Profiles in Pragmatism

With Caroline Kennedy's new Profiles in Courage for Our Time commanding much attention, it will perhaps prove worthwhile to take a moment, revisit her father's book, and consider how the assumptions and subtle deceits from the first volume of Profiles have influenced what we have before us now.

Of course, as documented long ago by Herbert Parmet, John Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning tome came from the hands of several literary elves, among them Theodore Sorenson. To this charge the loyal Sorenson replies vaguely, but perhaps legitimately, that the true author of a work is he or she who"stands behind" the words.

Sorenson has a point. Undoubtedly, John Kennedy was the source for the key notions expressed in Profiles. At the very least, he approved the exemplars of political courage presented. And he did so with a concrete ambition in mind: to make his readers (a.k.a., voters) believe that he himself revered and sought to reflect the altruistic bravery glamorized in his book.

This is a courage that involves the abandonment of cynicism. This is a courage that empowers one to swim valiantly against the tide of popular- and party-opinion, toward the greater national good, regardless of personal consequences. And this is courage that, when it appears in American political life, almost always does so as a con: an exercise in political sleight of hand.

No one understood this better than John Kennedy. A devoted student of both history and politics, Kennedy surely realized that many of the acts narrated in Profiles were simply not feats of courage. They were instead experiments in opportunism.

Let's go with just two examples.

Profiles opens by depicting John Quincy Adams who--as a young, first-term-senator from Massachusetts--renounced his father's Federalist party and supported the Jefferson Embargo of 1807. Kennedy paints this defining moment in Adams’s early career as a signal example of right overriding pragmatism. But in fact, Adams's action was not a principled, semi-suicidal defection from a sturdy political power-base. It was instead the shrewd abandonment of a diminished party with which the country at large had already lost sympathy--a party from which an ambitious young man, hurrying toward his future, was wise to flee.

Later in his book, Kennedy notices Senator Daniel Webster’s involvement with the Fugitive Slave Law: a much-debated Federal statute that helped preserve the Union as part of Henry Clay’s Compromise of 1850.

According to Profiles, when Webster of Massachusetts announced his support for the Fugitive Slave measure, he courted the hatred of a Bay-State electorate energized by radical abolitionist sentiment. Not so. Radical abolitionists were in fact a minority in Massachusetts. With his endorsement of the Compromise, Webster pragmatically bowed to the wishes of a large majority within his home state. Webster also, at the same time, secured the indebtedness of a powerful friend, Millard Fillmore, who shortly rewarded him with a Cabinet appointment.

In the real world, those in political life who brazenly and unwisely flout popular opinion wind up as mere footnotes to history. They are recalled, if at all, as oddities: freaks of political nature.

This truth was not lost on John Kennedy, who chose to have his own mention in history books be something larger than a footnote. In literature as in life, Kennedy pretended to admire and emulate the selfless political bravery that brought some to grief. But what he actually respected and aspired-to was the calculated pragmatism and knack for self-preservation with which Adams and Webster navigated the waters of public life.

In Caroline Kennedy's new Profiles in Courage for Our Time, the charade of the first volume continues. Contributed chapters authored by the likes of Michael Beschloss and Anna Quindlen depict various winners of the Kennedy Foundation's"Profiles in Courage" award, and chronicle risk-taking that never, upon analysis, seems quite real. Once again, let's go with just two examples.

Was James Florio truly putting himself out on a limb when, as Governor, he imposed an assault weapons ban in New Jersey? The people of the state widely approved Florio's action. They subsequently voted him out off office not on the score of gun control, but rather on the score of taxes he raised after promising he wouldn't.

Then we have Russ Feingold and John McCain. Did these two senators put their careers on the line when they launched their bipartisan partnership in favor of campaign finance reform? As polling data indicates, John and Joan Q. Public have always been fans of the McCain/Feingold measure. And today both Feingold and McCain (especially McCain) enjoy tremendous popularity on the street largely because of what has become their trademark issue.

It is time to rename both Caroline's book and her father's. The phrase should not be Profiles in Courage, but rather Profiles in Pragmatism.