Eight Profiles in Cowardice: Jacob Weisberg on Bezos, Bush & the Other Collaborators of the MAGA Age

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. Earlier this week, there was an interesting op-ed in the New York Times by Michelle Goldberg on books seeking to shame people, elites in particular, who caved in to Trump. She mentioned a guest we had earlier on the show, Susan Neiman, who has a new book out called Call It Evil, Understanding the Trump Era, in which she connects personal greed with people who compromised and embraced Donald Trump. And in Goldberg's piece, she also, and really it was the focus of the book, talks about another book which is out this week, Profiles in Cowardice by my guest, Jacob Weisberg, who is a very famous writer, publisher, troublemaker, is talking to us from New York. Jacob, congratulations on this book.

Jacob Weisberg (1:24)

Thank you, Andrew, it's a pleasure to be here.

Andrew Keen (1:28)

Obviously, when we think of Profiles in Cowardice, we think of JFK's Profiles in Courage, the book that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 Is that the focus of the book, to compare and contrast our current age with JFK's?

Jacob Weisberg (1:49)

Well, not in that sense. I did take the book as a departure point, and I like the structure of it, of picking eight representative figures who stand in for different parts of the problem. But Kennedy's book was written in a different era. It was written at the height of the McCarthy era, in fact.

Part of what's interesting about the context is that JFK was far from courageous on McCarthyism. Quite the contrary. He took a dive and avoided even voting or saying how he would have voted on the censure vote that finally began to bring Joe McCarthy down. He was also not at all courageous on civil rights in that era. I think he wrote the book in part because he wanted to give himself courage by looking to examples of earlier previous senators and all the profiles in that book are of senators who had taken decisions against their own interests, who had sacrificed their careers or risked their careers because of principles they thought were important. It's interesting that substantively, these are not at all people Kennedy would necessarily have agreed with on the substance of their views. Robert Taft sacrificed.

Andrew Keen (3:05)

I'm putting on the screen the characters that JFK wrote about in this book, including John Quincy Adams, Sam Houston, Robert Taft, as you said.

Jacob Weisberg (3:17)

Yeah. Taft thought that the Nuremberg trials were a terrible violation of constitutional democracy and an example of victory is justice and well, there's an argument about all that, but I don't think Kennedy agreed with it. But he admired that Taft was willing to resist his own party, which is in fact the Republican Party over that issue.

It's a model and such a touchstone, I think, because that book, he's the only president who ever won a Pulitzer Prize, even though the book had a ghostwriter. But I think it really sets the, people use that term in Washington all the time, the profile and courage. But it's very rare because essentially what they're saying is someone was willing to make a political sacrifice for something they believed in. It's often used ironically in the sense of, there goes another profile and courage, i.e. not at all, someone who's totally unwilling to take a risk to do something that they think is important.

Andrew Keen (4:19)

Jacob, just after the First World War, the great sociologist Max Weber gave a very famous speech in Munich, warning radical students about what he called approaching politics in a sermon on the Mount Way. He suggested that they needed to be a little bit more practical to maybe put their morality in their pocket, their back pocket. Is the book that you're presenting and so many others, like Neiman's Call It Evil, I mean, it came out this week as well, so two books on relatively similar subjects coming out of the same week. We have another one coming out later this week.

Are you all doing what Weber warned against, turning politics into a sermon on the Mount? Every political action of one kind or another, either an action taken or not taken, is a moral one?

Jacob Weisberg (5:15)

I hope not, Andrew. I think I'm very comfortable with political compromise. We live in a world of political compromise, but there are core issues on which we can't compromise, and that is how our system basically functions, and that we share certain values around democracy and human rights. That's where Trump has transgressed and been like pretty much any other certainly modern president in that he's rejected the premises of some of the fundamental premises of the system, such as that you let people vote and follow the results of elections.