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Profiles in Courage
John F. Kennedy
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Profiles in Courage
John F. Kennedy
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About This Book
THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING CLASSIC OF POLITICAL INTEGRITY
With a foreword by Robert F. Kennedy and introduction by Caroline Kennedy
John F. Kennedy's enduring classic resounds with timeless lessons on the most cherished of virtues—courage and patriotism—and remains a moving, powerful, and relevant testament to the indomitable American spirit
During 1954-55, Kennedy, then a junior senator from the state of Massachusetts, profiled eight American patriots, mainly United States Senators, who at crucial moments in our nation's history, revealed a special sort of greatness: men who disregarded dreadful consequences to their public and private lives to do that one thing which seemed right in itself. They were men of various political and regional allegiances—their one overriding loyalty was to the United States.
Courage such as these men shared, Kennedy makes clear, is central to all morality—a man does what he must in spite of personal consequences—and these exciting stories suggest that, without in the least disparaging the courage with which men die, we should not overlook the true greatness adorning those acts of courage with which men must live.
As Robert F. Kennedy writes in the foreword, Profiles in Courage " is not just 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 special "P.S." edition ofthe bookcommemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication. It includes vintage photographs and an extensive author biography, and features Kennedy's correspondence about the writing project, contemporary reviews of the book, a letter from Ernest Hemingway, and two rousing speeches from recipients of the Profile in Courage Award.
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Historia de NorteaméricaPart One
THE TIME AND THE PLACE
As our first story begins, in 1803, Washington was no more than a raw, country village. Legend has it that a new French envoy, looking about upon his arrival, cried: “My God! What have I done to be condemned to reside in this city!” In the unfinished Capitol sat the Senate of the United States, already vastly different from that very first Senate which had sat in the old New York City Hall in 1789, and even more different from the body originally planned by the makers of the Constitution in 1787.
The founding fathers could not have envisioned service in the Senate as providing an opportunity for “political courage,” whereby men would endanger or end their careers by resisting the will of their constituents. For their very concept of the Senate, in contrast to the House, was of a body which would not be subject to constituent pressures. Each state, regardless of size and population, was to have the same number of Senators, as though they were ambassadors from individual sovereign state governments to the Federal Government, not representatives of the voting public. Senators would not stand for re-election every two years—indeed, Alexander Hamilton suggested they be given life tenure—and a six-year term was intended to insulate them from public opinion.
Nor were Senators even to be elected by popular vote; the state legislatures, which could be relied upon to represent the conservative property interests of each state and to resist the “follies of the masses,” were assigned that function. In this way, said Delegate John Dickinson to the Constitutional Convention, the Senate would “consist of the most distinguished characters, distinguished for their rank in life and their weight of property, and bearing as strong a likeness to the British House of Lords as possible.”
Moreover, the Senate was to be less of a legislative body—where heated debates on vital issues would be followed anxiously by the public—and more of an executive council, passing on appointments and treaties and generally advising the President, without public galleries or even a journal of its own proceedings. Local prejudices, said Hamilton, were to be forgotten on the Senate floor, else it would simply be a repetition of the Continental Congress where “the first question has been ‘how will such a measure affect my constituents and . . . my re-election.’”
The original twenty-two United States Senators, meeting in New York in 1789, at first seemed to fulfill the expectations of the makers of the Constitution, particularly regarding its resemblance to the House of Lords. A distinguished and glittering gathering of eminent and experienced statesmen, the Senate, as compared with the House of Representatives, was on the whole far more pompous and formal, its chambers far more elaborate, and its members far more concerned with elegance of dress and social rank. Meeting behind closed doors, without the use of standing committees, the Senate consulted personally with President Washington, and acted very nearly as an integral part of the administration.
But, as it must to all legislative bodies, politics came to the United States Senate. As the Federalist party split on foreign policy and Thomas Jefferson resigned from the Cabinet to organize his followers, the Senate became a forum for criticism of the executive branch, and the role of executive council was assumed instead by a Cabinet of men upon whom the President could depend to share his views and be responsible to him. Other precedents had already divided the Senate and the White House. In 1789 “Senatorial Courtesy” rejected Benjamin Fishbourne as officer of the Port of Savannah because he was unacceptable to the Georgia Senators. Shortly thereafter, special committees launched the first Senate investigations of Administration policies and practices. And in that same year the impossibility of the Senate’s role as an executive council became apparent when a Northwest Indian Treaty was being discussed in person with the Senate by Washington and his Secretary of War. Senator Maclay and others, fearful (as he expressed it in his diary) that “the President wishes to tread on the necks of the Senate,” sought to refer the matter to a select committee. The President, Maclay records,
started up in a violent fret . . . [and withdrew] with a discontented air. Had it been any other man than the man whom I wish to regard as the first character in the world, I would have said with sullen dignity.
Gradually the Senate assumed more of the aspects of a legislative body. In 1794 public galleries were authorized for regular legislative sessions; in 1801 newspaper correspondents were admitted; and by 1803 the Senate was debating who should have the privilege of coming upon the Senate floor. Congressmen, Ambassadors, Department Heads and Governors could be agreed upon, but what about “the ladies”? Senator Wright contended “that their presence gives a pleasing and necessary animation to debate, polishing the speakers’ arguments and softening their manner.” But John Quincy Adams, whose puritanical candor on such occasions will be subsequently noted, replied that the ladies “introduced noise and confusion into the Senate, and debates were protracted to arrest their attention.” (The motion to admit “the ladies” was defeated 16–12, although this policy of exclusion would be reversed in later years, only to be restored in modern times.)
Although Senators were paid the munificent sum of $6 per day, and their privileges included the use of great silver snuffboxes on the Senate floor, the aristocratic manners which had characterized the first Senate were strangely out of place when the struggling hamlet of Washington became the capital city in 1800, for its rugged surroundings contrasted sharply with those enjoyed at the temporary capitals in New York and Philadelphia. Formality in Senate procedures was retained, however—although Vice President Aaron Burr, himself an object of some disrepute after killing Hamilton in a duel, frequently found it necessary to call Senators to order for “eating apples and cakes in their seats” and walking between those engaged in discussion. And John Quincy Adams noted in his diary that some of his colleagues’ speeches “were so wild and so bluntly expressed as to be explained only by recognizing that the member was inflamed by drink.” But certainly the Senate retained greater dignity than the House, where Members might sit with hat on head and feet on desk, watching John Randolph of Roanoke stride in wearing silver spurs, carrying a heavy riding whip, followed by a foxhound which slept beneath his desk, and calling to the doorkeeper for more liquor as he launched vicious attacks upon his opponents.
Nevertheless, the House, still small enough to be a truly deliberative body, overshadowed the Senate in terms of political power during the first three decades of our government. Madison said that “being a young man and desirous of increasing his reputation as a statesman, he could not afford to accept a seat in the Senate,” whose debates had little influence on public opinion. Many Senators surrendered their seats to become members of the House, or to hold other state and local offices; and the Senate frequently adjourned to permit its members to hear an important House debate.
Senator Maclay, whose diary provides the best, if somewhat acidly warped, record of that early Senate, frequently complained of dull and trivial sessions, as witness this entry for April 3, 1790: “Went to the Hall. The minutes were read. A message was received from the President of the United States. A report was handed to the Chair. We looked and laughed at each other for half an hour, and adjourned.”
But as the Senate shed its role as executive council and entered on a more equal basis with the House into the legislative process, it also became apparent that no Constitutional safeguards, however nobly created, could prevent political and constituent pressures from entering those deliberations. Maclay was disgusted that, in place of “the most delicate honor, the most exalted wisdom and the most refined generosity” governing every act and deed of his colleagues, as he had expected, he found “the basest selfishness. . . . Our government is a mere system of jockeying opinions: ‘Vote this way for me, and I will vote that way for you.’” The local prejudices which Hamilton had hoped to exclude only intensified, particularly as the Federalists of New England and the Jeffersonians of Virginia split along sectional as well as partisan lines. State legislatures, which would become increasingly responsive to those previously scorned “masses” as property qualifications for voting were removed, transmitted the political pressures of their own constituents to their Senators through “instructions” (a device which in this country apparently had originated in the old Puritan town meetings, which had instructed their deputies to the Massachusetts General Court on such measures as “removing the Capital from the wicked city of Boston,” taking any steps possible “to exterminate the legal profession,” and preventing debtors from paying their debts “with old rusty barrels of guns that are serviceable for no man, except to work up as old iron”). Some Senators were also required to return regularly to their state legislatures, to report like Venetian envoys on their stewardship at the Capital.
It was a time of change—in the Senate, in the concept of our government, in the growth of the two-party system, in the spread of democracy to the farm and the frontier and in the United States of America. Men who were flexible, men who could move with or ride over the changing currents of public opinion, men who sought their glory in the dignity of the Senate rather than its legislative accomplishments—these were the men for such times. But young John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts was not such a man.
II
John Quincy Adams
“The magistrate is the servant not . . . of the people, but of his God.”
The young Senator from Massachusetts stirred restlessly in his chair as the debate droned on. The half-filled Senate chamber fairly echoed with the shouting of his Massachusetts colleague, Senator Pickering, who was denouncing President Jefferson’s Trade Embargo of 1807 for what seemed like the one hundredth time. Outside, a dreary January rain had bogged the dismal village of Washington in a sea of mud. Sorting the mail from Massachusetts which lay in disarray on his desk, John Quincy Adams found his eye caught by an unfamiliar handwriting, on an envelope with no return address. Inside was a single sheet of fine linen paper, and the Senator grimly read its anonymous message a second time before crumpling letter and envelope into the basket by his desk:
Lucifer, Son of the Morning, how thou hast fallen! We hope not irrecoverably. O Adams, remember who thou art. Return to Massachusetts! Return to thy country. Assist not in its destruction! Consider the consequences! Awake—arouse in time!
A FEDERALIST
A Federalist! Adams mused bitterly over the word. Was he not the son of the last Federalist President? Had he not served Federalist administrations in the diplomatic service abroad? Had he not been elected as a Federalist to the Massachusetts Legislature and then to the United States Senate? Now, simply because he had placed national interest before party and section, the Federalists had deserted him. Yes, he thought, I did not desert them, as they charge—it is they who have deserted me.
My political prospects are declining [he wrote in his diary that night] and as my term of service draws near its close, I am constantly approaching to the certainty of being restored to the situation of a private citizen. For this event, however, I hope to have my mind sufficiently prepared. In the meantime, I implore that Spirit from whom every good and perfect gift descends to enable me to render essential service to my country, and that I may never be governed in my public conduct by any consideration other than that of my duty.
These are not merely the sentiments of a courageous Senator, they are also the words of a Puritan statesman. For John Quincy Adams was one of the great representatives of that extraordinary breed who have left a memorable imprint upon our Government and our way of life. Harsh and intractable, like the rocky New England countryside which colored his attitude toward the world at large, the Puritan gave meaning, consistency and character to the early days of the American Republic. 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. The intellect of the Puritan—of John Quincy Adams and his forebears—was, as George Frisbie Hoar has said:
fit for exact ethical discussion, clear in seeing general truths, active, unresting, fond of inquiry and debate, but penetrated and restrained by a shrewd common sense. . . . He had a tenacity of purpose, a lofty and inflexible courage, an unbending will, which never qualified or flinched before human antagonist, or before exile, torture, or death.
In John Quincy Adams these very characteristics were unhappily out of tune with the party intrigues and political passions of the day. Long before those discouraging months in the Senate when his mail was filled with abuse from the Massachusetts Federalists, long before he had even entered the Senate, he had noted in his diary the dangers that confronted a Puritan entering politics: “I feel strong temptation to plunge into political controversy,” he had written, “but . . . a politician in this country must be the man of a party. I would fain be the man of my whole country.”
Abigail Adams had proudly told her friends when John Quincy was still a boy that she and her husband, who completely directed his education and training, had marked their son for future leadership “in the Cabinet or the field . . . a guardian of his country’s laws and liberties.” 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. In spite of a life of extraordinary achievement, he was gnawed constantly by a sense of inadequacy, of frustration, of failure. Though his hard New England conscience and his remarkable talents drove him steadily along a road of unparalleled success, he had from the beginning an almost morbid sense of constant failure.
His early feelings of inadequacy, as well as his precocious mind, were evidenced by the letter he wrote his father at age nine:
Dear Sir:
I love to receive letters very well; much better than I love to write them. I make but a poor figure at composition. My head is much too fickle. My thoughts are running after bird’s eggs, play and trifles, till I get vexed with myself. Mamma has a troublesome task to keep me a studying. I own I am ashamed of myself. I have but just entered the third volume of Rollin’s History, but designed to have got half through it by this time. I am determined this week to be more diligent. I have set myself a stint to read the third volume half out. If I can but keep my resolution, I may again at the end of the week give a better account of myself. I wish, sir, you would give me in writing some instructions with regard to the use of my time, and advise me how to proportion my studies and play, and I will keep them by me, and endeavor to follow them.
With the present determination of growing better, I am, dear sir, your son,
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
Again, thirty-six years later, having served as United States Senator, Harvard professor, and American Minister to major European powers, he could write sadly in his diary:
I am forty-five years old. Two-thirds of a long life have passed, and I have done nothing to distinguish it by usefulness to my country and to mankind. . . . Passions, indolence, weakness and infirmities have sometimes made me swerve from my better knowledge of right and almost constantly paralyzed my efforts of good.
And finally, at age seventy, having distinguished himself as a brilliant Secretary of State, an independent President and an eloquent member of Congress, he was to record somberly that his “whole life has been a succession of disappointments. I can scarcely recollect a single instance of success in anything that I ever undertook.”
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, as Minister to the Hague, Emissary to England, Minister to Prussia, State Senator, United States Senator, Minister to Russia, Head of the American Mission to negotiate peace with England, Minister to England, Secretary of State, President of the United States and member of the House of Representatives. He figured, in one capacity or another, in the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the prelude to the Civil War. Among the acquaintances and colleagues who ma...