an ally of the civil rights movement (even if there were a few problems in the relationship).

But let’s think back to the pre-Presidental years, in 1956. JFK was a Massachusetts Senator aiming for the Presidency – with a willingness to recruit White Southern leaders into a winning coalition. In this context, let’s look at then-Senator Kennedy’s (allegedly ghostwritten) book Profiles in Courage which came out in 1956 (the alleged ghostwriter didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize for the book, Kennedy did). Five chapters deal with Civil-War-era examples of political courage (there were also three non-Civil-War-era examples, a catch-all chapter giving additional instances of courage, and some analysis of political courage in general). All of the putatively brave politicians were United States Senators (except for a few brief attaboys for non-Senatorial courage in the catch-all chapter, and the fact that Sam Houston committed one of his acts of courage after leaving the Senate).

Kennedy’s daughter Caroline, in an Introduction first published in 2003, wrote: “Our collective definition of courage has expanded since Profiles in Courage was written – today we honor those with the courage to compromise as well as those who stay the course” (xii). But Profiles in Courage does praise a compromising Senator – Daniel Webster, the Whig leader from Kennedy’s Massachusetts. The book suggests that sometimes even the non-courageous kind of compromise is good, but Webster’s compromise certainly required the courage to stand up to his Massachusetts constituents.

Just before turning to Webster, Kennedy praised John Quincy Adams’ fight against slavery in the U. S. House as “perhaps the brightest chapter of his history” (47-48). But it was Adams’ unpopular support, as a Massachusetts Senator, of the embargo against England in 1807 which gets Adams included in the politically-courageous list.

Consistently with the historiography of the time, Kennedy blamed “the Abolitionists in the North [and] the fire-eaters in the South” for hastening the Civil War by putting section above Union (51). Like Adams with his support of the embargo, despite its Bay State unpopularity, Webster earns praise for his courage in setting aside the sectional desires of his Massachusetts constituents and supporting the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act, in order to maintain the Union. John Quincy Adams, by 1850, had been dead for two years – he probably wouldn’t have done a Webster.

The drama centers on Webster’s influential “Seventh of March speech,” 1850, which Kennedy credits for the passage of the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act of that year. Kennedy credits the Compomise for America avoiding a civil war – for another decade. Kennedy claims the Compromise of 1850 gave the North ten extra years to grow economically so that the North’s forces would be powerful enough to reunite the United States in the Civil War. Indeed, “the strength of the North was such that secession was doomed to failure” in the Civil War (53) – in apparent contrast to a less-powerful North in 1850. But that wasn’t the basis on which Webster was praised by the South and by Northern Unionists in 1850, of course – they praised Webster for avoiding disunion and war, not postponing it.

As for Webster’s critics – long before Stephen Vincent Benét portrayed Webster as an opponent of the devil, Massachusetts bard John Greenleaf Whittier said Webster had fallen prey to “the Tempter” and had acquired “A fallen angel’s pride of thought,/Still strong in chains.” Kennedy quoted part of Whittier’s poem, including the latter couplet, as one of many instances of the Massachusetts attacks on Webster (71).

Webser died in 1852 and missed the war.

Kennedy praises two brave Southern Unionists – Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and Senator Sam Houston of Texas. Both lost their Senate seats for preferring the Union over proslavery agitation. Houston made a political comeback as governor of Texas – and then lost his office when, after Texas seceded, he refused to swear loyalty to the Confederacy.

Though Benton died in 1858, Kennedy thinks Benton’s influence shares credit for Missouri, a “key border state,” staying in the Union during the Civil War (55-56).

(Nowadays, Benton’s Unionism is, to some, outweighed by his proslavery views and anti-Indian racism. Oregon State University renamed what had previously been called Benton Hall, though technically the hall had  originally been named, not for Senator Benton, but for residents of the county in which Oregon State is located, which is named after Benton. Still, that was deemed too close for comfort. Benton county itself still keeps its old name.)

For a nationalist-minded Senator like Kennedy, the important point is that Webster, Benton and Houston bravely defended national unity, and two of them (Webster and Benton), from beyond the grave, supposedly helped the Union win the Civil War. In 1956, nationalism was at a premium given a Soviet challenge which Senator Kennedy took seriously.

In giving two profiles in Reconstruction-era courage, Kennedy adopts a view of Reconstruction which was more prevalent in 1956, and was certainly popular among Southern white voters (if Kennedy ever, hypothetically, wanted the support of such voters). Kennedy said the Reconstruction conflict involved Andrew Johnson as the good guy – Johnson wanted to “bind up the wounds of the nation and treat the South with mercy and fairness” (111) and “carry out Abraham Lincoln’s  policy of reconciliation with the defeated South.” The bad guys were Congressional Radical Republicans, “who sought to administer the downtrodden Southern states as conquered provinces” (115). (JFK talked nicer about the first President Johnson than he would talk about his own future Presidential successor of the same name.)

Profiles In Courage describes how the bad-guy Radicals had the good-guy President Johnson impeached. In this struggle, Kennedy thought acquitting Johnson was obviously the right thing to do. Acquittal might have been the right thing anyway, not because Johnson was right about Reconstruction, but because the charges had the potential for turning the impeachment process, a remedy for serious official misconduct, into a Westminister-style vote of no confidence. This is a problem which Kennedy mentions, but Kennedy focuses on how Johnson wanted to be nice to the South while the mean Radicals wanted to be vindictive toward the South and toward Johnson (the Radicals clashed with Johnson on Black civil rights and suffrage, which Johnson opposed and the Radicals supported, though Kennedy doesn’t tackle this aspect of the subject with much specificity).

Kennedy introduced readers to a Senator he (Kennedy) claimed to be rescuing from undeserved obscurity – alleged courage-haver Edmund G. Ross of Kansas. Ross fought against proslavers in antebellum Kansas as well as in the Civil War. The dominant Republicans in the Kansas legislature (legislatures elected Senators back then) wanted their fellow-Republican Ross to be on the pro-conviction side of impeachment. But, allegedly because of his dedication to conscience, Ross provided the one-vote margin to acquit Johnson. A handful of other Republicans voted to acquit, but the public knew in advance that those Republicans would vote Not Guilty. Not so with Ross, who kept the public in suspense until he actually cast his Not Guilty vote, which automatically indicated a Senate acquittal because everyone knew the pro-conviction forces were now exactly one Guilty vote short of the needed two-thirds.

David O. Stewart’s Impeached provides strong circumstantial evidence that Johnson bribed Ross in exchange for Ross’s acquittal vote. Kennedy didn’t know about this evidence, because Stewart published it in 2010. Kennedy focuses on how Ross and the other acquitting Republicans endured obloquy because of their stance. Ross lost his Senate seat.

(In his catch-all chapter, Kennedy briefly mentions Andrew Johnson’s courage as a Senator. Representing Tennessee in the U. S. Senate, Johnson was the only Senator from a Confederate state to be a Unionist, and he risked his life in a brief and dangerous pro-Union tour back to his state just before the war started.)

Another example of Civil War era courage was committed by Mississippi Senator Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, who praised the recently-deceased Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, who was hated by most White Mississippians. I have already discussed Lamar’s speech, and Kennedy’s praise, in an article in Emerging Civil War.

JFK suggested that he might not support all the specific positions his courageous Senators took: “Some of these men…were right in their beliefs; others perhaps were not” (18-19). But when it came to the pro-Union stances of Webster, Benton and Houston, Ross’s allegedly principled defense of the embattled and supposedly righteous Johnson, and Lamar’s politically-dangerous posthumous reaching across the aisle in support of North-South reconciliation, JFK thinks these Senators were right as well as brave.

The need for courage to be for the right cause is also suggested in the 1963 post-assassination reissue of Profiles in Courage. JFK’s grieving brother Robert wrote in a Foreward that all the profiled Senators “recognized what needed to be done – and did it” (xvii). In 1989, some Kennedy family members set up a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, and since then the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation gives the award annually to those deemed to be both courageous and right.

I doubt that the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation would honor courage if it thinks a person is showing courage in the wrong cause(s), whether the person is living (not even rogue Kennedy family members), or dead, like JFK’s own heroes Webster and Ross (anyway, I doubt the dead are eligible for these awards).

This edition contains 32 extra pages at the end, summarizing JFK’s life, describing the writing of the book, giving contemporaneous reviews, describing the Profiles in Courage Awards, and so on.