Two More American Profiles In Courage

The late President John F. Kennedy, before becoming President, wrote a famous book called Profiles In Courage, a saga of Americans with extraordinary vision and resoluteness of character.

The author of this BLOG believes that two more names should be posthumously added to that celebrated book: those of U.S. Senators Ernest Gruening of Alaska, and Wayne Morse of Oregon.

Regardless of what one may think of the politics of American military involvement in Viet Nam during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, the courage of these two United States Senators to stand rock-solid for their convictions against an overwhelming tide of contrary public opinion is hereby duly noted in this BLOG. It was these two U.S. Senators who, on August 7, 1964, stood alone to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This measure was used by President Lyndon Johnson and his Administration as a pretext to conduct open-ended warfare in Viet Nam: this, in context of the President's campaign promise to be a "peace candidate" on Viet Nam in opposition to the ostensibly "reckless" plans of Republican opponent Senator Barry Goldwater. At the time the vote on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was taken, these two U.S. Senators alone understood its fullest possible implications, while everyone else was blind to them.

By 1970, it was easy to oppose the American involvement in the Viet Nam war because public opposition to it had become popular by that time. But the reward for principled opposition to the war from the beginning, August 7, 1964, absenting popular approbation, belongs exclusively to these two senatorial profiles in American courage.

-Lawrence K. Marsh