Profiles in Courage

Profiles in Courage gathers eight sketches of United States senators who broke with their own party or their constituents to act on a principle, and the book uses each one to build an argument about what political courage actually costs. It opens with John Quincy Adams breaking from the Federalist Party, then moves through Daniel Webster's support for the Compromise of 1850, Thomas Hart Benton's opposition to extending slavery despite pressure from fellow Missouri Democrats, and Sam Houston's lonely stand against the Kansas Nebraska Act. It follows Edmund Ross casting the deciding vote to acquit Andrew Johnson at his impeachment trial, Lucius Lamar working for reconciliation between North and South during Reconstruction, George Norris challenging the near dictatorial power of House Speaker Joseph Cannon, and Robert Taft criticizing the legal basis of the Nuremberg trials. Kennedy's stated thesis, that a senator can compromise a political position without compromising himself, runs through every chapter, and the book closes with essays drawing the individual portraits together into a case for judging politicians by their willingness to risk their own careers.

The book is also, famously, not entirely what its title page claims. Kennedy conceived the project while recovering from back surgery in 1954 and 1955 and asked his aide Ted Sorensen to help research it; historians who have since examined the drafts, including biographer Craig Fehrman, conclude Sorensen wrote a first draft of most chapters and shaped much of the finished prose, while Kennedy worked most directly on the opening and closing material and made the final decisions about which senators to include. Sorensen himself acknowledged only decades later, in his 2008 memoir Counselor, that he had done a first draft of most chapters and had helped choose the words. Reading the book today means holding both things at once, a genuinely argued case for political courage and a genuine question about whose hand actually wrote it.