Profiles in courage
Profiles eight historical figures who demonstrated particular integrity in the face of opposition, including John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton, and Robert A. Taft.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
5people
2016–2025years
40% recommend60% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Profiles in Courage by JFK (probably ghost written)
I go back to the section on Daniel Webster and the compromise of 1850 a lot. It always stuck with me how much courage it took to advocate for compromise and peace rather than head into a civil war.
- The danger of manipulation through propaganda is indeed an argument used in political discourse, though in reasonable discussions when talking about direct and indirect democracy. The layers of parliamentary systems are partly a means of protection against manipulations. If you want to read an interesting and nice to read book that partly talks about this, then I'd recommend Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy.
Though a consumer decision is not the same as a political vote, at least the latter is not supposed to be similarly thoughtless, so there is no need to interpret my comment that broadly.
- > if the achievement being discredited is the number of books he's seemingly written then it makes sense to a degree.
Only if you take "written" literally, as in, he didn't do the actual writing, he just told the stories orally and someone else wrote them down.
I personally don't care much about that; the stories are his (including, as I've said, whatever misrepresentations of what actually happened they contain). Lots of people have books ghostwritten, and that's not considered unusual.
More than that, there are famous examples of books for which someone got the credit for the writing when they actually did little or none of it: John F. Kennedy being credited as the author of Profiles in Courage, for example. Even the content of Profiles in Courage was probably less Kennedy's than the content of the books Feynman gets credited for was Feynman's.
- JFK won for Profiles in Courage, though in all likelihood it was largely ghost-written by Ted Sorensen.
- You could add Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage" and a few others I think (Huey Long and "Every Man a King" for instance).
In the case of both Kennedy and Obama the book was used in combination with great oratory skill to introduce the candidate to the people: You hear an amazing speech by the candidate and want to learn more. You find they have written a book and decide to read it. The book gives you a feeling of intimacy with the candidate which turns you into a supporter.
