Quote of the Day | August 4, 2008: Rather Lose Gallantly Than Win Pragmatically

From David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, 1972:

He was by no means the most obvious of liberals, being closer to the center of his party, with lines put to both the main wings. He knew from the start that if he was going to win the nomination, his problem would not be with the professional politicians, but with the liberal-intellectual wing of the party, influential far beyond its numbers because of its relations with, and impact upon, the media. It was a section of the party not only dubious of him but staunchly loyal to Adlai Stevenson after those two gallant and exhilarating defeats.

That very exhilaration had left the Kennedys, particularly Robert Kennedy, with a vague suspicion that liberals would rather lose gallantly than win pragmatically, that they valued the irony and charm of Stevenson's election-night concessions more than they valued the power and patronage of victory. That feeling of suspicion was by no means unreciprocated: the New Republic liberals were well aware who had fought their wars during the fifties and who had sat on the sidelines.

The true liberals, those derivative of Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, were at least as uneasy about Kennedy as he was about them, sensing that he was too cool, too hard-line in his foreign policies, too devoid of commitment. To them, Kennedy seemed so much the new breed, so devoted to rationalism instead of belief that even his first biographer, James MacGregor Burns, had angered the Kennedy Senate staff, particularly Theodore Sorensen, by suggesting that Kennedy would never risk political defeat on behalf of a great moral issue. They felt he had made too many accomodations in deference to the Cold War climate and adjusted his beliefs; he in turn thought them more than a little naive and unrealistic about what was then considered a real Soviet threat.

Tags: David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest