Profiles in Courage

John F. Kennedy, 1956

Executive Summary

Kennedy’s premise is that the Senate is a body designed to punish independent judgment. A senator who follows his conscience against his party, his state, or his contributors does so knowing the cost is his career, and the book is a study of eight men who paid it. It was published in January 1956 by Harper & Brothers, won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and became the single most effective piece of reputation-building in American political history. The thesis: the health of a republic depends on the willingness of individual legislators to lose their seats rather than their judgment.

That thesis is worth taking seriously, and the book is worth reading with two facts in hand. The first is that its authorship is contested in a way the book’s title page does not disclose. The second is that the history has not held up. Kennedy’s eight heroes include a defender of white supremacy whose “reconciliation” helped end Reconstruction, and a senator whose deciding vote in an impeachment was very likely bought. Both are in the book, and neither complication appears in it.

5 Core Arguments

1. The Senate’s structure rewards conformity. Kennedy’s opening chapter is the book’s real argument. A senator faces three pressures: the voters who elected him, the party that funds and organizes him, and his own conscience. The first two are immediate and organized; the third is neither. He notes that senators who lose reelection for a principle are not around to fight for it again, which makes compromise rational rather than craven.
2. Courage is expensive, and the price is the office itself. Every profile ends in the same place. Adams was deserted by Boston and had his successor elected nine months early. Houston’s legislature condemned his position 73 to 3. Ross was called a traitor and never returned to the Senate. Kennedy’s point is not that these men were rewarded but that they were ruined, and that this is the normal cost of the thing he is describing.
3. The hardest case is the senator who defies his own constituency. The book’s best chapters concern men who broke with the people who sent them, not with a distant party. Benton refused instructions from the Missouri legislature. Norris broke with Nebraska repeatedly. Kennedy is most interested in the moment when a senator discovers that his judgment and his voters’ preference are not the same thing.
4. Party is the primary instrument of pressure. Kennedy treats the party not as an institution of principle but as a machine of mutual obligation. He is explicit that the rewards are tangible: committee assignments, patronage, campaign money, and the cooperation of colleagues. The threat is not punishment alone but the loss of the ordinary means of doing anything at all.
5. Character, not institutions, is the variable. This is the claim the book is really making, and it is the one most open to challenge. Kennedy’s implicit theory is that reform comes from individual conscience rather than from movements, parties, or structural change. His profiled senators change history by refusing to go along.

The Eight, and What They Actually Did

The book contains eight full profiles, framed by essays on “Courage and Politics” at the front and “The Meaning of Courage” at the back. A tenth chapter, “Additional Men of Courage,” names others in a paragraph each; those are not among the eight.

Two corrections to the popular shorthand are worth carrying. Norris’s Cannon fight took place in the House, where he was then a Representative, not in the Senate. And the book’s own framing is careful to say the list is not canonical: “There is no official ’list’ of politically courageous Senators, and it has not been my intention to suggest one.”

A Respectful Disagreement

The authorship question is not a distraction; it is a problem with the artifact. Kennedy’s title page named one author. Theodore Sorensen, his aide, wrote a first draft of most chapters and helped choose the words of many sentences, as he acknowledged in his 2008 memoir. Jules Davids, a Georgetown historian, drafted four chapters and a thirteen-page essay that Kennedy used in the closing chapter, and was paid $700 for it. The thematic essays at the front and back are, by general agreement, substantially Kennedy’s own. A reader can reasonably conclude that the argument is Kennedy’s and much of the prose is not.

The historical substance has aged worse than the authorship. The chapter on Lucius Lamar presents as a statesman a man who wrote Mississippi’s Ordinance of Secession and who, in 1875, organized the Mississippi Plan, which used violence and economic pressure to keep Black voters from the polls. Mississippi’s own historical society now says plainly that his legacy is “tainted today by his active role in the reestablishment of White supremacy.” Kennedy built the chapter on Dunning School historians who treated Reconstruction as a tragedy of corrupt carpetbaggers, and he maligned Adelbert Ames, the Reconstruction governor who actually championed Black suffrage. Blanche Ames spent the last years of her life petitioning him to correct it. He never did, and the book has never been corrected.

The chapter on Ross is the most instructive failure because the book’s own thesis depends on it. Kennedy quotes Ross’s memoir about looking down into his open grave, and the passage is real. But Ross’s motives were not the ones the chapter describes. He had a patronage stake in preventing Benjamin Wade from becoming president pro tem, he bargained with Johnson before the vote, and he spent the weeks after it asking for jobs for his friends. David Stewart’s Impeached (2009) concludes that the votes for acquittal “were purchased with political deals, patronage promises, and even cash,” and that at least four other senators would have acquitted anyway. A House investigation later found no proof of bribery, which is the correct caveat. Even on the most generous reading, Ross is a mixed case, and the book presents him as a pure one.

There is a fair defense of the whole enterprise, and it should be stated: Fredrik Logevall argues that the book’s architecture, themes, and arguments were Kennedy’s, that Sorensen at twenty-six lacked the political experience to conceive them, and that ghostwriting assistance was ordinary practice for politicians of the era. That is a serious argument. It addresses who built the book. It does not address whether the history in it is true, and on that question the scholarship has moved decisively against Kennedy.

One structural criticism deserves separate mention. The historian Jeffrey Pasley argues that the book fashioned a history of American political courage from which the New Deal and every struggle for equality were almost entirely absent. Every featured senator is a white man, and none took a progressive position on Black rights. Kennedy answered this once, in a 1958 McCall’s article adding three women. He never revised the book.

Bottom Line

Read it as a period document and it is genuinely useful. The opening essay on why independent judgment is expensive in a legislative body remains one of the clearest short statements of the problem, and no one who has watched a legislature work will find it naive. The eight stories are well told. The prose is lucid, and the moral seriousness is real.

Read it as history and it needs a corrective in the other hand. Three of the eight were slaveholders. The Lamar chapter launders a white supremacist into a healer. The Ross chapter turns a patronage operator into a martyr. The book’s deepest claim, that courageous individuals rather than organized movements drive change, is exactly the claim you would expect a man planning to run for president to make.

The honest way to use it: take the argument seriously, and check the examples.

If the structural question interests you, Democracy in America is Tocqueville on the same tension between individual judgment and collective pressure, written without a career to protect.

“We can compromise our political positions, but not ourselves. We can resolve the clash of interests without conceding our ideals.” — John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, ch. I

Sources

• Kennedy, John F. Profiles in Courage. Harper & Brothers, 1956. Full text of the first edition: fadedpage.com.
• The Pulitzer Prizes. “1957 Pulitzer Prizes,” winner in Biography: Profiles in Courage, by John F. Kennedy (Harper): pulitzer.org.
• Fehrman, Craig. “I Would Rather Win a Pulitzer Prize Than Be President.” Politico, February 11, 2020: politico.com.
• Stewart, David O. Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy. Simon & Schuster, 2009. Excerpt: davidostewart.com.
• Greenberg, David. “Andrew Johnson: Saved by a Scoundrel.” Slate, January 21, 1999: slate.com.
• Rogers, William. “Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar.” Mississippi Historical Society: mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov.
• Virtue, Jordan. “How John F. Kennedy Fell for the Lost Cause.” The Atlantic, December 2023: theatlantic.com.
• Pasley, Jeffrey L. “Profiles in Triangulation: John F. Kennedy’s Neoliberal History of American Politics,” in Historian in Chief, University of Virginia Press, 2019. Chapter abstract: academia.edu (full text available to signed-in users; the argument is summarized in the chapter abstract).
• Pearson, Richard. “Jules Davids, Lauded Professor of Diplomatic History, Dies at 75.” Washington Post, December 11, 1996: washingtonpost.com.
• Cohen, Patricia. “An Old Letter Backs a Claim of Helping Kennedy Write ‘Profiles.’” New York Times, October 18, 1997: nytimes.com.
• U.S. Senate. “Impeachment Trial of President Andrew Johnson, 1868”: senate.gov.
• U.S. Senate. “The Kansas-Nebraska Act”: senate.gov.
• U.S. Senate. “George Norris”: senate.gov.
• U.S. Senate. “Speech Costs Senator His Seat” (Webster, Seventh of March): senate.gov.
• U.S. House of Representatives. Biography of Joseph Gurney Cannon: history.house.gov.
• Miller Center, University of Virginia. “John Quincy Adams: Life Before the Presidency,” by Margaret A. Hogan: millercenter.org.
• Texas State Historical Association. “Houston, Sam,” by Thomas H. Kreneck: tshaonline.org.

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