Robert Alphonso Taft

And to do that, he created a kind of gallery of past senators who he thought had not necessarily done the right thing in terms of like taking positions he would have agreed with.

I mean, you know, one of them is Robert Taft opposing the Nuremberg trials.

But acting on principle and being willing to sacrifice their political careers, you know, lose an election for something that they felt was a fundamental principle.

And I think it kind of worked for Kennedy.

I mean, this is sort of like having, I mean, I'm exaggerating, but the '30s with, I don't know, you know, F- Father Coughlin as president or something insane, right? I mean-

Well, it could even have been, it could have even have been Herbert Hoover or, or Robert Taft.

They, uh, they would have also pursued a different foreign policy.

And, and I think the one thing that I think people don't really realize is that, among other things, World War II was, within America, a victory of the liberal worldview over the conservative worldview.

deference to his father's friendship with McCarthy.

In Weisberg's view, whatever else profiles and courage may have been, the book, which took the form of eight narrative profiles of senators such as John Quincy Adams, Sam Houston, and Robert Taft, who had famously put principle above political self-interest, was also Kennedy's attempt to make sense of what that kind of courage was so he could locate some inside himself.

Profiles in Courage went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and has remained hugely influential in the seven decades since its publication as a touchstone and a template for how modern politicians discuss moral leadership.

And now, Jacob Weisberg has paid the book a unique kind of compliment by producing a bizarro world mirror image homage and sequel to it.

He was also not at all courageous on civil rights in that era.

And I think he wrote the book in part because he wanted to give himself courage by looking to examples of earlier previous senators and all the profiles in that book are of senators who had taken decisions against their own interests who had sacrificed their careers or risked their careers because of principles they thought were important and uh it's interesting that substantively these are not at all people uh kennedy would necessarily have agreed with on the substance of their views you know robert taft uh yeah i'm putting

on the screen the the characters that uh jfk uh wrote about in this book including john quincy adams sam houston robert taft as you said

Yeah, I mean, Taft thought that the Nuremberg trials were a terrible violation of constitutional democracy and an example of victor's justice.

And, well, there's an argument about all that, but I don't think Kennedy agreed with it.

I mean, that was, that's kind of like what turned national socialism into like a, a pretty conventional right wing tendency, honestly.

Like I, uh, not, not in the sense of, you know, not, not, not, not right wing in terms of like Donald Trump or not even right wing in terms of like Robert Taft, but by European standards, um, the third right was more conventionally right wing than people will acknowledge.

I mean, they, because there's, there's moronic stuff like, like Jonah Goldberg saying like, Oh, fascists are a bunch of like Hillary Clinton liberals or something like, but it, but there's serious people too, who aren't prone to that kind of moronic stuff who don't like really understand because they, you know, they, they read these like dispatches from, uh, um, from, um, from Dietrich Eckert and from Ernst Rahn, like saying, yeah, God is dead, you know, like the hell with the capitalists and the Jews, like burn everything down.

You know, we're going to, we're going to march on everything and we're going to kill everybody.

It's just the way it is.

And yeah, that's, if you, um, And the North was a little bit different.

But at the same time, too, like I said, even, you know, the old right, what was called old right in the 20th century, you know, America First and Robert Taft and stuff, those guys were Hamiltonian Republicans.

They were like northern city slickers.

was part of it um definitely but i mean he he um his concession there i mean nixon actually looked like a gentleman in 1960 in a lot of ways especially especially um he never gave up till the end but there was a lot of dirty pool in that election and probably in absolute terms like in real in real numbers terms it was probably too close to call kind of full the kind of full frontal assault on nixon by the east coast press um i missed uh that kind of presentation that you know the national audience had been afforded would have um would have been somewhat unseemly i make the point about 62 because in a lot of ways like the proverbial mask dropped um What prompted Nixon's comeback? You know, as we've talked about, you know, the catastrophic defeat of Barry Goldwater, you know, Goldwater himself was a bizarre placeholder, but it wasn't just owing to a lack of personages who could interface effectively with kind of the era of new media.

You know, is that like we've talked about Kennedy's literal eulogy to Taft in Profiles in Courage, you know, post Nuremberg, there was no more American right.

It was it was It was for all practical purposes, illegal in policy terms and in ethical and optical terms.

It was just unthinkable, you know, to have an America first party.

The New Republic was quoted as saying, quote, the current gravitation of power into the hands of Congress at the expense of the executive is a phenomenon so fatuous as to be incredible if the facts were not so patent.

That's the New Republic, you know, which in the 50s was, um, dividing its time between screaming that everybody in America is racist and talking about how great the Soviet Union is.

This wasn't the Wall Street Journal, and it wasn't a bunch of John Birchers, and it wasn't a bunch of dissident America firsters who had hoped to see Robert Taft become the president.

This was literally a bunch of reds saying this.