Jacob Weisberg has written a book, probably a good one, Profiles in Cowardice, that he discusses here with Yascha Mounk. I think they both do a good job analyzing the “second term cave”, when, for the first year, at least, of Trump’s second term, his willingness to do patently illegal things—wrecking AID, for example, and bullying law firms and universities—seemed to carry all before him. But Weisberg says something up front that I found seriously off-putting, when he talks about the book’s title, a play on John F. Kennedy’s 1956 thriller, Profiles in Courage, spinning out a morality tale that I found both thoroughly contrived and thoroughly incorrect. Said Weisberg
… just to spend a minute on Kennedy because it is a really interesting book—it’s a book about the Senate. And John F. Kennedy as a young senator, I think, was really troubled by his own failure of courage. He’d been a war hero, and everyone knows the story of PT-109, how he rescued his fellow sailors, and his physical courage was unquestionable. But when Joe McCarthy was running rampant, JFK took a dive in the Senate on the vote to censure him [in 1954]. He was in the hospital for his back. He got out of voting. He never said how he would have voted. He never stood up to Joe McCarthy.
My read on it is that he wanted to write this book to give himself more courage, to try to understand what courage in politics was. He wrote about eight senators going back to the early days of the Republic, not all of whom he would have agreed with on substantive issues, but who took important decisions against their own interests, who were willing to risk or sacrifice their political careers for principles, often constitutional principles, that they believed in deeply. I think it worked for JFK. The JFK of the Cuban Missile Crisis was someone who was morally courageous in a way that the JFK of the McCarthy era wasn’t. So the book is sort of a trope in Washington—people talk about “profiles in courage” when someone is willing to do something, which they very seldom are, against their political interest.
Actually, JFK didn’t “take a dive” when he missed the McCarthy vote. He was seriously incapacitated by the surgery and could not have made it to the Senate floor under any circumstances. But it is true, as Weisberg says, that Kennedy refused thereafter to say how he would have voted, a strange “strategy” indeed, one perhaps due to the fact that McCarthy was actually a family friend of the Kennedy family, vacationing with them at their famous summer home at Hyannis Port—famous to anyone old enough to remember the Kennedy era. In addition, Robert Kennedy worked for McCarthy. My “guess” is that Kennedy thought/hoped that if he took the thoroughly uncourageous tack of not saying how he would have voted—about as a direct a violation of a senator’s “job” to take a position on the controversial issues of the day as one can find—his family’s close connection with McCarthy would be less likely to receive serious examination in the press. And by 1960, thanks in large part to McCarthy's quick disappearance from the national scene—he died in 1957—it did not.
But the idea that Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage to give himself courage is ridiculous. In the first place, Kennedy says, in the introduction to Profiles that he had the idea for at least an article on the topic of political courage before he was even in the Senate:
Since first reading—long before I entered the Senate—an account of John Quincy Adams and his struggle with the Federalist party, I have been interested in the problems of political courage in the face of constituent pressures, and the light shed on those problems by the lives of past statesmen. A long period of hospitalization and convalescence following a spinal operation in October, 1954, gave me my first opportunity to do the reading and research necessary for this project.
Even more to the point—far more to the point—Kennedy did not write Profiles in Courage in the first place—at least, not alone. It is well known now, and has been for some time, that Kennedy in-house speech writer/intellectual Ted Sorenson did most of the heavy lifting for the book. Michael Bechloss, reviewing Sorenson’s 2005 memoir, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History for Publisher’s Weekly, says the following:
Sorensen knows that history will view him mainly as architect of much of Kennedy’s enduring rhetoric—and the collaborator (at least) on JFK’s famous 1956 book, Profiles in Courage. Such prominence unsettled the Kennedys, who wanted JFK’s speeches and writings to be taken as his own. Sorensen reveals that after the commercial success of Profiles, Kennedy privately gave him a large share of the book’s substantial royalties, and Sorensen wrote his boss a letter pledging not to push for “recognition of my participation” in its writing.
Kennedy may have found the whole idea of political courage “interesting”, but “co-authoring” a book and then concealing the fact that most of the work was done by someone else sounds a lot more like self-promotion than “courage”. The real icing on the cake, which Weisberg ignores entirely, is that, thanks to the efforts of JFK’s father, Joe Kennedy, one of the wealthiest men in America,1 Profiles won the Pulitzer Prize for best biography in 1957, despite the fact that it wasn’t even nominated by the “jury” for biographies. Instead, the “Pulitzer Advisory Board”, which made the final selection, ignored all the books selected by the jury for biography and chose Profiles instead. Sitting on the Advisory Board? Famous New York Times columnist and Joe Kennedy factotum/wing man Arthur Krock, who, according to Garry Wills in The Kennedy Imprisonment, claimed to have said that he “worked like Hell” to get Profiles the prize. Not a lot of “courage” there!
And the notion that writing the book somehow inspired Kennedy to be “brave” during the Cuban Missile Crisis is, in my opinion, way over the top. Kennedy had already learned, the very hard way, not to take the advice of military brass and CIA big shots too seriously, thanks to the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. He very definitely did the right thing during the Cuban Missile Crisis by not listening to belligerent hawks like Curtis LeMay who were pushing for pre-emptive nuclear strikes from the get-go, but he was also helped immeasurably by the willingness of what appears to be a seriously frightened Nikita Khrushchev to let Kennedy eat his cake and have it too—swap the removal of Soviet missiles in Cuba for the removal of U.S. missiles in Turkey without having to admit that he had made a deal, keeping the U.S. end of the quid pro a secret and allowing Kennedy to look like the hero while Nikita accepted the role as the wimp—which surely helped poor Nikkie lose his job in 1964, when the Soviet Presidium removed him from power.
Kennedy was a “complex”, often very unattractive personality—immensely self-centered and very rarely indeed motivated by “ideals”, despite his extraordinary ability to stimulate idealism in others. The British author Nigel Hamilton, in his excellent biography of young JFK, Reckless Youth, starts off by offering us, in effect, an “exposé” of Kennedy as an utterly spoiled brat but ends up being at least half seduced by Kennedy’s energy, his ability to endure lengthy, repeated bouts of life-threatening illness without giving up on himself, his appetite for life, his willingness to take risks—“demanding” a combat command in the Navy during World War II, for example, when he “should” have been rejected for service entirely on the basis of ill health. In his memoir In Search of History, Theodore White, once the most famous political journalist of his generation, said, on the basis of his many private conversations with Kennedy, that Kennedy regarded all of politics as a game, a game that he played to win. He could be immensely petty—he was most often likely to show “real” emotion when he was embarrassed (by the truth)—but he could make decisions—often reluctant ones—that were “smarter”, more realistic, than a “true believer” would.
His treatment of civil rights is “classic”. He would have preferred to have avoided it entirely. Why piss off the entire South? But it made us look so bad to the rest of the world, and winning the Cold War was more important than coddling a bunch of red necks. Kennedy always tried to do as little as possible, but if “as little as possible” meant “a lot”, well, then he would do that. The notion, so beloved among sixties liberals, that he would have gotten us out of Vietnam is, I think, entirely false. Whether he would have plunged as blindly as LBJ is, I guess, questionable. But the pressure of “blind” anti-communism in the U.S. prior to the Vietnam debacle was enormous. Whether he could have done “better” than LBJ if he had lived to win and complete a second term is impossible to say. He wouldn’t have had to endure the hatred and contempt of the left the way poor LBJ did and that would have been “something”. It’s hard to say more than that.
Afterwords
In the wake of Kennedy’s tragic assassination, it was almost inevitable that a “Profiles in Courage” awards program would be established, and onc has. You can visit their site here, announcing the 2026 winners, Federal Reserve of the United States Chairman Jerome Powell, for protecting the independence of the Federal Reserve, and the people of Minneapolis and St. Paul, for “risking their lives to protect their neighbors and immigrant community members from an unprecedented federal law enforcement operation, peacefully defending the human rights and values that serve as the foundation of our Constitutional democracy.” I cannot quibble with the deservedness of either reward, but I won’t resist remarking that JFK himself would, I think, savor the ironies involved in the naming of the awards, at least in private.
1. Joe used his enormous wealth to effectively “buy” JFK first a seat in the House of Representatives in 1946 and one in the Senate in 1952. In addition, “Kennedy money” certain made JFK’s 1960 run for the presidency “possible”, though it was Kennedy’s own ability and attractiveness as a candidate that pushed him, barely, over the finish line in November.
