The Politics of Courage: Kennedy's Profiles as Political Thought

Published in 1955 during John F. Kennedy's tenure as a senator, Profiles in Courage was an instant best-seller, receiving the Pulitzer prize that same year. Yet, for being such a widely acclaimed work, scholars and reviewers have been reluctant to engage the argument of the book. What has focused scholarly attention, instead, is intrigue: who really wrote the book,1 whose political goals were served by writing the book (Burns 168), and how might Kennedy have secured the Pulitzer prize (Burner 91, Burner and West 59)? When scholars have addressed issues in the book, it is by way of synopses, a generic praise of courage (Burner and West 57), comments on style ("Profiles" 78), or suggestions that Kennedy never actually lived up to these words.2 Part of the difficulty with interpreting Profiles is that we approach the work from within a framework grounded in a twentieth-century conception of politics as a process of interest articulation and aggregation. From this perspective, Profiles appears as little more than a series of "anecdotes" that say nothing substantive about politics but serve to advance the political interests of Kennedy.3 This framework, though, is particularly unsuitable for interpreting Profiles precisely because the book is engaged in a challenge to this framework. We will argue that Profiles introduces a different conception of politics, one suggested by the two key words in the title: "profile" and "courage." Both the language and arguments in Profiles in Courage seem foreign to us now, but they recall a Roman conception of profiling and its relationship to courage and politics. Understanding this conception requires that we look at some examples of Roman profiling to develop a vocabulary for interpreting this relationship between courage and politics. What emerges is a notion of courage that is not only necessary for, but made possible by, the public nature of politics. The very notion of profiling, with the emphasis on the individual actor in politics and the performance of courageous deeds, appears as a fundamental departure from the prevailing, twentieth-century instrumental conception of politics as "who gets what, when, how" (Lasswell). In making this argument, Profiles seeks to rehumanize the political space-to make politics a realm of human action rather than impersonal processes. Roman Profiling as Politics It is one of the distinctive features of Roman thought that there are few statements of a political theory. A Roman conception of politics emerges, instead, through a cumulation of profiles. In describing the task of the Roman historian in writing of the "kinds of lives our ancestors live," Livy suggests, "in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid" (34). The history that Livy is referring to is a history of individuals rather than of political processes and institutions. These are not biographies, in the modern sense of the term, but profiles meant to capture particular moments in a life. Though the perspectives of the likes of Cicero, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus vary widely, what they share in their emphasis on profiles is a conception of politics in which individual virtue and public life are inextricably tied to each other. Where Plutarch, for example, focuses on the character of those entering public life, Cicero makes clear how politics not only demands "great" individuals but also makes these individuals "great." The qualities of character necessary for political greatness are many, but foremost among them is courage. The reason for this is because there is an extraordinary risk that one assumes in entering a public realm that was notable, most of all, for its unpredictability. The value of profiles was that they served to recall these public deeds. …