In 1990, former Senator Lowell Weicker avoided a daunting
Republican primary showdown with then-Representative John Rowland
by running as an independent candidate for Connecticut governor.
Upon winning a narrow plurality over Rowland in the general
election, Weicker quickly reneged on his explicit campaign promise
to oppose a state tax on earned income.
Roughly a year later, shortly after calling Senator Ted Kennedy
one of the “best senators I have ever known” in a New York
Times Magazine feature, Governor Weicker was presented with
the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. The presenter was
none other than Ted Kennedy.
Last year, far from skirting a primary showdown, Senator Joe
Lieberman willingly subjected himself to the highly personalized
vitriol and barely disguised anti-Semitism of his Democratic
challenger’s most vocal web-based supporters. Having attempted in
vain to stem the tide of a partisan purge, Lieberman then followed
in Weicker’s footsteps by running and winning as an
independent.
In so doing, Lieberman took on two Greenwich multimillionaires
simultaneously: his immediate opponent Ned Lamont, a scion of the
J.P. Morgan fortune, as well as Weicker, a scion of the Squibb
pharmaceutical empire, who had been ousted from the Senate by
Lieberman in 1988 and now endorsed Lamont’s effort to oust his
former rival.
In presenting the 1992 award to Weicker, Senator Kennedy had
noted that “too often, elected officials are captives of public
opinion polls, bending to the contemporary winds and trends,
unwilling to act on principle, reluctant to pursue unpopular
courses of action or offend powerful and well-financed special
interest groups.” In contrast, Kennedy remarked, the Profile in
Courage Award honors “elected officials who act in accord with
their conscience, even at risk to their careers, by pursuing a
larger vision of the national, state or local interest, in
opposition to the prevailing views of their constituents.”
It is difficult to imagine an elected official whose course of
action over the past year meets the criteria for this award more
clearly than that of Lieberman. He willingly offended moneyed
special interest groups such as MoveOn.org by refusing to call for
a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. He steadfastly pursued a
foreign policy that he perceived to be in the greater national
interest, despite the overwhelming displeasure of his constituency.
Moreover, his words and conduct closely mirrored that of the
protagonists in the classic book for which the prize is named.
Like Senator (and later President) John Quincy Adams — who
insisted that “the critical issues of war and peace could not be
decided on the basis of ‘geographical position’ [or] ‘party bias’”
— Lieberman defied New England voters by supporting an unpopular
president from the rival party in foreign affairs. Like Senator
Albert Beveridge — who maintained that “a party can live only by
growing [for] intolerance of ideas brings its death” — Lieberman
refused to let one issue be the litmus test of his partisan
loyalty.
Last year, the Profile in Courage Award Committee conferred the
prize upon Rep. John Murtha, an outspoken critic of the Iraq war
and the Bush Administration. In his introductory remarks, Senator
Kennedy lauded Murtha for “telling the war like it is,” despite the
Administration’s “pathological aversion to thoughtful
criticism.”
Yet in Profiles in Courage, President Kennedy wrote
that he had selected his protagonists not because he agreed that
they were right in taking the stands they did, but because of the
political courage they displayed in taking those stands at all. It
is “on matters of conscience which challenge party and regional
loyalties,” JFK asserted, “that the test of courage is presented.”
It takes a special brand of political courage for the senator to
“defy the angry power of the very constituents who control his
future.”
As we reflect upon what would have been President Kennedy’s
ninetieth birthday, and the annual presentation of the Profile in
Courage Awards scheduled to coincide with that date, it is
certainly no criticism of this year’s and past years’ worthy
recipients to note that Lieberman’s award remains conspicuously
missing.
As JFK both profoundly understood and famously celebrated, true
political courage often means telling those who control your future
what they don’t necessarily want to hear. Whether you agree with
Lieberman or not, for a Democratic senator from Connecticut in 2007
to say, “I have tremendous admiration for the President, because I
believe he understands the challenge of our time,” constitutes
political courage in precisely the way JFK defined it.
Ultimately, if Lieberman’s unforgivable sin in the eyes of his
detractors is that, unlike many of the figures in Profiles in
Courage, he emerged victorious and was not immediately
banished to political oblivion, JFK has already provided a
rejoinder: “The true democracy puts its faith in the people —
faith that the people will not simply elect men who will represent
their views ably and faithfully, but also elect men who will
exercise their conscientious judgment — faith that the people will
not condemn those whose devotion to principle leads them to
unpopular courses, but will reward courage, respect honor and
ultimately recognize right.”
