11/22/63 by Stephen King

11/22/63
By Stephen King
Copyright 2011

Stephen King explores a new genre of writing as he undertakes time travel and dystopian futures in his latest novel. King, who loathes doing research, did his homework and produced a fantastic novel based on the real events leading up to and during the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.

Jake Eppling is a recently divorced teacher forced to teach English in summer GED classes. He loathes the process of grading student essays which vary in quality, with none ever rising to the level of good. However, one essay stands out in the latest batch. The school’s janitor, who is earning his GED, writes about the night his alcoholic father broke into a rage and killed his entire family – save our janitor – on Halloween Night.

Jake is moved by the simple prose of the profoundly emotional story. He and the janitor, Harry Dunning, later celebrate Harry's graduation at a retro 1950s diner owned by a friend of Jake’s named Al Templeton. Al takes their picture and puts it on his wall of fame – a collection of his customers who are really all average Joes.

A few days later, while at school, Jake receives a call from Al which is alarming and strange since Jake didn’t think the two knew each other quite well enough for Al to interrupt him at work. Al tells Jake he has to see him tonight at the diner – it is an emergency.

Jake meets Al and notices his friend’s physical condition has deteriorated dramatically in just a few short days. He appears to have aged years. Al tells Jake this is because he’s been living the last several years in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While living in that time, he’s developed lung cancer and it is terminal.

He has summoned Jake because he must share his secret and his goal with someone before he passes on. Al tells Jake that there is a temporal anomaly – or a time portal – in the pantry of his little greasy spoon diner – a diner which will undoubtedly be torn down upon Al’s untimely death. This temporal anomaly has but one terminus – October 1958 Maine. Al says that he dedicated more than four years to being at the right place at the right time to save President Kennedy from assassination. In Al’s mind, the world would be a better place had Kennedy not died that November afternoon.

The temporal anomaly has a fixed return point in time and place as well. The return is always back to Al’s diner and the return time is always just two minutes after you leave. If you go back, all the changes wrought previously are reset. Al invites Jake to try it out. All he has to lose in his own time and place is two minutes of his time.

Jake resolves to return to Derry, Maine in October 1958 to stop his janitor’s father from killing his family. He steps through the portal and finds himself outside of a working textile mill and it does appear to be 1958. He is greeted by a drunken old man who asks Jake for a dollar to take advantage of a two for one special at a liquor store just around the corner. This man, who Al calls the Yellow Card Man because of the strange yellow card stuck in the band on the guy’s hat. Jake gives him fifty cents as Al instructs him to do.

He is struck by the differences in his hometown and the cultural differences as well. Well stocked with 1950s vintage cash, courtesy of Al who used his knowledge of future sporting events to amass a healthy stock of cash, Jake acquires a set of wheels and motors off for Derry to save Harry Dunning’s father from killing his family.

While biding his time and trying to learn more about Dunning, Jake acquaints himself with 1950s culture. He buys the right clothes and tries to learn to adjust his speech and mannerisms for the times – with uneven results. He also encounters two characters well known to fans of Stephen King. Richie Tozier and Beverly Marsh, just a few months removed from sending IT into deep hibernation, are in the park trying to learn the fine art of swing dancing with a battery powered record player. Jake stops long enough to provide a little instruction. He also encounters the taciturn and abrupt Norbert Keene, proprietor of Derry’s only apothecary who, one day in the summer of 1958, told Eddie Kaspbrak that the only asthma he had was the asthma his mother placed in his head.

Halloween night finally arrives and Jake prepares to make his move. However, Mr. Dunning the elder has more than one enemy and Jake has tipped his hand to this guy who is determined to stop Jake from killing Dunning so he can do it himself. He and Al eventually head to the Dunning house together and encounter Mr. Dunning in his full rage. Dunning kills one of his sons with a hammer, but Jake and his accomplice are able to save the wife, the daughter, and Harry Dunning – future janitor extraordinaire.

After what seems like a month in another time, Jake returns to 2011 to find Al patiently waiting for him, finishing the cigarette he started when Jake left. Jake tells Al that he is successful in preventing the horror that would shape Harry Dunning’s life. Al asks Jake to consider taking over the quest to save Kennedy and change the world for the better. Jake, born long after Kennedy’s untimely demise, says he will take it under advisement.

Jake returns to the school to find that Harry Dunning is not a janitor there and never was. This does not particularly surprise Jake, so he starts research to find out what happened to Harry Dunning. The Internet reveals no clues. It seems there never was a Harry Dunning. Finally, Jake is able to track down the sister whom he calls. She informs Jake that Harry grew up and went off to fight in Vietnam where he was killed in action.

Jake is distraught that he doomed a man to die in an undeclared war instead of living out full life. He reasons that if he goes back again, saves Harry Dunning again, and then saves Kennedy, that Kennedy will not escalate the conflict in Vietnam and Harry Dunning will be saved by the wise political actions of JFK. (This is specious historically, but serves the story).

Jake goes to Al’s house to tell him that he’s decided to make the trip. However, when he gets there, he finds that Al has ended his life and his suffering with an overdose of painkillers. Jake helps himself to the remainder of Al’s 1950s cash and heads for the past. He takes with him Al’s extensive notes on the Kennedy assassination and the biographical notes on the last years of the misbegotten life of Lee Harvey Oswald to guide him.

First, he goes back to Derry and, in a much neater fashion, saves the Dunning family. Finding Derry, Maine to be an unfriendly, unsettling place he’s eager to vacate, Jake attains an education degree from a correspondence school and heads to Florida where, using his fake credentials, he gets a job as a substitute English teacher.

Jake warms to his job and his colleagues. While in Florida, he places a number of bets on sporting events. Some are small, routine bets. But others are high yield bets which are sure things to Jake with his knowledge of events, but draw attention from his bookie with strong ties to organized crime. Sensing he has overplayed his hand, Jake vacates Florida and heads for Texas. He later learns that the house he was renting was firebombed shortly after he left town.

He settles in the town of Jodie, Texas and takes a job teaching English there. He soon falls for the school librarian, Sadie Dunhill who is in the process of divorcing her husband who lives back in Atlanta. The two quickly fall in love, but Sadie soon grows suspicious of Jake for his strange language and odd statements. Despite his best efforts, Jake can’t help but have lapses and one day, starts singing Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones – a song’s lyrics that were mildly risqué in 1971 when it was released and would be over the top by the standards of 1960.

Sadie pressures Jake to tell her more about who he is and where he came from, suspecting that Jake is holding back. Jake finally admits there is more to his story, but will not tell her. She breaks off their relationship at the end of the school year. Sadie heads off for Las Vegas to establish short term residency to get her Vegas divorce. Jake heads for Fort Worth where Lee Harvey Oswald will soon set up residence.

Jake rents the house across the street from the house that Lee and Marina Oswald will soon take up residency in a Fort Worth slum. Jake also finds a bookie so he can maintain his cash flow. He talks to the current residents who are preparing to vacate the home that the Oswalds will soon occupy. The woman’s name is Ivy Templeton. The name is striking in the story because it happens to be Al’s last name. Through Mrs. Templeton, Jake is able to learn the layout of the house across the street.

Jake settles in to observe and study the Oswalds and to worry about Sadie whom he misses badly. The Oswalds soon take up residence. Jake has bugged their apartment and studies the Oswald family with the underachieving Lee with his delusions of grandeur, his domineering mother who henpecks him constantly, and his lovely, but submissive wife whom he beats and mentally abuses.

One of Al’s major concerns he documents in his notes is whether or not Lee received help in killing Kennedy. Conspiracy theories regarding the Kennedy assassination have been an industry unto themselves in the United States since that date in Dallas and Al had one major concern regarding a Russian émigré who was close to Oswald.

The Oswalds receive frequent visits from a Russian named George de Mohrenschildt who is obsessed with a ranting right winger who takes to the radio to speak out against all things communist. General Edwin Walker will soon survive an assassination attempt undertaken by Lee Harvey Oswald. Jake is convinced that if he ascertains whether or not de Mohrenschildt was actually a participant or just an agent provocateur, he will know the truth about Oswald’s role as either a lone assassin or patsy in a conspiracy.

Jake continues to worry about Sadie as well. He is convinced that Sadie’s strange husband is not going to take the divorce well and is concerned. One night he calls Sadie and she doesn’t answer. Convinced that something is wrong, he heads back to Jodie instead of observing the assassination attempt on General Walker. As Jake often notes, the past is obdurate; it does not want to be changed. Time itself is fighting Jake’s efforts to change it.

He arrives in Jodie to find that Sadie has been attacked by her ex-husband. She is badly beaten and slashed across the face by her husband who is killed by one of Sadie’s fellow teachers. Sadie falls into a deep depression over her disfigurement and injuries. Jake briefly abandons his pursuit of Oswald to help Sadie return to mental and physical health.

The Cuban Missile Crisis comes and goes. As Sadie and the rest of the world look on in terror as the two superpowers play chicken over a Caribbean island, Jake reassures Sadie that the Russians will look for a way out to save face and avoid nuclear war. When Sadie demands to know how Jake knows this, he finally confides in her his true nature. She doesn’t believe it at first, but with more and more information flowing from Jake, she soon accepts it.

The Oswalds abandon Fort Worth and head for a brief sojourn in New Orleans before they will return to Dallas one final time. Lee rents the downstairs apartment in the duplex where the Oswalds will reside upstairs. Jake is resolved to track all of Oswald’s final days to ascertain whether or not there was a conspiracy. He visits Dealey Plaza and visits the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository.

Before he can learn much, he is attacked by a bookie who is angry over having lost so much money to Jake. It turns out that his bookie in Derry, in Fort Worth, in Florida, and in Dallas are all linked to the same organized crime organization. Time is being obdurate again. One of the Dallas police officers investigating Jake’s assault is none other than Officer J.D. Tippit – the officer Oswald will kill in his desperate attempt to escape police pursuit.

Jake is brain damaged and much of his memory, his ability to speak, and his ability to reason is damaged. He has no recall of who he really is and what he is doing. Sadie tries to help him regain his senses. As the final month passes and October 1963 turns to November 1963, the man who would stop history altering events isn’t sure who he is.

Finally, one phrase breaks through Jake’s mental block – “The word of Al.” Jake remembers that he had a notebook put together by a guy named Al that told all about what he was doing and why he was doing it. Jake retrieves the notebook from a safety deposit box and reads it. Most of his memories come flooding back to him over the next several days.

November 22 finally arrives and Jake takes off in a frenzy to reach Dealey Plaza in time to save the president. Sadie is determined to accompany him. Along the way, they have a flat tire, are caught in a traffic jam, and are in a car wreck. History is trying to keep him from his appointment with Oswald.

Sadie and Jake race the final few blocks to the book depository and climb the steps to the sixth floor. As they weave through the stacks of books, they hear the first shot fired and see Oswald sitting at his perch, chambering another round into the bolt action rifle. Jake shoots and misses Oswald. Oswald turns and fires, hitting Sadie in the chest. Jake returns fire and kills Oswald. Kennedy’s motorcade flies out of Dealey Plaza and back to Love Field.

Jake spends Sadie’s last moments with her before she dies and he is arrested. The police question him but his story matches what apparently happened: Jake saved the president’s life. While still at police headquarters, Jake receives a call. President Kennedy calls to thank him for saving his life as well as that of Jackie and others in the motorcade. Jake becomes a national hero.

The FBI accepts that Jake is not part of any conspiracy to kill Kennedy, but they want him to drop out of sight for awhile so they can investigate, not entirely sure how Jake knew that Oswald was going to be at that particular place on that particular day. Before Jake leaves 1963, a massive earthquake kills thousands in California – an event that did not happen in the normal course of history.

Heartbroken over the death of Sadie, Jake returns to Maine and the textile mill where the portal still exists. There, he finds another man standing where the Yellow Card Man used to stand. This man reveals himself to be a guardian over the time portal. There are many portals and many timelines, the guardian tells Jake. The guardian that Jake knew as the Yellow Card Man died of alcoholism. It is an occupational hazard, the guardian tells Jake, with many guardians driven insane by trying to keep timelines straight in their own head.

This particular guardian wears a green card in his hat band. This, he says, is indicative that this string of time is healthy. He encourages Jake to return to his own time. Jake is eager to see the world as it would have been had Kennedy survived. He arrives to find the future he created quite dystopian.

The world has been nuked. Kennedy did not save the world. Instead, he became increasingly unpopular. Hostilities between the superpowers increased with the gunslinger Kennedy in the White House. Ronald Reagan, elected president in 1976, made matters worse and eventually nuclear war broke out and the government of the United States fell. Maine seceded from the union and joined Canada, Jake learns. He learns this from none other than Harry Dunning – the man he saved from Vietnam but doomed to live out his years in post nuclear Canada.

Realizing that he’s badly messed up time itself and fundamentally altered the course of the human race, Jake returns to 1958. He can immediately set things to right by sampling returning to 2011. But he can’t forget Sadie. He checks into a hotel room and contemplates returning to Jodie, getting a teaching job, and meeting and falling in love with Sadie all over again to live out his life in the 1960s and 1970s.

Finally, he realizes he cannot doom man on earth for his own lost love and steps back through the portal one final time. All is as it should be. He travels to Jodie to find Sadie, now an old woman, has survived the attack by her ex husband without his help. She is an old woman now, having never married. Jake asks her to dance. . .

Give Stephen King kudos for doing his homework on the Kennedy assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald before writing this book. In his closing notes, King tells us that he and a research assistant invested hours in interviewing historians, visiting Dallas, and learning all they could about Oswald. Their primary text in research was William Manchester’s 1967 book, The Death of a President. This factual account of Oswald’s actions prior to killing Kennedy and the events themselves that day in Dallas is a narrative account of history, unfettered by the wild conspiracy theories that developed later. Although it was one of the first books published on the subject, it remains one of the most authoritative. I've read more than a dozen books on the subject of the Kennedy assassination and none are more straightforward in the telling than Manchester's.

As for the story, it is one of King’s better works – certainly the best thing he’s written since Cell. As is King’s wont, each character is provided with extensive backstory, making them deep and rich. The story is not only a narrative of a man trying to change history, but a man observing what was good and bad about another time and a man in love, which is always timeless. King weaves Jake’s dual motivations together seamlessly and we experience Jakes struggle between what he regards as his duty to save Kennedy and his desire to love Sadie.

I feared that this book would become an outlet for all of Stephen King's liberal politics and fantasies to play out. I've never let the difference between King's politics and my own discourage me from enjoying his work. Seldom do his politics creep into his work, even when dealing with political issues such as he did in The Dead Zone. When the do, such as in the horrible book, The Regulators, it is always distracting. I was certain that King's political hero, Gary Hart, was going to be savior of the world in the end.

Alas, King spared us from all that. He instead developed a plausible series of political events that did not disparage any person or political party. Gary Hart didn't even figure into the equation.

King, like many writers his age, has romanticized that time of the late 1950s and early 1960s as a wonderful time. I’ve heard of people referring to November 22, 1963 as the day the “nation lost its innocence.” King does not rhapsodize on how beautiful that period was and how innocent they all were back then. His story points up the overt racism, sexism, and narrow mindedness of American culture as well as the terrifying international events that transpired. He notes that Dallas circa 1963 was a mean place. It was and the political rifts that existed between the competing ideologies were as wide then as they are today as is evidenced by the ascendency of ardent right winger Barry Goldwater to the Republican presidential nomination in 1964.

But he also notes how we, as a people, were less suspicious of each other. How trusting we were in our fellow man 50 years ago as opposed to now. Some things, as King notes, do get worse with the passage of time. We are a nation of paranoids now when compared to the halcyon days of modern society in 1963.

King has reverted to form in linking 11/22/63 to his earlier works – a practice he’d all but given up. We see Beverly Marsh and Richie Tozier from IT. Also in Derry are the aforementioned Norbert Keene as well as the Tracker Brothers who own the trucking depot that became the metaphorical mental refuge of the main character in the novel Dreamcatcher. King seems to revel in his return to Derry and helps the reader revel in it as well. Derry is a dark place, King readers know. Now we have Jake Eppling’s confirmation as he was palpably aware of the Derry’s dark undercurrents. There is also passing references to the Shawshank State Prison that is the setting for Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and is referenced in so many other King Castle Rock stories.

King uses the name Ivy Templeton as the person who rented the Fort Worth home before the Oswalds. Many horror fans will recognize her as the young girl who dies at the end of Frank DeFilitta’s 1976 novel Audrey Rose. I doubt this was an homage to DeFelitta since King ridiculed his work in his 1981 non fiction book, Danse Macabre, saying his work and that of author John Saul were not what he regarded as good horror. Perhaps just a name King grabbed out of his subconscious. He never elaborates on it.

The book comes in at just under 900 pages. While King is often criticized (often rightfully) for overwriting his stories, 11/22/63 is not one of them. In those 900 pages, there is nary an unimportant event or word. The story is epic and King tells it in the grandeur it deserves.

Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy

Profiles in Courage
By John F. Kennedy
Copyright 1955

Forward by Allan Nevins
Historian Allan Nevins describes for readers how each of the subjects selected by Sen. Kennedy for his book was a hero who risked entire careers, reputations, and lives in defense of a noble cause in the face of tremendous adversity.

Preface
Sen. Kennedy describes how the idea for this book and most of its research and writing took place as he convalesced from back surgery. He then proceeds to thank the people who helped him with his research, writing, and editing. Perhaps it is fitting that he saved Theodore Sorenson, whom he calls his research associate, for last in his list of thank yous because it has become apparent over time that, while Kennedy selected the subjects and had a hand in the writing of the book, the actual prose belong to Sorenson.

Courage and Politics
In this remarkable essay, Kennedy describes the constant conflicts and pressures confronted by members of Congress when they go about their business and how one’s conscience, desire to accomplish goals must be balanced against his loyalty to his constituents, his loyalty to his nation, and his own sense of what needs to be done.

Kennedy’s essay today should be required reading for all students of American government. With the entirely dysfunctional Senate we have now, this essay is illuminating. With the wingnuts of both parties demanding ideological purity – profiles in courage on each and every issue – this essay is particularly topical.

This is because most people do not understand how the Senate works and what a Senator must do to accomplish the greater good. They assume that the send their senator to Washington to always vote his or her conscience and always do what they know to be right while always voting the way his constituents would have him vote.

However, a senator who routinely defies his party will never accomplish anything. He will be marginalized, so party loyalty is of the essence. Fellow senators understand the pressures of loyalty versus constituent interests and matters of conscience and one need not tow the party line constantly to be an accepted member of the club. But to expect a senator to maintain ideological purity at all times, to vote strictly in the interest of his state at all times when the needs of the nation must be weighed, is unreasonable.

I disapprove of today’s ideological electorate every bit as much as I disapprove of Congress.

Members of the Tea Party and the uber liberals of the Democratic party should read Kennedy’s essay and take it to heart.

Part One: Time and Place
Kennedy sets the stage for his first profile in courage by describing a U.S. Senate that is not the great deliberative body it was designed to be. In 1803, the Senate was little more than an advisory body to the president and the disposer of what the House proposed.

Thus the Senate was until forced to act on the possibility of war for the young nation. As British naval vessels seized American ships and American sailors and impressed them into service in the British Navy in the country’s war against the French, it was clear the situation was becoming untenable for the United States and action would soon be necessary.

Here, we see a young U.S. Senator, heir to a tarnished family legacy, struggle between what he knows is in the best interest of his nation and what the constituents in his home state want and need. The debate over American declaration of war upon Great Britain after the incident between the American ship, The Chesapeake and the British ship, The Leopard.

John Quincy Adams
History refers to John Quincy Adams as “Old Man Eloquent.” This nom de plume comes from his later years in the House of Representatives fighting the fight against slavery in the early days of the abolitionist movement. But before he served his long term in the House, and before he spent four unhappy years in the White House, John Quincy Adams served as the junior senator from Massachusetts.

Young Adams was a Federalist like his father before him. Having served as an ambassador during his father’s administration, he was recalled after Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams to gain the presidency. Massachusetts remained a strong Federalist stronghold and shortly after his return to the United States, Adams was appointed to the Senate by the Massachusetts legislature.

It did not take him long to earn the scorn of Federalists in Massachusetts. In 1803, he had supported Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. Federalists regarded this as an unconstitutional expansion of executive power. The party, now relegated to a New England sectional party, also saw the westward expansion as a threat to their regional political power. Adams was excoriated in his home state for his support of Jefferson.

After the Chesapeake Incident, Adams was in a quandary which would require him to tap all of the courage he could muster. To retaliate, Jefferson had proposed an embargo on trade with Great Britain. Massachusetts and New England relied heavily on this trade for their economic livelihood. As the war between Great Britain and France wore on, the sentiment in New England was decidedly pro-British.

But Adams realized that such an attack could not pass without retaliation. America was still a young nation and Great Britain was showing contempt for American sovereignty. Although his constituents would have him support and represent their interests in the U.S. Senate, Adams viewed the problem as a national problem. He ultimately cast his vote with the Republicans in favor of the embargo.

The reaction in Massachusetts was every bit as bad as Adams had anticipated. He was excoriated in newspapers, deserted by friends, mocked to his face. What must have made it even more painful for young John Quincy Adams was he committed this act of party defiance in support of Thomas Jefferson – a man he despised for his cunning and duplicity in defeating his father for the presidency.

But Adams expressed no regrets over the vote. He appeared at a Republican meeting to discuss the embargo. To Federalists, this apostasy was beyond the pale. The embargo went into effect and hard times fell on Massachusetts. Adams would not be sent back to the Senate when his term expired.

Time bore out Adams’ wisdom. The British continued and ramped up their antagonism of the United States, eventually leading to war. Today, it is easy to see the wisdom of Adams’ approach to his duties as a legislator. But viewed through Adams’ eyes at the time, it must have seemed to be political suicide. It was not.

Adams would go on to assist in the formation of the Whig Party and would be elected President. His defeat for re-election also seemed to portend his political death. However, he was sent by the electors of his congressional district to the House of Representatives where he served for many years until his death in the House chambers in 1848. He and Andrew Johnson remain the only two presidents to rejoin the legislature upon leaving the presidency.

Part Two: Time and Place
By 1850, the Senate had evolved into the great deliberative body envisioned by the Founding Fathers. This was the Senate’s golden age with the likes of Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, Henry Clay, Salmon Chase, Thomas Hart Benton, and Sam Houston graced the stately senate chamber.

The great issue of the day was slavery and maintaining the union in the face of growing antipathy for the South’s Peculiar Institution in the North and growing distrust of the North’s political clout in the House. Repeatedly, states were admitted two at a time to maintain the balance between slave and free states in the Senate. The architect for these compromises was the Kentucky Senator, Henry Clay.

This delicate balancing act was thrown off balance by the acquisition of Texas and other new lands in the Mexican-American War and the Wilmot Proviso which proposed banning slavery in any new state or territory acquired during that war. Secessionists convened at Nashville and began laying out a plan for the southern states to secede from the union.

The Great Compromiser Henry Clay once again took up legislative pen and hammered out a compromise he hoped would restore balance and preserve the union. He crafted the Compromise of 1850 which called for: 1) California was to be admitted as a free state; 2)New Mexico and Utah were to be organized as territories with no declaration as to whether they were free or slave holding territories; 3) Texas was to be compensated for territory which it ceded to New Mexico; 4) slavery was abolished in Washington, D.C.; 5) Strengthening the Fugitive Slave Act to assure that slaves fleeing to the north would not be given amnesty from their southern owners. Like most compromises, there was something for everyone to hate in the compromise.

Sectional tensions were at their highest. In this chapter, Kennedy profiles Daniel Webster of Massachusetts who sacrificed his political career to support the compromise and the union by delivering his famous Seventh of March speech, Thomas Hart Benton who, despite the pro-slavery sentiments of his state, fought to preserve the union, and Sam Houston, the Texas patriot who sacrificed the adoration of his fellow Texans in the name of American unity.

Daniel Webster
Kennedy notes that Daniel Webster was the greatest orator in the history of the Senate. With today’s lengthy quorum calls, floor maneuvers, speechless filibusters, and vacant chambers, it is hard to believe that one man could command the attention of 99 fellow senators. Daniel Webster was such a man.

While Webster is a vaunted historical figure today, he was not for many years. His name was held in scorn for betraying the cause of abolition for which he had fought his entire career. As was John Quincy Adams, Webster was a Massachusetts man and the state that led the way toward American independence did not value independence in its senators. It demanded that they represent their interests. As far as Massachusetts was concerned, their interests lied in the abolition of slavery.

Kennedy points out that Webster, while a great orator who moved audiences with his speeches, was a flawed man. While it might be a stretch to say he was on the take or corrupt, he did expect to be paid for favors delivered. Webster accepted cash and gifts from all comers and had no qualms about doing so, nor did he try to hide it.

When the time came for Clay to push for passage of his compromise he hoped would one more time maintain the union in the face of sectional tension, he knew he needed Daniel Webster to deliver. Clay called on Webster one cold evening and the two talked late into the night about how Webster could play his part in sustaining American unity.

On March 7, 1850, Daniel Webster prepared to deliver his speech. The Senate gallery was packed with people who had traveled from all parts of the country to hear the man from Massachusetts defend Clay’s compromise. Senators stood in the aisle, offering their seats to the women present.

Vice President Fillmore gaveled the chamber into order and opened the Senate for business. The senator who held the floor immediately yielded to Webster. He rose and began in his measured voice, “I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American and a member of the Senate of the United States. . .I speak today for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.”

For the next three hours, Webster spoke. The galleries were silent. Senators listened with rapt attention. The venerable and frail John Calhoun, champion of the southern cause, was assisted to his seat to listen. When Webster yielded the floor, the chamber was still silent, stunned by Webster's brilliant oratory as well as the position he’d taken in favor of compromise.

Like most Massachusetts men, Webster had dedicated his life to the abolition of slavery. Now, he’d foregone a lifetime of advocacy in the cause of American union. As they’d done to Adams when he defied his state in the cause of his country, the people of Massachusetts excoriated him with venomous attacks. He was a political pariah in his home state.

History bore out much of what Webster prophesized in his speech. He noted there could be no peaceful disunion. The dissolution of the states, he predicted, would be convulsive, difficult, and probably bloody. A prescient man was Daniel Webster.

But his support for the compromise disarmed southern critics. It won the day for Clay’s compromise and the union was preserved for another 11 years.

Webster had always aspired to the presidency. Following his speech, he sought the Whig nomination for the presidency. His rival was President Millard Fillmore who had become president upon the death of Zachary Taylor. Fillmore had no declared position on slavery other than compromise. Nor did the Whig party have a declared position. Nonetheless, northern abolitionists in the party deadlocked the convention. The party eventually settled on Mexican-American War hero, Winfield Scott. But, without a declared position on the greatest issue of the day, the Whig Party was doomed to disunion and death. Scott would lose to pro-southern Democrat, Franklin Pierce and the Whigs would never put forward another presidential nominee of consequence.

Webster sought the nomination of his party in 1852, he would not live to cast a vote in that election. He fell from his horse in October of that year and later succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage.

Kennedy notes that Webster sacrificed everything he held dear – the love of his fellow Massachusetts men, his political aspirations, and many friendships, in the cause of preserving the union. Such political courage is almost impossible to imagine today.

Thomas Hart Benton
The U.S. Senate – the Club of 100 – is known, and has always been known – as the most pompous assemblage of people anywhere in these United States. No man was more pompous or arrogant than Thomas Hart Benton.

Benton was a vituperative, sarcastic, vain man given to leveling cutting and biting insults at those with whom he did not agree. He used the word, “sir” two or three times in one sentence, never with respect and almost always with contempt.

But, to the people of Missouri, he was their champion. He was the Senate’s chief spokesman for westward expansion; the floor leader of Manifest Destiny. He would not allow sectional tensions or slavery detract from the pursuit of Manifest Destiny – the expansion of the American country from sea to sea.

Slavery and abolition were impediments to that expansion and he scorned both equally. It was the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that created the state he represented in the Senate and allowed Missouri to enter the union as a slave state. When the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 threatened to abrogate the Missouri Compromise, Benton, with all his bluster, arrogance, and passion, made his final stand in the cause of westward expansion.

He cared little about whether Missouri was a slave state or free state. He had no patience for the arguments of abolitionists. Indeed, the Kansas-Nebraska Act offended both sections, for it called for Popular Sovereignty – or letting the people decide whether or not their new states would be slave or free.

What so disgruntled Benton was the line drawn across the United States by the proposed law. It would hinder the creation of new western states by making the entry of each new state a battle over slavery. He took to the floor of the Senate and denounced the proposed law, its supporters, and its consequences in the harshest language ever heard in that august chamber. At one point, he so enraged a fellow senator that he pulled a gun on Benton on the floor. Benton thrust open his vest and defied his fellow senator shoot him. Colleagues defused the situation before blood was shed.

The Kansas Nebraska Act was popular with the Missouri state legislature and the people of Missouri which saw its potential to expand slavery in the west. Benton saw it as a threat to union.

The Missouri legislature, dominated by fellow Democrats, decided not to send Benton back to the Senate in 1854. His unwillingness to court votes, engage lobbyists on behalf of railroads, and his nasty, arrogant disposition made it impossible for him to effectively fight for reelection. His unwillingness to put his state’s popular opinion ahead of his own belief in the importance of union and the pursuit of Manifest Destiny effectively ended the career of one of the nation’s most colorful politicians.

Were Benton a senator today, the media would no doubt carefully analyze his melt down. Politicians today do not behave as Benton did, deriding his colleagues with harsh language, dismissing ideas with which he did not agree with ugly vehemence. Indeed, today’s silent filibuster precludes the need for senators to make such declarations.

When one reads about Benton, it is impossible to not feel admiration for him in standing for the cause of union. However, as one reads the text of his various speeches and statements, laced with biting sarcasm coupled with condescending arrogance, it is also impossible to feel that, in the end, Benton got what he deserved. Arrogance such as his would have no place in today’s political discourse.

Sam Houston
Sam Houston stands as a larger than life figure in American history. The hero of Texas who defeated a much larger Mexican force at San Jacinto during the Mexican-American War, Houston was a genuine American hero of his day, much like Dwight Eisenhower would become 100 years later.

Houston was an eccentric man. He served as governor of Tennessee. But when he learned that his betrothed had only agreed to marry him out of her father’s desire to gain political clout, the heartbroken Houston left Tennessee and headed west to live with the Indians.

After living in Arkansas, he moved to the Mexico, settling in present day Texas and quickly became a high profile proponent of Texas independence. His victory at San Jacinto and his capture of Generalissimo Santa Anna made him the hero of Texas and he was elected the president of the Republic of Texas. As a strong advocate of admission of Texas to the union, he led the way on Texas’ long path to admission to the United States.

When sectional tensions of the 1850s led to Texas leaders contemplating secession, Houston spoke out forcefully against Texas leaving the union and the right of any state to secede. He had dedicated too much of his life and seen too much blood shed on Texas’ behalf to gain her admission to the union to see it scuttled by sectional tensions.

Like Benton, Houston recognized the Kansas-Nebraska Act as a dangerous law that would lead to violent separation. He opposed it vociferously, prophesying, “I see my beloved South go down in an unequal contest.”

Like others who fell on their sword in this tumultuous time, Houston fought for neither the cause of the slaveholders or the abolitionists. He was a union man. With tensions running as high as they were on the eve of secession, there was no room in the middle. Houston, unwilling to participate in the dissolution of the union, was branded a traitor by his state. He left the senate and was twice elected its governor. But when the Texas legislature ultimately voted for secession, he refused to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy and was removed from office.

Houston lived briefly in Galveston before ultimately leaving the state so embittered toward him for opposing its popular will and moved to Tennessee where he died in 1863.

Part Three Time and Place
Kennedy sets the scene of postwar America following the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomatox. Abraham Lincoln has been assassinated. The coarse, ill-mannered, and uneducated Andrew Johnson has assumed the presidency. In Lincoln’s last days, he’d been battling with Congress over the best way to reconcile the union and restore the Confederate states to the United States. That battle fell to the overmatched Johnson.

The Senate, controlled by radical Republicans wanted to punish the south for their disloyalty and make the path to statehood difficult. Johnson wanted to take an easier route – one that would restore the union with less rancor. The state was set for a battle over which branch would control policy.

Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act that required the president to seek the advice and counsel of the Senate in firing any member of the cabinet. Johnson immediately put the act to the test, discharging Secretary of War Edwin Stanton who was loyal to the Republicans. Republicans almost immediately brought impeachment charges against the president. The House voted to impeach the president and a trial was held in the Senate. There, President Johnson would need six Republicans to swing his way to keep his job.

It would be in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson that Edmund Ross of Kansas would, “. . .look into his open grave,” as he voted his conscience rather than how his constituents and party would have him vote.


Lucius Lamar would act as a healing agent in the days of Reconstruction. A Mississippi House member and later senator, he would eulogize a northern Republican with words of reconciliation – words that would inflame and anger his southern constituency. He would go on cast his vote in favor of hard currency rather than free silver in the depths of economic depression, further angering the people of Mississippi.

Edmund G. Ross
Edmund Ross came to office following the suicide of Kansas senator James Henry Lane. Lane had separated from his fellow Republicans on several votes regarding Reconstruction and was thoroughly beaten down by state and national Republicans. One of those Kansans that had a hand in Lane’s demise was Edmund Ross, a radical Republican, who had accused (falsely) Lane of financial improprieties.

In the Senate, as the trial of Andrew Johnson proceeded, Republicans caucused to ascertain how many votes they had to remove the president. Five Republicans had broken ranks and were leaning toward acquittal. Edmund Ross refused to tell his colleagues how he would vote, saying he wanted to hear all of the evidence before rendering judgment.

Ross was offered bribes, patronage, and other inducements to vote with his fellow Republicans. But he refused to allow his vote to be counted before the end of the trial.

At the end of the trial, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase sought a vote on guilt. The five Republicans who’d said they would vote against removal held out, the last vote counted was Ross’. All waited silently until Ross uttered, “not guilty.” President Johnson was spared the indignity of removal from office.

Ross’ fellow Republicans were furious with him. His Kansas constituency, so certain that he was a true Republican that would vote in their interests, were also infuriated. Newspapers excoriated him. His fellow senators shunned him. He finished out his senate term and returned to Kansas. There, he worked in the newspaper business as he had prior to entering politics. He was later appointed governor of the New Mexico territory by President Grover Cleveland.

Edmund Ross became a figure of interest in the late 1990s as the U.S. Senate proceeded with the trial of President Bill Clinton. Historians looked back on this man who had cast his vote, not with blind loyalty to his party or his constituents, but with an eye toward the future of the American government that might permanently been damaged by an overly powerful legislature and imbalance in its balance of powers.

Some journalists, mostly conservatives, derided Ross as a false hero lionized with glaring errors in Kennedy’s book. They revealed evidence that Ross had sought rather than been offered bribes and patronage. Liberal journalists held Ross up to contemporary Republicans as an example of courage they should follow.

Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar
Lucius Lamar might have been the last person any in Congress would have looked to for a plea for sanity in the days of Reconstruction and bitter feelings between the North and South following the Civil War because Lamar had been a leading proponent of secession.

As a congressman from Mississippi from 1856 to 1860, Lamar had fought hard for the southern cause. In 1860, he left the House to draft the articles of secession for Mississippi who would secede the next year. He later served in the Confederate Army as an aide to General Longsreet.

But, on the floor of the House, as Congress memorialized the most radical of the radical Republicans, Charles Sumner, Lamar asked for peace, sanity and harmony between all the states. His address moved his audience, bringing even the hardened Speaker, James Blaine to tears.

His constituents in Mississippi didn’t share Lamar’s feelings of forgiveness. They’d not forgotten Sumner’s efforts to make their lives hell in the days following the Civil War as military and carpetbagging government officials held power in their state. Newspapers railed against him and he was called traitor in some circles.

His reputation recovered and he was sent to the Senate by the state legislature in 1877. The United States was enduring a harsh depression. Exacerbated in the South by a lack of capital and business resources, the depression created widespread misery.

Many saw currency expansion through the coinage of silver as the panacea that would get the economy moving again. Silver was abundant and had climbed in value. The citizens of Mississippi demanded inflation and expansion of the supply of capital and the Mississippi legislature passed a resolution demanding that Lamar vote in favor of bimetallism.

Once again, Lamar followed his intellect and his conscience and voted against the coinage of silver. He regarded a falsely inflated currency as immoral and bad business.

His constituents were furious with him for not alleviating their misery. Rather than hide in Washington, Lamar took the road across the state, delivering speeches defending his vote for sound currency. He managed to salvage his political career and would go on to serve in the cabinet of Grover Cleveland before eventually being appointed to the Supreme Court.

Part Four: Time and Place
The time and place for the fourth part of Kennedy’s examination of courage in the Senate starts at the beginning of the 20th century. Far from that body that was so powerful in postwar America as to throw the whole system of checks and balances out of whack, the senate was now a moribund body with no dynamic leaders and no dynamic statesmen.

Into this void would step Sen. George Norris of Nebraska, a renegade Republican who made a name for himself in the House fighting to curtail the power of Speaker “Uncle Joe” Cannon and who would fight America’s entry into World War I with every parliamentary tool at his disposal. Also filling the void of statesman in the U.S. Senate was Ohio’s own, “Mr. Republican” Bob Taft whose judgment OF Nuremberg and the trial’s there were statement of conscience that challenged the conventional wisdom and political zeitgeist of his time.

George Norris
Like John Quincy Adams, it was more than one act of courage that places Sen. George Norris in Kennedy’s list of profiles in courage. Norris’ entire career in both the House and the Senate was spent bucking the system and fighting against the popular tide to defend principles in which he believed.

Norris was a loyal Republican in the House for many years. Soon, he, and other Republicans, became disaffected with the iron fist rule of Speaker “Uncle Joe” Cannon who made sure the House Rules Committee and other important committees were always stacked with loyal lieutenants, effectively controlling what legislation came before the House for votes.

He joined with progressive Republicans and Democrats in changing House rules. In parliamentary maneuvers that stunned the powerful speaker, Norris introduced legislation that assured that seniority rather than the whims of the speaker determined who sat on and chaired committees. Norris lead the charge that dethroned perhaps the most powerful Speaker of the House in U.S. history.

In the Senate, Norris fought the popular tide of war as President Woodrow Wilson led the nation toward declaring war on Germany and entering World War I. He feared that it was financial considerations and programs that benefited the wealthy that were the real reasons for entering the war. He was one of just six senators to oppose American entry into World War I.

However, he was not a mindless Republican renegade. He fought with the Republican faithful to defeat the Treaty of Versailles and American entry into the League of Nations, dealing President Wilson his greatest defeat.

Later, he would go on to support some of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs – particularly the Tennessee Valley Authority which meant nothing to his home state of Nebraska. But he would oppose Roosevelt’s attempt at packing the Supreme Court.

Norris did not pay a heavy price for his courage as did many of Kennedy’s heroes. The people of Nebraska did not always agree with him, but they trusted him. When he could no longer align himself with the Republican Party during the Great Depression, he left. However, he could never align himself with the Democrats. So, the people of Nebraska elected him as an independent over nominees of both parties.

Norris was a native of Bellevue, Ohio, having been born and raised just west of that northern Ohio city in York Township in Sandusky County.

Robert A. Taft
Taft was the son of an American president who aspired to the presidency himself. However, he would speak out against what he regarded a grave injustice and violation of the principles of American jurisprudence and earn the scorn of the entire country.

In remarks delivered at Kenyon College in Gambier, OH, Taft decried the Nuremberg trials where Nazi war criminals were tried, convicted, and executed. Taft claimed that it was un-American to prosecute anyone – even people as vile as the leadership of the Nazi party – without having specific laws in place under which to try them. While they had committed atrocities, Taft said, there was no law on the books that prohibited what they did. Therefore, to charge and try them was a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against Ex Post Facto trials.

Americans were outraged. Democrats running in 1948 made political hay out of Sen. Taft’s remarks. Republicans either denounced him or distanced themselves from him. Newspapers in Ohio and across the country heaped scorn on him for coddling Nazis. Taft was given several opportunities to back away from the remarks, but stood by his principles.

Taft’s views did not hurt him so badly that Ohioans would not send him back to the Senate. Republicans elected him Majority Leader in 1953. He worked closely with the Eisenhower Administration in trying to enact Eisenhower’s domestic policies. However, his leadership of the Senate was cut short when he developed bone cancer in his legs. One leg was amputated and he continued, struggling through the pain, to lead the Senate, but he would eventually succumb to cancer. Kennedy remarks on the man’s courage in fighting the pain of his debilitating disease to do his job in his final days.

Kennedy would not only memorialize his political adversary in his profiles in courage. Kennedy chaired the Senate committee which named the five greatest senators in America history to be memorialized in the Senate Reception Room. Among them is Bob Taft.

Additional Men of Courage
Kennedy goes on to describe briefly other men and other acts of political courage. He talks of Sen. Andrew Johnson’s loyalty to the union while representing Tennessee in the Senate. That loyalty led to a noose being placed around his neck in Virginia where he came within seconds of being hanged.

He also discusses George Washington’s valiant defense of the Jay Treaty that prevented the young country from fighting another war against Great Britain and Charles Evans Hughes, as an attorney with political aspirations, fighting to allow socialists to be seated in the New York Assembly even though Hughes was an ardent Republican. He also discusses patriot John Adam’s valiant defense of the British soldiers in the case of the Boston Massacre.

The Meaning of Courage
This essay on courage is actually a defense of representative democracy as opposed to popular democracy. Each person elected to public office has the duty to do what he believes is right, regardless of party sentiment or voter affection. Truly great leaders listen to their constituents, weigh their opinions, and make the best decisions they are able based on their knowledge and principles. As current Ohio senator Sherrod Brown once told me in an interview, “Do the right thing and elections will take care of themselves.”

It is clearly understood that the prose of Kennedy’s book was penned by his aide and speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen – a speechwriter without peer in the history of our nation. But that should not discount Kennedy’s contribution and leadership in the project that became this book.

Senators and elected officials rely on others to forge speeches, letters, legislation, and opinions. No elected official has time to do it all himself. While we can enjoy Sorenson’s worthy prose in this well written book, we can be sure that the sentiments are those of John F. Kennedy.

Some historians have attacked parts of the book. Indeed, the punishment borne by those Republicans who opposed the impeachment of Andrew Johnson is overly dramatized in Kennedy's book. Historians have also criticized the inclusion of Lucius Lamar, saying he was an agitator for racial disharmony rather than the spokesman for reunification.

I agree with their assessment of the high drama Kennedy portrays in the Johnson trial. Judgment of Lucius Lamar I'll leave to those more learned in Reconstruction politics than I.