Profiles in Courage

Where are they today?

So U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) has a new book. It’s called Stand, and it offers a cautiously optimistic view of our dark time by harking back to individuals from our history who had the courage to take a stand and fight for justice and against injustice.

The senator was promoting his book on “Morning Joe.” But that was just the excuse for him to offer a full-throated and frightening explanation for why his Republican colleagues privately but not publicly will condemn the autocratic president and his lockstep administration in their no-compromise campaign to destroy our democracy.

He cited Trump’s despicable “Truth Social” post on the passing of Robert Mueller (“Good. I’m glad he’s dead.) and his similarly disrespectful and personally revealing postmortem for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who famously voted thumbs down on Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare. Booker said Republican senators who criticized Trump in private were simply afraid to go public for fear of his targeting them for retribution. Teddy Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit” was never meant for this.

Where are today’s profiles in courage?

The conversation brought to mind the slim 1956 book Profiles in Courage by the then junior senator from Massachusetts John F. Kennedy. It’s about eight U.S. senators “who, at crucial times in our history, risked their personal and public lives to do the one thing that seemed to itself right.” The book, largely ghost-written by Ted Sorenson, won a Pulitzer Prize, but, regardless, its essential message remains relevant.

Kennedy extols Daniel Webster, known as “the great compromiser.” “His is a story worth remembering today,” he writes. “So, I believe, are the other stories of Senators of courage—men whose abiding loyalty to their nation triumphed over all personal and political considerations…” In an arguably less partisan time, Kennedy praised the system of two parties, “not because both are right but because both are flexible.”

In a foreword, the Columbia University historian Allan Nevins wrote: “In any Senator or Representative, courage will spring not as a independent trait but from the nature of moral breadth and poise. We may add that before there may be much character and courage in Congress, there must be a great deal of it in the American people. We may hope that that, moderation, orderliness and justice as abiding traits, with the courage to defend them when attacked; if they do, the national Legislature will also exhibit them.” And when they — or a majority — don’t, well, here we are.

Still, during our history, there have been those who persist. Call them Persisters. My former Washington Post colleague Petula Dvorak is publishing a series of mini-profiles of lesser known “Persisters.” Find them here on SubStack.

My review of Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry is now up on the website of the Washington Independent Review of Books. To read it, click here.