Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [81]
The book was Profiles in Courage. It was Kennedy’s tribute to eight U.S. senators who during their legislative careers had taken positions highly unpopular with their constituents. Though Kennedy dug up the stories and sketched out his intentions, Ted Sorensen did most of the actual writing. So it’s fair to call the project a collaboration. The bookish child had been father to the man. “He was enormously well read in American history and literature,” Hugh Fraser, the British politician and longtime friend, recalled. “I mean, to me, staggeringly so.” Charlie Bartlett saw the book as an obvious undertaking for Jack. “I think the whole concept of the really gutsy decisions made by men with seats in the Senate fascinated him. So when he had this time, I suppose it was natural for him to turn to it.” Bartlett, like all the others gathered around Jack in Palm Beach, would watch him, still unable to rise from bed, writing upside down on a board suspended above him.
In his memoirs, Sorensen explained that they worked on the book by letter and telephone. The reason was, he was in Washington helping hold down the fort in Kennedy’s office while his boss was on his back down in Florida. The way Sorensen explained the enterprise, Kennedy played an especially serious role composing the first and last chapters and that he, the aide, wrote the first draft of the rest.
The theme and the bulk of the content were pure Jack. As smart as Sorensen was, and even given his familiarity with politics—his Republican father had been the attorney general of Nebraska—he was nonetheless a twenty-seven-year-old. He’d arrived in Washington only four years earlier, armed with a law degree but no on-the-ground political experience. He would admit that he was nowhere as well read as Kennedy in American history.
The voice of John F. Kennedy seems to me to be noticeably audible in Profiles in Courage. For example, in the opening passages, you read, “Where else, in a non-totalitarian society, but in the political profession is the individual expected to sacrifice all—including his own career—for the national good?” It’s a quip that, I think, captures Jack Kennedy’s own ironic style. Another sentence, I believe, derives from his ability to see things from the inside out as well as the outside in: the prospect of forced retirement from “the most exclusive club in the world, the possibilities of giving up the interesting work, the fascinating trappings and the impressive prerogatives of Congressional office, can cause even the most courageous politician a serious loss of sleep.”
Here’s a story that comes clearly from the insider Jack: “One senator, since retired, said that he voted with the special interests on every issue, hoping that by election time all of them added together would constitute nearly a majority that would remember him favorably, while the other members of the public would never know about—much less remember—his vote against their welfare.” That senator was George Smathers, his pal who’d once said he didn’t “give a damn.” That business about the senator being “retired” was a cover.
David Ormsby-Gore, now a member of Parliament, stayed in touch with his friend as he recovered. “He must have been getting near the end of the book—but one of the lessons he had drawn from examining these moments in American history was that there were very much two sides to each problem. Now, this didn’t prevent him being capable of taking decisions, and knowing that somebody had to make decisions, but it did always prevent him saying, ‘I know that I have got nothing but right on my side, and the other side is entirely wrong,’ and he never would adopt that attitude.
“He said that one of the rather sad things about life, particularly if you were a politician,