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By Root 1426 0

I’d finished my other work each day I’d dictate into the machine,” Jack told the Boston Globe, hardly the typical regimen for the serious writing of history. What Jack was doing essentially was taking these drafts prepared by others and working them over. He had no qualms about taking the writing of others, applying a few flourishes, and passing the work off as fully his own. Sorensen, with his gift for euphemism, says that the “opening and closing chapters, which are more personal and more reflections of his philosophy, probably were more heavily influenced by his literary style than those that were simply historical accounts.” Arthur Krock recalled Jack “lying on a board in his bed, absolutely flat, with one of those blocks of yellow paper, and there he sat writing the introduction … and some of the biographical material.”

It is in the introduction and final chapter of Profiles in Courage that some of the intellectual themes of Jack’s life emerged, and they may be viewed largely as his own work. “This is a book about the most admirable of human virtues—courage,” he begins his book. Courage. Not faith. Not honor. Not honesty. Courage. It is how he judged other men, how he judged himself, and how ultimately he would choose to be judged. His father had taught him that courage was the king of all virtues in a true man’s life, and he showed that courage in his struggle against illness. He showed it when his PT-109 was sliced in two. The courage he spoke of now was political and intellectual. It was subtle, complicated, and contradictory.

Jack saw courage among his colleagues, even if others did not recognize it. And just as he primarily blamed the self-interested British populace, not their leaders, for the country’s belated rearmament before World War II, now he found fault with the American people more than with his fellow politicians. He bemoaned what he considered the misguided perception that his fellow senators were midget imposters dancing around controversial issues where great men had once bravely stood. As Jack saw it, the fault lay not with his fellow senators but more with a decline in “the public’s appreciation of the art of politics, of the nature and necessity for compromise and balance, and of the nature of the Senate as a legislative chamber.” This man who had once been so disdainful of elected officials that he talked of becoming a “public servant” now proudly called himself by the term he once found so distasteful: politician.

Acts of political courage had become more difficult now. Jack saw that “our everyday life is becoming so saturated with the tremendous power of mass communication that any unpopular or unorthodox course arouses a storm of protests,” a reaction that his political predecessors could not have envisioned. “Our political life is becoming so expensive, so mechanized and so dominated by professional politicians and public relations men that the idealist who dreams of independent statesmanship is rudely awakened by the necessities of election and accomplishment.”

Jack had prophesied that one day an American president would be confronted with the immediate prospect of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Now he saw a danger of equal but subtler form—a time when the very concept of political courage would be endangered. “And only the very courageous will be able to keep alive the spirit of individualism and dissent which gave birth to this nation,” he wrote.

Jack was writing when his own political courage was as suspect as his health. He had this book idea long before his failure to vote on the McCarthy censure, but as he wrote, he may have reflected on where that lack of action lay on the spectrum from cowardice to courage.

Courage was the highest virtue, and he aspired to a moment when he would be tested and found not wanting. The last sentences of the book are an exhortation to the American people, but also surely to Jack himself: “The stories of past courage can define that ingredient—they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself.