Today’s New Yorker has an article by Nicholas Lemann on persistent questions he has about John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Profiles in Courage. Back when I was a kid, this was a popular volume in which the courageous war vet Kennedy gave brief stories of acts of courage by members of the Senate by taking stands unpopular with their constituencies. I don’t know how many people still read the book. Poor JFK has been dead for almost six decades and many question whether he even had a hand in writing the book.
One group of people who still seem to read it come from the family of Adelbert Ames. Lemann writes:
Every so often I hear from the descendants of Adelbert Ames, a Union general during the Civil War and then the governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction, objecting to a paragraph about him in John F. Kennedy’s book “Profiles in Courage,” from 1956. “No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi,” Kennedy wrote, about Ames’s governorship. Corruption was rampant. Taxes rose by a factor of fourteen. “Vast areas of northern Mississippi lay in ruins.” None of this is true, and the Ames family has been lobbying the Kennedy family to change the offending paragraph pretty much continuously for more than sixty years—including an in-person discussion with J.F.K., in 1963, conducted in the White House by Ames’s great-grandson George Plimpton, the writer and editor of The Paris Review. Nothing has worked. But maybe now, at this moment of a great national reconsideration of our history and our monuments, especially on racial grounds, it might be different?
“Profiles in Courage” was published when Kennedy was thirty-eight years old. He was the junior senator from Massachusetts, in the early stages of planning his campaign for President in 1960. The main body of the book is eight profiles of United States senators whom Kennedy considered to have been extraordinarily courageous, starting chronologically with John Quincy Adams, in the early nineteenth century, and ending with Robert A. Taft, in the mid-twentieth century. It’s irresistible to think about the book in the light of Kennedy’s political ambitions. Thanks to his heroic and well-publicized exploits as a Navy officer in the South Pacific during the Second World War, courage was already identified as one of Kennedy’s salient qualities, and the framing device for the book underscored that. The courageous subjects were distributed pragmatically, considering that Kennedy was a regional politician preparing to go national. Two were from the Northeast, two from the South, and four from the Midwest. Three were Republicans. They stood for a broad range of political causes.
Like many Americans who went to Catholic school in the 1960s and 1970s, I read the book enthusiastically. Kennedy was a hero and a martyr to us. He was also polished and well-educated, the sort of model for the young Irish Catholic that President Obama is for African American children. I reread the book years later, saw a lot of sins of omission, like just about anything involving racial inequality, and put the book away as a politician’s history book designed to court favor with voters rather than as a serious historical enterprise. Lemann says:
Three of Kennedy’s eight Senate heroes were slaveholders. None won inclusion in the pantheon for having taken what we’d now think of as a lonely liberal stand. Taft’s courageous act was opposing the Nuremberg trials for the members of the Nazi high command, because they had not broken any German law; he preferred that they be put in a Napoleon-like exile in some remote place. “These conclusions are shared, I believe, by a substantial number of American citizens today,” Kennedy asserted. Daniel Webster’s was breaking with anti-slavery opinion in his home state of Massachusetts to support the Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act, making it a federal crime for Northerners to give shelter to escaped slaves. For Webster, Kennedy noted admiringly, “the preservation of the Union was far dearer to his heart than his opposition to slavery.” John C. Calhoun, the most influential pro-slavery politician of the nineteenth century, didn’t get a full-dress profile, but Kennedy included him in a chapter devoted to senators who almost made the cut, and mentioned him throughout the book, always with the greatest respect, as, for example, “that revered sage of the South.” Not long after “Profiles in Courage” was published, Kennedy chaired a committee charged with choosing five outstanding senators in American history. Calhoun, Taft, and Webster were all on the list. One can guess from this sentence where the Kennedy of that moment would have stood on the question of the South’s continuing to honor the Confederate flag: “Surely in the United States of America, where brother once fought against brother, we did not judge a man’s bravery under fire by examining the banner under which he fought.”
Courage is a quality that can be deployed toward many different ends. Kennedy defined courage in a U.S. senator as a willingness to take a stand that is unpopular with one’s constituents and the leadership of one’s party, in service of a larger, higher cause. But what cause? For Kennedy in the mid-nineteen-fifties, it wasn’t anything in the range of what we’d now regard as social justice, especially racial justice. Something else was at the top of the list of moral absolutes for him: maximizing the national power, wealth, and influence of the United States. In the early nineteenth century, it was crucial to expand the territory under American control. Then it became necessary to postpone the Civil War, through compromises like the one Webster supported, until the North became populous and economically powerful enough to defeat the South. After 1865, reconciliation between the former Confederacy and the Union was essential. At the moment when Kennedy was writing, the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, he claimed, “only the very courageous will be able to take the hard and unpopular decisions necessary for our survival in the struggle with a powerful enemy.” Kennedy consistently dismissed political reformers who, by his lights, failed to understand the primacy of the national interest. Abolitionists were an example. “Compromise need not mean cowardice,” Kennedy declared, as long as it served what he—wholly in accord with the liberal-centrist conventional wisdom of the time—considered to be a higher purpose. That was why he chose so many compromisers on racial justice as his exemplars of courage.
The paragraph at the heart of the Ames family’s quarrel with “Profiles in Courage” is in the profile of Senator Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, the most prominent Mississippi politician of the late nineteenth century. Lamar, an especially militant secessionist and defender of slavery, won inclusion because of a counterintuitively warm eulogy he gave on the Senate floor, in 1874, for Charles Sumner, the radical Republican senator from Massachusetts, who had been a leading abolitionist and had been subjected to a brutal beating in the chamber, in 1856, by a South Carolina congressman. Kennedy endowed all his subjects with a general-purpose magnificence—Lamar more than most. He wrote, “No petty issues, no political trivia, not even private affairs, were permitted to clutter up his intellect. No partisan, personal, or sectional considerations could outweigh his devotion to the national interest and to the truth.” Lamar decided to give his eulogy for Sumner, even though it would be unpopular back home, because “he came to believe that the future happiness of the country could only lie in a spirit of mutual conciliation and cooperation between the people of all sections and all states.” During Lamar’s speech itself, “his full, rich voice touched the hearts of every listener with its simple plea for amity and justice between North and South.”
There is another way to look at Lamar’s motivations. The post-Civil War Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution gave civil rights and voting rights to millions of formerly enslaved Black people in the former Confederacy. The white South considered full citizenship for African-Americans to be absolutely unacceptable—especially voting rights, especially in Black-majority states like Mississippi, which quickly elected a combination of Black officeholders and whites, like Ames, who appealed to Black voters’ interests. As Lamar put it in a letter to a friend, written a few months before his eulogy for Sumner, “Where is the constituency to which these men will be responsible? Negroes! . . . If there ever was a time when the white people of this state, the men in whose veins flows the blood of the ruling races of the world, should rise & with one unanimous voice protest against the domination about to piled upon them the present is that time.” Whites all over the South organized terrorist militias to prevent Black people from voting; if you’ve ever seen “Birth of a Nation,” you’ll recall that the climactic scene of Ku Klux Klan triumph is set at a polling place. The only protection against the militias was to station federal troops in the South to guarantee fair elections.
For public purposes, Lamar and other respectable Southern whites insisted that what they objected to was not African-American rights but corruption, federal domination, and a punitive attitude toward the South. Through the early eighteen-seventies, most white liberals in the North, including most of the former leading abolitionists, came to accept this view. So, over time, did most white academics, intellectuals, and politicians. Kennedy referred to Reconstruction as “a black nightmare the South never could forget.” Reconstruction became a kind of enforced blank in the white-liberal mind: everybody knew that it had been terrible and had to end so that the country could move forward, but the details were out of focus. This form of collective, convenient historical forgetting—a kind of willed ignorance or amnesia about horrors that were richly documented by government investigators at the time—prevailed for eighty years, until the civil-rights movement finally began to awaken the slumbering consciences of white people outside the South.
In 1876, Ames was ousted from the governorship of Mississippi after a terrorist-dominated election, which a weary President Ulysses S. Grant, who for years had been far out ahead of the rest of his Administration in supporting Reconstruction, declined to order federal troops to supervise. In 1876, several other Southern states adopted the “Mississippi Plan” to suppress the Black vote during the Presidential election, and the result was an essentially tied national vote. Lamar, in Kennedy’s account, was one of those Southern Democrats who then magnanimously consented to the installing of a Republican President, Rutherford B. Hayes, in return for the removal of federal troops from the South. Lamar’s eulogy for Charles Sumner, in other words, was part of a campaign that led to the nullification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in the South and the advent of the Jim Crow era. That is what national reconciliation meant.
Congress passed no federal civil-rights legislation between 1875 and 1957. Kennedy voted for the 1957 bill, which gestured, without a tough enough enforcement mechanism, in the direction of finally making the Fifteenth Amendment the law of the land. But he also voted for an amendment proposed by Southerners that required a jury trial for those accused of violating the law. Everybody knew what this meant: Southern juries were all-white. In 1960, Kennedy carried most of the formerly Confederate states, and won the Presidential election by a thin margin. Afterward, he began to move cautiously toward a fuller embrace of civil rights, and this is now what the Kennedy family highlights as being at the heart of his legacy. The late congressman John Lewis, exactly the kind of person who wasn’t in “Profiles in Courage,” won the family’s only Profile in Courage Award for Lifetime Achievement.
What should we do about “Profiles in Courage”? It isn’t as if the paragraph about Adelbert Ames—who, according to Kennedy, was “chosen Governor by a majority composed of freed slaves and Radical Republicans, sustained and nourished by Federal bayonets”—is the only one that is problematic today. A comprehensive revision to meet contemporary standards would be just about impossible, or would have to resemble the Talmud, with each page of the original text surrounded by a thick doughnut of emendations and arguments. Still, the book makes for an excellent example of a number of important points. It is perilous to try to understand history as a procession of heroes. Imposing the prevailing moral certainties of a moment backward through time insures perishability. Assuming that texts should be exemplary, and that if they’re not they shouldn’t be read, is foolhardy. People are smart enough to be able to disassemble, reconsider, and reject, rather than simply imbibe uncritically, the message of a book like “Profiles in Courage,” as a lesson in the dangers of historical misunderstanding. And that’s what they should do now.
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