On an August night in 1943, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy’s patrol boat PT-109 was rammed by a Japanese destroyer and burst into flames. Badly wounded, Kennedy saved a fellow crewman in a rescue that earned him a Purple Heart and the Navy and Marine Corp Medal “for extremely heroic conduct.” A decade later Kennedy spent six months recuperating from surgery for a spinal injury suffered that night. Strapped to a board and immobilized, Kennedy turned to history for perspective on that test he had survived and, most importantly, for a guide to the challenges he faced as a newly elected senator. As Arthur Schlesinger recalled in A Thousand Days, “it was the tension between means and ends which fascinated and bothered Kennedy… Profiles in Courage represented his most sustained attempt to penetrate the moral dilemmas of the political
life.” In his notes for the book, Kennedy observed: “Politics is a jungle.”

In Profiles in Courage Kennedy looks at eight American senators, including John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster and Sam Houston, whose lives provide a path through the challenges of political life and toward America’s future. Here is Kennedy’s tribute to those who best inspire faith in “the cause of principle… that is the basis of all human morality.” We are pleased to offer a rare inscribed copy of Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work in the scarce original dust jacket and housed in a custom clamshell. Browse our current selection.