Politics & Power Quote by John F. Kennedy

Kennedy’s line lands like a polite indictment: the country isn’t suffering from a lack of leaders so much as a failure of taste. “Forgotten” is the operative weapon. It implies courage isn’t missing because it’s rare, but because the public no longer recognizes it as a civic requirement. In that framing, voters don’t merely elect timid leaders; they cultivate them, rewarding caution, punishing risk, confusing steadiness with spinelessness.

The sentence is built to shift blame without sounding accusatory. Kennedy doesn’t name a party, a class, or a culprit; he names a national amnesia. That’s classic JFK rhetoric: moral pressure delivered in the cadence of shared responsibility. “In the past” and “today” create a nostalgic contrast, but it isn’t pure sentimentality. It’s a warning about how democracies decay: not with a coup, but with a slow downgrade of expectations, where “public life” becomes management, not sacrifice.

Context matters. Kennedy was writing and speaking in a Cold War America defined by conformity, careerism, and the fear of being labeled soft or disloyal. Around the time of Profiles in Courage, he elevated political bravery as a scarce virtue in an era of televised consensus and backroom discipline. The subtext is also self-serving in a sophisticated way: he’s selling a standard that he wants to embody, and that he wants the public to demand, even when courage looks like dissent, compromise, or an unpopular peace.