PROFILES IN COURAGE AND COWARDICE, PLAGIARISM AND GORDON BROWN by Donal Kennedy

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The Pulitzer Prize in 1956 was awarded to “PROFILES IN COURAGE” attributed to the Junior Senator from Massachusetts whose record in that House was not impressive. It featured eight persons, some coldly calculated to influence states where the Senator’s professed religion might have disqualified himfrom Presidential hopes.

Other books had been shortlisted by the Pulitzer Jury, but the millionaire father of the Senator persuaded it to ignore them, and accept his nomination for the prize.

The book was a bestseller and greatly increased the Senator’s recognisability and helped him win, by a whisker, the Presidency in 1920.

The prize-winning book was largely written by Ted Sorensen, the Senator’s speechwriter and when ABC Television showed a fellow claiming it was ghostwritten, the Senator’s Dad got on the phone threatening to sue it for over one hundred million dollars (a fortune for Presidential winners in those days). The fellow did not withdraw his allegation, but ABC apologised.

Incidentally, when JFK was elected, he told Gore Vidal that he’d have to be seen at Sunday Mass for the next four years. A bit like Henry IV of France, for whom Paris was worth a Mass.

A few years ago I was in North Yorkshire on a Sunday, and although not running for public office nor seeking to amass a reputation for piety, I attended Mass with my then and present wife  at the Benedictine Abbey and Public School at Ampleforth.

Afterwards we visited its Bookshop, where, amongst other books which caught my eye was one by Gordon Brown with eight pen portraits of heroes for our admiration.

One of these was of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish Diplomat and Humanitarian who had saved innocent people, many of them Jewish, from murder by the Nazis. At the end of WWII he disappeared and was believed murdered in Russia, but neither the date nor place of his murder has been established…                                                                                                                                               

Wallenberg has been, rightly, recognised for his heroic humanitariansm, with statues, postage stamps, posthumous citizenship in countries he had no connection with, songs, plays and paeans of praise. Nine years ago THE SUNDAY TIMES, praising a work by Douglas Murray, founder of the warmongering HENRY JACKSON SOCIETY, claimed that Wallenberg had been airbrushed out of history..

I wrote to the SUNDAY TIMES disputing its claim and copied my letter to the JEWISH CHRONICLE. I drew attention to another Swedish Humanitarian Diplomat with a similar right to international..celebration,Count Folke Bernadotte, and suggested it swap its Cyclops viewpoint…for Binocular Vision..Both newspapers spiked  my letter.

A few days ago the Jewish  Chronicle, then as now, edited by Stephen Pollard was censured for insupportable allegations.

Stephen Pollard is a member of the HENRY JACKSON SOCIETY, and like Gordon Brown, might be

plausibly feature in a collection of  PROFILES IN COWARDICE. Count Folke Bernadotte, United Nations Negotiator in Palestine,together with his friend, Lieut Colonel of the French Army, serving  with the UN, and both unarmed, were shot to death by men acting on the orders of Yitzhak Shamir, who,as leader of the Likud Party later served two terms as Prime Minister of Israel.

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