Читать онлайн «Profiles in Courage (slipcased edition): Decisive Moments in the Lives of Celebrated Americans»

Автор Джон Кеннеди

Each one of us must find the gift we have to give. As Martin Luther King said in one of the last sermons he gave before his death, “You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. And you can be that servant. ”

—CAROLINE KENNEDY

2003

Foreword

Courage is the virtue that President Kennedy most admired. He sought out those people who had demonstrated in some way, whether it was on a battlefield or a baseball diamond, in a speech or fighting for a cause, that they had courage, that they would stand up, that they could be counted on.

That is why this book so fitted his personality, his beliefs. It is a study of men who, at risk to themselves, their futures, even the well-being of their children, stood fast for principle. It was toward that ideal that he modeled his life. And this in time gave heart to others.

As Andrew Jackson said, “One man with courage makes a majority. ” That is the effect President Kennedy had on others.

President Kennedy would have been forty-seven in May of 1964.

At least one half of the days that he spent on this earth were days of intense physical pain. He had scarlet fever when he was very young, and serious back trouble when he was older. In between he had almost every other conceivable ailment. When we were growing up together we used to laugh about the great risk a mosquito took in biting Jack Kennedy—with some of his blood the mosquito was almost sure to die. He was in Chelsea Naval Hospital for an extended period of time after the war, had a major and painful operation on his back in 1955, campaigned on crutches in 1958. In 1951 on a trip we took around the world he became ill. We flew to the military hospital in Okinawa and he had a temperature of over 106 degrees. They didn’t think he would live.

But during all this time, I never heard him complain. I never heard him say anything that would indicate that he felt God had dealt with him unjustly. Those who knew him well would know he was suffering only because his face was a little whiter, the lines around his eyes were a little deeper, his words a little sharper. Those who did not know him well detected nothing.

He didn’t complain about his problem, so why should I complain about mine—that is how one always felt.

When he battled against illness, when he fought in the war, when he ran for the Senate, when he stood up against powerful interests in Massachusetts to fight for the St. Lawrence Seaway, when he fought for a labor reform act in 1959, when he entered the West Virginia primary in 1960, when he debated Lyndon Johnson at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles with no advance notice, when he took the blame completely on himself for the failure at the Bay of Pigs, when he fought the steel companies, when he stood up at Berlin in 1961 and then again in 1962 for the freedom of that city, when he forced the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba, when he spoke and fought for equal rights for all our citizens, and hundreds of other things both big and small, he was reflecting what is the best in the human being.