Profiles in Courage

by John Fitzgerald Kennedy

You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. And you can be that servant.”

President Kennedy was fond of quoting Dante that “the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”

Thomas Carlyle wrote, “The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently but to live manfully.”

President Kennedy’s grandmother was living in Boston when President Kennedy was assassinated. She was also alive the year President Lincoln was shot.

“Public life is the crown of a career, and to young men it is the worthiest ambition. Politics is still the greatest and most honorable adventure.”

It has been fashionable in many places to look down on politics, on those in Government. President Kennedy, I think, changed that and altered the public conception of Government. He

certainly did for those who participated. But, however we feel about politics, the arena of Government is where the decisions will be made which will affect not only all ou...

and u...

“We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”

This book is not just the stories of the past but a book of hope and confidence for the future. What happens to the country, to the world, depends on what we do with what others have left us.

This is a book about that most admirable of human virtues—courage. “Grace under pressure,” Ernest Hemingway defined it. And these are the stories of the pressures experienced by eight United States Senators and the grace with which they endured them—the risks to their careers, the unpopularity of their courses, the defamation of their characters, and sometimes, but sadly only sometimes, the vindication of their reputations and their principles.

Politics, as John Morley has acutely observed, “is a field where action is one long second best, and where the choice constantly lies between two blunders”; and legislation, under the democratic way of life and the Federal system of Government, requires compromise between the desires of each individual and group and those around them.

The fanatics and extremists and even those conscientiously devoted to hard and fast principles are always disappointed at the failure of their Government to rush to implement all of their principles and to denounce those of their opponents.

But the legislator has some responsibility to conciliate those opposing forces within his state and party and to represent them in the larger clash of interests on the national level; and he alone knows that there are few if any issues where all the truth and all the right and all the angels are on one side.

All of us occasionally have the urge to follow the example of Congressman John Steven McGroarty of California,

who wrote a constituent in 1934:

One of the countless drawbacks of being in Congress is that I am compelled to receive impertinent letters from a jackass like you in which you say I promised to have the Sierra Madre mountains reforested and I have been in Congress two months and haven’t done it. Will you please take two running jumps and go to hell.

We shall need compromises in the days ahead, to be sure. But these will be, or should be, compromises of issues, not of principles. We can compromise our political positions, but not ourselves. We can resolve the clash of interests without conceding our ideals.

Whatever their differences, the American politicians whose stories are here retold shared that one heroic quality—courage. In the pages that follow, I have attempted to set forth their lives—the ideals they lived for and the principles they fought for, their virtues, and their sins, their dreams and their disillusionments, the praise they earned and the abuse they endured.

His somber sense of responsibility toward his Creator he carried into every phase of his daily life. He believed that man was made in the image of God, and thus he believed him equal to the extraordinary demands of self-government. The Puritan loved liberty and he loved the law; he had a genius for determining the precise point where the rights of the state and the rights of the individual could be reconciled.

Few if any Americans have been born with the advantages of John Quincy Adams: a famous name; a brilliant father who labored unceasingly to develop his son’s natural talents; and an extraordinary mother. Indeed

he was born with everything to make for a happy and successful life except for those qualities that bring peace of mind.

Yet the lifetime which was so bitterly deprecated by its own principal has never been paralleled in American history. John Quincy Adams—until his death at eighty in the Capitol—held more important offices and participated in more important events than anyone in the history of our nation,

Though one of the most talented men ever to serve his nation, he had few of the personal characteristics which ordinarily give color and charm to the personality. But there is a fascination and nobility in this picture of a man unbending, narrow and intractable, judging himself more severely than his most bitter enemies judged him,

possessing an integrity unsurpassed among the major political figures of our history, and constantly driven onward by his conscience and his deeply felt obligation to be worthy of his parents, their example and their precepts.

Had his political philosophy been more popular, his personal mannerisms would still have made close alliances difficult. He was, after all, “an Adams . . . cold, tactless and rigidly conscientious.” The son of an unpopular father, a renegade in his party and rather brash for a freshman Senator, John Quincy neither sought nor was offered political alliances or influence.

His guiding star was the principle of Puritan statesmanship his father had laid down many years before: “The magistrate is the servant not of his own desires, not even of the people, but of his God.”

We would admire the courage and determination of John Quincy Adams if he served in the Senate today. We would respect his nonpartisan, nonsectional approach. But I am not so certain that we would like him as a person;

Hated by the Federalists and suspected by the Republicans, John Quincy Adams returned to private life. His star was soon to rise again; but he never forgot this incident or abandoned his courage of conscience.

Here he wrote perhaps the brightest chapter of his history, for as “Old Man Eloquent” he devoted his remarkable prestige and tireless energies to the struggle against slavery.

Great crises produce great men, and great deeds of courage.

The attention of the nation was focused on the Senate, and focused especially on the three most gifted parliamentary leaders in American history—Clay, Calhoun and Webster. Of

Henry Clay of Kentucky—bold, autocratic and magnetic, fiery in manner with a charm so compelling that an opponent once declined a meeting which would subject him to the appeal of Harry of the West.

he reveled in a love for life, and had a matchless gift for winning and holding the hearts of his fellow-countrymen—and women.

That the key border state of Missouri did not join the Confederacy in 1861 was due in good measure to the memory of its former Senator Thomas Hart Benton. No man gave more than Senator Benton for the preservation of the Union. His efforts and his fate are told in Chapter IV.

There could be no mistaking he was a great man—he looked like one, talked like one, was treated like one and insisted he was one. With all his faults and failings, Daniel Webster was undoubtedly the most talented figure in our Congressional history:

A very slow speaker, hardly averaging a hundred words a minute, Webster combined the musical charm of his deep organ-like voice, a vivid imagination, an ability to crush his opponents with a barrage of facts, a confident and deliberate manner of speaking and a striking appearance to make his orations a magnet that drew crowds hurrying to the Senate chamber.

But whatever his faults, Daniel Webster remained the greatest orator of his day, the leading member of the American Bar, one of the most renowned leaders of the Whig party, and the only Senator capable of checking Calhoun.

“From my earliest youth, I have regarded slavery as a great moral and political evil. .

And the New Orleans Picayune hailed Webster for “the moral courage to do what he believes to be just in itself and necessary for the peace and safety of the country.”

“Webster did more than any other man in the whole country, and at a greater hazard of personal popularity, to stem and roll back the torrent of sectionalism which in 1850 threatened to overthrow the pillars of the Constitution and the Union.”

“Necessity compels me to speak true rather than pleasing things. . . . I should indeed like to please you; but I prefer to save you, whatever be your attitude toward me.”

I shall stand by the Union . . . with absolute disregard of personal consequences. What are personal consequences . . . in comparison with the good or evil which may befall a great country in a crisis like this? . . . Let the consequences be what they will, I am careless. No man can suffer too much, and no man can fall too soon, if he suffer or if he fall in defense of the liberties and Constitution of his country.

From 1821 to 1844 he had reigned supreme as Kingpin of Missouri politics, her first Senator, her most beloved idol.

‘old Bullion’” (the nickname derived from Benton’s fight for hard money).

The first Senator ever to serve thirty consecutive years, Thomas Hart Benton achieved a prominence which no other Senator from a new state could claim, and he championed the West with a boundless energy no opposing candidate could match.

Defeat Benton, father of the Senate and defender of the people?

her rebellious Senator whose primary loyalty was neither to his party nor his section, but to the Union for which he had fought—on the battlefront and in Congress—and upon the rugged independence of his views for which he intended to fight, in or out of Congress. His devotion to the Union was far greater than his devotion to the South or the Democratic party.

Willing to meet crushing defeat rather than compromise his principles (for as Clay said, intending it to be disparaging, Benton had the “hide of a hippopotamus”), he towered over his more famous colleagues in terms of sheer moral courage.

But Sam Houston was also Sam Houston, one of the most independent, unique, popular, forceful and dramatic individuals ever to enter the Senate chamber.