The Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen took Speaker Paul Ryan to task this week for Ryan’s tepid endorsement of Donald Trump—”What I know about Ryan is that he could not be proud of endorsing Trump”—and compared him at length, and distinctly unfavorably, with a Republican from an earlier era, Robert Taft.
Taft, explains Cohen, was “an uncommon man of uncommon courage.” And on the eve of the 1946 congressional elections, he risked his party’s prospects (and his own presidential ambition) by condemning, on the floor of the Senate, the impending execution of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg. In Cohen’s words, Taft “had his principles … and he stuck to them. The Constitution commanded no ex post facto laws. The Nazis were convicted of waging an aggressive war — a crime without legal precedent. Taft was adamant that they had broken no existing law.”
Whether one agrees with Senator Taft, or not, it is certainly fair to say that he chose principle over political expediency, and in Cohen’s words, in the face of “the full horror of Nazi crimes so recently placed into evidence,” bravely resisted public opinion. By contrast, says Cohen, “Ryan puts his legislative agenda above his own principles and the good name of the country”—and for emphasis, adds that John F. Kennedy himself had included Taft among the honorees in his 1956 bestseller, Profiles in Courage.
Still, as Cohen explains, Robert Taft, like Paul Ryan, had his imperfections as well: “JFK may still have been bothered by Taft’s refusal to condemn the demagogic Sen. Joseph McCarthy.” Or maybe not. For as Cohen must surely realize, but doesn’t mention, Kennedy had several reasons to sympathize with Taft’s “refusal to condemn” Joe McCarthy. The first, and most pertinent, reason was that Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was an admirer and financial supporter of McCarthy’s witch hunts as well as his son’s political career. And the second reason was that JFK’s younger brother Bobby was a member of McCarthy’s Senate staff, and so enamored of McCarthy that he made him the godfather of his eldest child, Kathleen (now Kathleen Kennedy Townsend).
Indeed, unlike Paul Ryan, John F. Kennedy was a man of such principle that, when the Senate formally censured Joe McCarthy in December 1954, Kennedy, citing his health, conveniently absented himself on the day of the vote—thereby preserving, in the words of another principled Democrat, his “political viability.”
Paul Ryan, take note.
