Profile In Partisanship
The JFK Library should change the name of its signature award, or surrender its trademark
The John F. Kennedy Library’s annual Profile In Courage Award ® was presented this weekend and an obvious omission should once again raise the specter of whether the award is misnamed.
Before half of my readers check out of this column, let me be clear: I’m not disapproving of the award for former Vice President Mike Pence; he did his constitutional duty, and it did take courage. But Mike Pence’s courageous act was four years ago, and the committee had a few much more obvious choices for courage validated this year.
First, I’d nominate Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who spent the last year seeing factual vindication for his courage. Cotton was the first official to suggest that it bore investigating whether the Coronavirus that caused the pandemic had escaped from a virology lab in Wuhan, China instead of from natural transmission at a wet market.
That was in the earliest days of the pandemic in February of 2020 and the national media immediately excoriated him. The New York Times’ headline blared “Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory,” the Washington Post said “Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory.” Cotton’s question – and his demand that China “open up now to competent international scientists” to investigate – is now widely accepted as prescient and important. In the last 12 months, we’ve learned the CIA, the German intelligence services, and the British intel agency all acknowledge Cotton was likely right.
The more that comes out, the more it seems the media lynching of Cotton’s challenge to the Communist cover-up was not coincidental. It was egged on by biologist Peter Daszak, with a letter published in the British science journal The Lancet, signed by a cadre of scientists to lend a veneer of authority and shut down the Cotton question. We now know Daszak had ties to the Wuhan lab, as the entity he headed, EcoHealth Alliance, was facilitating studies into bat coronaviruses there.
Today, not only has Cotton been vindicated, Daszak has been discredited, with his funding suspended by the U.S. government for poor oversight of the viral gain-of-function research in Wuhan. And before lefty readers roll their eyes, note the suspension came in the last days of the Biden Administration.
The JFK Library says its award is to “recognize a public official (or officials) at the federal state, or local level whose actions demonstrate the qualities of politically courageous leadership.” It’s hard to see how standing up for intellectual inquiry against an avalanche of scorn from the authoritarian government of the world’s most populous nation, and bravely defying cancellation by the world’s elite media, is not the epitome of that description.
Cotton would not be the first politician to win an award based on the pandemic. In 2021, the Kennedy Family honored Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) for “Covid Courage.” This is the same Whitmer who shut down green houses in Michigan. Think about it: green houses, the places one would buy plants and garden rakes and other stuff to get outside – precisely the kinds of activities “following the science” prescribed during the airborne pandemic. She did not follow the science, but she did follow the hype. Whitmer was also knocked for pandemic hypocrisy because her husband reportedly invoked her name trying to get a northern Michigan boat dock to let him launch his boat, in violation of his wife’s lock down orders.
But the Whitmer/Cotton dichotomy is not the only one in evident in who’s not getting an award this year.
Where’s Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), for standing in the gap against Democrats’ desire to eliminate the Senate filibuster?
In 2023, the library lauded a group of South Carolina state legislators – dubbed “the Sister Senators” - who used a state filibuster to block a proposed new abortion law. Three of those lawmakers were Republicans, and the library noted they “met with strong opposition from their own party, including censures and promises of primary challenges.” Sinema did not merely get threats or promises, she actually did get censured, primaried and run out of office in 2024.
If Sinema doesn’t meet the bar, where’s the award this year for Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who’s still bravely facing down extremists in his party to support our ally, Israel.
Scrolling back through the list of the past winners of the Profile In Courage® does not turn up the names of other brave maverick Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), Sen. Zell Miller (D-GA) or Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT). It may not be possible to win this award by thwarting the will of elite Democrats - its partisanship reeks.
There is one sure-fire way for a famous Republican to get tapped to come to Boston to collect hardware: by bucking other Republicans. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)’s came from thumbing his nose at fellow Republicans on campaign finance laws. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) has a trophy; Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), too.
Former President George H. W. Bush got one – not for taking down the Berlin Wall, but for screwing conservatives and helping Democrats raise income tax rates in 1990. Governor Lowell Weicker (R-CT) got a Profile In Courage® for starting a state income tax against the wishes of conservatives. Apparently by the 1990s it was already lost on the Kennedy Library that its namesake was an income tax cutter, himself, thirty years prior.
Believe it or not, the award’s name is officially trademarked; the Kennedys are so vain they think they own the concept of courage. With tongue in cheek, I might suggest the U.S Patent and Trademark Commission reconsider the accuracy of the mark. Or perhaps the Kennedy crowd should voluntarily rename this trophy “Profiles in Partisanship.” That kind of honesty would truly be…courageous.
