Accuracy
David O. Stewart has questioned the accuracy of the book's chapter on the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Of Johnson's defenders in the Senate, Profiles in Courage stated that "Not a single one of them escaped the terrible torture of vicious criticism engendered by their vote to acquit." However, Stewart wrote of the supposed suffering: "It is a myth, ..." and "None was a victim of postimpeachment retribution. Indeed, their careers were not wildly different from those of the thirty-five senators who voted to convict Andrew Johnson ..." There is also significant evidence that Edmund Ross was bribed to vote for Johnson's acquittal, a fact which is not mentioned in Profiles in Courage.
Kennedy also praised Lucius Lamar, who, while working in the public eye towards reconciliation, privately was an instigator of growing racial agitation, as chronicled in the book Redemption: The Last Battle for the Civil War by Nicholas Lemann. Blanche Ames, the daughter of Governor Adelbert Ames, who in Kennedy's Lamar chapter was described in negative terms for what he supposedly inflicted against Mississippians, tried to get Kennedy to look at the record and correct that section; Kennedy ignored her efforts.
Read more about this topic: Profiles In Courage
Famous quotes containing the word accuracy:
“Such is the never-failing beauty and accuracy of language, the most perfect art in the world; the chisel of a thousand years retouches it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The child who has been taught to make an accurate elevation, plan, and section of a pint pot has had an admirable training in accuracy of eye and hand.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“U.S. international and security policy ... has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call “the Fifth Freedom,” understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)