The blast uttered by new Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, against the president he despises may have been wise, or it may have been foolish. But the one thing it wasn’t was “brave.”
It wasn’t “brave” because he risked nothing by it — he is at the start of a six-year term in the Senate, his state hates President Trump perhaps more than he does, and he can stay in the Senate as long he wants. By the same token, the famous “Declaration of Conscience,” uttered on the floor of the Senate by Margaret Chase Smith against Sen. Joseph McCarthy way back in the ’50s, wasn’t brave, either. Though a dangerous move as regarded her party, she too was impregnable in her home state of Maine and could stay in the Senate as long as she wanted — which she in fact did.
One person who was lacking her luck was Sen. John F. Kennedy, D-Mass., whose father’s friendship with the Wisconsin renegade was enough to keep McCarthy from endorsing Kennedy’s rival in the 1952 election. As a junior senator from the opposite party, Kennedy would not have mattered in this political calculus, except that the most intense group of McCarthy supporters were Irish Catholics, most of them Democrats, who comprised Kennedy’s South Boston base.
In 1954, Kennedy wasn’t running, but his Republican friend Leverett Saltonstall was, and he was as silent as Kennedy, who seems to have used a life-threatening surgery to avoid being faced with a vote. “If Senator Saltonstall were to make his position on McCarthy clear now, he might well be committing political suicide,” said one local paper. “Adherents of both political parties are apparently scared to death.”
Two years earlier, another war hero on a far grander scale had also gone silent. In October 1952, presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower, in a campaign stop in Wisconsin, yielded to requests from Republican handlers and omitted from his remarks some words of praise for Gen. George C. Marshall, then under attack by McCarthy.
Later, Eisenhower and Kennedy were ashamed of themselves for these omissions. Kennedy routinely took risks with his life he would never have taken in politics, and both might have found an embarrassing loss harder to take than a brave death in battle, had they ever been given the choice.
Another element that is not considered often is the matter of what one has to lose. In 1968, Eugene McCarthy was widely described as having been braver than Robert F. Kennedy for deciding to run against Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, while Kennedy had declined the pleas of insurgents until after McCarthy had almost beaten the president early in March the next year. But McCarthy, an unknown senator from a small state, had little to lose by taking the gamble.
Bobby Kennedy, head of his family, his dead brother’s heir, and political heir to his legions of followers, stood, if he lost, to lose everything. He had planned to run in 1972, when Johnson retired and their mutual hatred would not be an issue. If he ran now, he would split the whole party; he might lose and thus end the whole Kennedy venture. He wasn’t less brave, he was just more encumbered.
In a similar fashion, Romney is “free” to speak now, but not necessarily especially brave.
