The Kennedy Problem
Hugh Brogan · 2014
The book Profiles in Courage , for which John Fitzgerald Kennedy was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1957. Kennedy&s;s life was crammed with incident and great events, many of which the author had to leave out entirely. Kennedy was fascinated from his earliest manhood until his death by the problem of leadership in a democracy. Kennedy was most evidently a Cold War president, and the Cold War is over. One of the minor consequences of this tremendous fact has been to make most studies of Kennedy&s;s foreign policy obsolete: some are still valuable for the raw information which they contain, and for their authors&s; mental powers. Thirty years have amply vindicated the wisdom of the policy on civil rights which Kennedy was driven to adopt and which Lyndon Johnson carried to fruition in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but the American dilemma remains as acute as ever.