There is nothing harder to regain, once lost, than trust
Profiles in Courage, for which then Senator John F. Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize, was required reading in my high school. And in the ’60s, after Kennedy’s assassination, it was turned into a weekly TV program, around which the Rosenblum family regularly gathered on Sunday evenings to learn the story of another profile in courage, usually a political figure, as in the original book.
I enjoyed imagining myself in the place of the heroes, like Edmund Ross, the Kansas senator who cast the decisive vote to acquit President Andrew Johnson on articles of impeachment, and said of the experience, “I literally almost looked down into my open grave.” That description has stuck in my mind for over 50 years (and not just for the familiar substitution of “literally” for “figuratively,” its opposite).
Thinking back to those days, what chiefly strikes me is how naïve I was. Yes, I already knew that I did not suffer from an abundance of physical courage. But I had no trouble imagining that I would always rise to the occasion and act morally where it was only a matter of money or public contumely.
No doubt I was right about my assessment of my physical courage. While working with Lieutenant Meyer Birnbaum on Lieutenant Birnbaum, never once did I imagine myself bravely charging forward at Omaha Beach in Normandy, oblivious to being a sitting duck for the German snipers above.
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