Jack Kennedy did not write this book. The whole world knows that. The prose is Ted Sorensen’s. The ideas are Arthur Schlesinger’s. Both Sorensen and Schlesinger acknowledged as much. Even JFK did not deny it at the time. In fact, he seriously considered including Ted Sorensen as co-author.
OK, so the issue of authorship is settled. But what about the issues of content and purpose? Why did Schlesinger, Sorensen and Kennedy write this book? And why did they write it when they wrote it?
Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorensen were part of what in 1955 was considered to be the left wing of the Democratic Party. The Eleanor Roosevelt Walter Reuther Reinhold Niebuhr Adlai Stevenson wing. The internationalist, Wilsonian, world-government wing. The people who secretly believed the United Nations should supersede the United States Government as the government of America and the world, because there was too much danger that the United States Government and other democratic governments if left to themselves would backslide into fascism.
The book quotes Andrew Jackson: “One man with courage makes a majority.” The argument of the book is that courageous senators could stand alone against the will of section and party to promote the national interest. Nationalism is the theme. But not just any nationalism: liberal nationalism. At the end the authors quote Senator Robert Taft: “Liberalism implies particularly freedom of thought, freedom from orthodox dogma, the right of others to think differently from one’s self.” Sorensen and Schlesinger and the other Democratic left-liberals planted their flag on this liberalism. They thought the mission of the United States was to defend freedom in this sense against the assaults of totalitarianism from the left and the right, and in favor of what they would later call the New Frontier.
And what was that New Frontier? During the campaign of 1960 the liberals never spelled it out. They did not trust the American people to understand or support their agenda. But privately they knew what their agenda was: civil rights.
And indeed they were right. The American people did not understand or support civil rights. The Kennedys’ signature civil rights measure stalled in committee in both houses of Congress. At the time of President Kennedy’s death, the bill was bottled up and going nowhere. The people did not want it, and the southerners who dominated Congress were dead set against it. You can read the whole sad history of this in Volume III of Robert A. Caro’s magisterial book, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.”
So what is “Profiles in Courage” really about? Why in 1955 does it glorify individual senators, often conservative, who defied sectional opinion to advocate for a nationalist cause? The message is obvious, although the authors could not say it openly at the time. The book was preparing the ground for the coming effort of the Second Reconstruction, the historic attempt in the 1960’s to move the American South out of the 19th Century. In the conservative, America of 1955, the authors had to speak in code. Their choice of Jack Kennedy as a stalking horse was apt. Young Kennedy, a moderate Democrat from a conservative Irish Catholic background, was the perfect foil for their summons to the liberal movement, and particularly to liberal southerners, to gird their loins for the coming battle.
Unfortunately, Jack Kennedy did not live to see the fulfillment of the liberal mission so carefully adumbrated between the lines of “his” book. Indeed, Arthur Schlesinger received the shock of his life when the Civil Rights Bill he and Robert Kennedy had drafted up at Harvard was shepherded into law by a man they both hated as a Southern reactionary, Uncle Corn Pone, the Southern usurper who turned out in the fullness of time to be the real profile in courage who shepherded the South into the modern world.