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  • Profiles in Courage, JFK's Book for Boys
  • John Michael (bio)

Political memoirs written during campaigns are meant to establish the candidate's fitness for office by presenting him or her as the right person for the times. Profiles in Courage, published in 1956, tells us a good deal about the political temper of the years when John F. Kennedy was establishing his credentials to run for president. It engages the triumphalist national narrative that so many Americans accepted after World War II and presents a model of selflessly heroic nationalism that Kennedy suggested had saved the US in the past and could do so again in the future. Profiles in Courage resonated with the tensions and uncertainties of the Cold War, retelling American history in a way that addressed anxieties about manly courage and national union in a moment of terrifying global challenges. The book also helped establish Kennedy's potential as a national leader by furthering the production of his own persona as a profile in courage that began with the media's celebration of his heroic service in the Pacific during World War II. But really to understand the successful production of Kennedy's public image as an embodiment of manly vigor and heroic courage—the representative of a generation "tested in war," as he himself put it during his first inaugural address—one must also remember the popular ideal of American adolescence and manhood embodied in the strenuous life championed a half-century earlier by Theodore Roosevelt. Kennedy's story, of which his book formed an important part, touched national chords of something not quite remembered but actively present nonetheless. The US brought into the postwar world a [End Page 424] sense of its own exceptionalism rooted in an extremely selective memory of its own long struggles with issues of race and belonging, and a persistent, though increasingly beleaguered, belief in America, and especially American masculinity's special place in the world. Profiles in Courage succeeded, in part, because it adopted a view of the nation's past that remained comforting to the dominant culture. Moreover, it contributed to Kennedy's self-creation as a national leader by reminding Americans that the youthful senator's own story of personal courage helped him to embody a mainstream ideal of American boyhood as a training ground for national heroes. That ideal, however, as we shall see, had its own roots in a racialized vision of national destiny that Roosevelt played a large part in formulating and that some Americans in the 1950s were only beginning to learn to disavow.

1956 was a nervous time.1 Geopolitical alliances were rigidifying into a nuclear standoff between NATO and the newly formed Warsaw Pact nations; the US and the Soviet Union took turns testing increasingly powerful hydrogen bombs that made mutually assured destruction seem less a policy and more a terrifying inevitability. Kennedy introduced Profiles in Courage by evoking the urgencies of this moment and of what he described as "that seemingly unending war to which we have given the curious epithet 'cold'" (17). Cold War perils and fears gave meaning to his opening claim that "This is a book about that most admirable of human virtues—courage. 'Grace under pressure,' Ernest Hemingway defined it" (1). He hardly needed to specify that the courage of individual Americans was a matter of national interest. "A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or reward that quality in its chosen leaders today—and in fact we have forgotten" (1). Kennedy calls upon the nation to prepare for the coming struggle: "in the days ahead, only the very courageous will be able to take the hard and unpopular decisions necessary for our survival in the struggle with a powerful enemy" (17). This rhetoric of national crisis lent urgency to Kennedy's sketches of US senators, though it had been a hundred years since most of the men featured in the book had exhibited what Kennedy estimated to be grace under political pressure by defying constituents and party to preserve the nation. No doubt, the young senator...

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