The granddaughters were over at our Tampa apartment the other day, spreading their usual chaos. It was raining hard across the bay. The five-year-old had her crayons out on the rug, artwork spread wide (flowers, insects, family members — including one older stick figure using a cane, hmm.). I had to hop to avoid stepping on the cerulean-blue Crayola, grinding it into the carpet.

In the spare bedroom, the eight-year-old, with heart-shaped sunglasses perched on her forehead, was rummaging through the bookshelf, leafing through some of my old books. On a bottom shelf, she pointed to a worn paperback copy of Profiles in Courage, a collection of essays by a young John F. Kennedy. The name meant nothing to her. I think it was the old, weathered look of the book that intrigued her.

“What’s that, Pops?”

“I read that book when I was young, honey. The person who wrote it became a U.S. president. Kind of grown-up, not a kid’s book.”

The best way to pique a bright kid’s interest, I’ve found, is to tell them something’s too grown-up for them.

“Hey, I know lots of grown-up stuff. What’s it about?”

I thought about how to describe the 1956 book about political courage which won JFK the Pulitzer Prize the next year as a young senator. (There was controversy about how much help he had from his future “Ask-not” speechwriter Ted Sorensen. )

“It’s about people who were brave enough to do the right thing — even if it was hard.”

She pondered that. “Like Baba?

It was an apt, poignant connection to make. Baba is her maternal grandmother, Ukrainian-born, who until recently divided her time between Tampa and her relatives over there. But this gentle-spoken widow in her mid-60s had determined she could not remain here while her family was struggling in war-torn Ukraine. She would go back, alone, to help in any way possible, to assist her family members navigating to safety and resettling in the safest parts of the country — if such parts exist anymore.

She is the most inspiring profile in courage our family is likely to see in our lifetime.

“Yes,” I said, “your Baba is very, very courageous.”

My granddaughter blinked and nodded. I wanted to lighten the mood, perhaps talk more about family history. But this wasn’t the moment to tell her a family story about her own paternal great grandmother. We — Pops and Nana — will tell her and her sister when they’re of age, especially because it involves a dash of romance. But right now, romance has a limited appeal to the girls — especially the five-year-old. When a couple kiss on the TV screen, the reaction is, “Ewww!” I have reason to suspect that will change.

A story for the girls, but not yet

The story I’ll share now, and save for the girls, goes like this.

My mother, of Irish descent, was from Lynn, Massachusetts, north of Boston. Beverly Barry was smart and pretty, and in 1938, at the age of 17, went off to a small nearby Catholic women’s college. Theirs was a middle-class family, comfortable, but far from privileged. My mother’s only brother, a year older, a pre-med student, had made it into Harvard on his own. (It cost about $500 a year, around $10,000 in today’s currency.)

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When my grandfather died suddenly during her freshman year, my grandmother took her daughter Beverly out of college at the end of the school year and told her to get a job — so her brother at Harvard could continue his studies. No question then that a man’s education was more important than a woman’s.

But give my mom this: She had a great single year at college while it lasted. Especially one evening at her college, sometime in 1939, as she told it. Life was probably sweet for bobby-sox Americans of a certain background, back in those halcyon days two years before Pearl Harbor. In Europe, the Nazis had already begun their annexations and depredations. The contrast between an isolationist, prospering, post-Depression America, and a Europe riven by ideologies and the opening thunder of war may not have been much in evidence to young Americans. Glory days. For them, war was still a long way off.

One evening, Mom’s college had a “mixer” — a dance, closely monitored by teachers and nuns, to which boys at nearby colleges were invited. Mom always claimed the nuns would inspect the slow-dancing student pairs to make sure room was being left for the Holy Ghost. Mom’s brother showed up at the mixer with a friend, a classmate from Harvard. The friend was a lanky sophomore with a dazzling, roguish smile — and he asked Mom to dance right away.

His name was Jack. He was also of Irish background, and he was apparently modest about the fact that his Massachusetts family — unlike ours — was a big, big deal. His father, Joseph Kennedy, a rich Boston political and business force, had donated his way to become ambassador to Great Britain. He leaned heavily isolationist, thought Hitler would win and was an Irish thorn in the British government’s side.

At the dance, John F. “Jack” Kennedy apparently didn’t boast about his father. He was more interested in his mixer partner — my mother. We — her four kids, years later — never heard how they handled the Holy Ghost. What we do know is that John F. Kennedy and Beverly Barry hit it off. They danced all night, and dated for some months after that. At that time, no one telephoned casually across state — too expensive. So they exchanged weekly letters. Then, when my grandfather died, and she dropped out of college, the romance faded.

When I was a teenager, while JFK was still a junior senator from Massachusetts, my mother would read a news article about him to me, and say, “That man will be president someday.” And she’d add, with perhaps a blush I’m imagining, that he’d been her first romance. (We’re talking 17-year-old, Catholic-girl romance, yo.)

Then in November 1963, as a freshman in college, I stumbled down the dormitory steps after hearing the news of the assassination in Dallas. Like everyone in my generation, I remember everything about that day, the way we milled around the freshman quad uncomprehendingly, some of us weeping. Just as vivid is the memory of one fellow freshman — from Texas, as it happens — who was in a ground-floor dorm room as I passed by. He was cheering, fist raised. It made my head snap back. It was the first time I, as a naïve Eastern freshman, glimpsed the profound split in my country. There were some who hated what I loved. But I thought, what kind of person will cheer for murder?

Profiles in Courage

All this is why I still keep an old copy of Profiles in Courage on my bookshelf. What’s interesting in retrospect about Profiles is that it’s not what you might expect. John Kennedy, a genuine war hero, atoned for his father’s apostasy by becoming a liberal Democrat icon. He’s remembered for his early, imperfect support of civil rights. He averted nuclear war by staring down his saber-rattling generals during the Cuban missile crisis.

I feel no uncritical nostalgia for the times. We got so much wrong back then, ignored so much, it’s embarrassing to recall — women, race, gays, opportunity. What changes we have today were due to the liberal tide following Kennedy’s death, though with bipartisan cooperation.

But the courageous politicians he wrote about as a young senator weren’t all liberal do-gooders. They did include John Quincy Adams, who defended the slave revolt on the Amistad. But half of JFK’s historic “courageous” senators were right-wingers, even reactionaries, including slave-holders. He was a fan of John C. Calhoun, the most unrepentant racist in the Senate. He praised Daniel Webster for defying his abolitionist constituents and supporting the Fugitive Slave Act, which returned enslaved people to their owners. Terrible, but they voted their conscience, when necessary for national unity.

In a 2020 essay in the New Yorker, former Columbia journalism dean Nicholas Lemann revisited Profiles. He pointed out its racism problems, but stressed that the political courage JFK was idealizing was a “willingness to take a stand that is unpopular with one’s constituents and the leadership of one’s party, in service of a larger, higher cause.” That cause: the national interest. Voting beyond party interests to hold onto the whole. What JFK disdained were history’s true-believer intransigents — on either side — who, in Lemann’s words, “failed to understand the primacy of the national interest.” The courage he celebrated was about being tough, but standing down for the sake of the country. “Compromise need not mean cowardice,” Kennedy wrote, as long as it serves a higher purpose.

From Ukraine, a rare courage

That Rosebud moment reverberates for me as I look around me, this late spring of 2022. At just the right time, a certain rare courage has showed up again. On the international scene, a young Ukrainian actor-turned-politician, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has come along to single-handedly defy our generation’s almost impossibly evil dictator. After a lifetime of World War II movies, it’s surreal to see history repeating itself in bloody real-life sequels on our TV screens. Times have changed, of course. We don’t have Churchill growling with a V-sign anymore. Our hero is beaming himself, daily, by TV satellite to the world’s live venues — Grammys included — humiliating entire parliaments for their cowardice on lend-lease — sorry, for favoring gas prices over mass murder.

Here at home, as we approach the terrible figure of 1 million U.S. dead from COVID — a large share unnecessarily caused by anti-vax and anti-mask measures — we’ll be recalling the countless acts of courage by health workers, by meatpackers, by teachers. (Just think about being a teacher in some states today, harassed nonstop by showboating governors, school boards, parents — and accused of “grooming” children, for good measure. I taught fourth grade once. I’d lack the courage today.) There’s been plenty of reporting on how grandparents stepped bravely up to take over child care when their own kids couldn’t. Let’s hear it again for those grannies!

But among our politicians: Look far, look wide for either conscience or courage.

Senate, House, state governments — it’s party above all, do anything to win so the other side loses. The left has its orthodoxy, quick to cancel lives and careers for using the wrong words or pronouns. But the right has crossed into another sphere, an entire party in the thrall of a mentally damaged leader’s fevered election lies and amorality. (When Donald Trump said, about Vladimir Putin’s murderous invasion, “Smart, genius,” I thought, as I did 60 years ago, “What kind of people can cheer for murder?”) The distance we’ve traveled from JFK’s definition of courage as compromise for country is immeasurable.

I was still capable of being stunned to watch sitting Republican senators slime, and harangue, the exquisitely qualified jurist Ketanji Brown Jackson for — preposterously — being soft on pedophilia. How does it get to be this low, I thought. I flashed on techniques from the old Soviet Union, from Putin’s KGB playbook, where dehumanizing opponents with false charges of perversion is common. How far removed was this from language used in today’s Russia, which is broadcasting to its captive audiences that all Ukrainians are “bestial” Nazis who need to be placed into concentration camps — or eliminated?

Our politicians on this side know American institutional norms, traditions, pillars are wobbling, civility all but obsolete. Do they retain no sense of how fragile it all is? That the whole world is watching? Have they no sense of decency?

I understood when I read the newest poll: 50 percent of Republicans believe most Democratic leaders are involved in pedophilia trafficking. They believe this, or they say they do. This, and so much more—that elections are rigged, that voting rights must be abridged, that the only thing that counts is to give up nothing, to compromise never, to not so much govern as to own the other side. Should we expect it to get more vicious yet, if the midterm elections go as predicted? Expect it, yes.

And yet. And yet.

The small glints of hope. I’m grateful to have sane folks on my side of the divide, an elderly centrist president — older than I am! — who is at least trying. But I always look to the other side for any small hints of redemption. And I see onscreen: Sen. Mitt Romney, alone, clapping respectfully for just-confirmed Justice Ketanji Jackson, as other Republican senators churlishly flee the chamber. Rep. Liz Cheney risking her Wyoming seat to call Jan. 6 what it was — an attempted overthrow of the election. Gone, but remembered, decent Sen. John McCain, casting a thumbs-down vote against repealing Obamacare — not because he or his voters wanted him to, but because it was right for the country.

I think JFK would have taken heart. “Ask not.”

A bundle of letters, a Miami wedding

Outside our apartment, the rain has stopped. My five-year-old granddaughter, having Crayon-signed her newest family portrait, is off on her next mission. Usually, that means sneaking into forbidden territory, her grandparents’ bedroom. I’m not nimble enough to stop her; she’s going to get through the lines. She reaches my bedside table. She knows I keep forbidden fruit drops there — sugar, forbidden to her entire generation, near as I can tell. I try to remove the candies before the girls visit, but it’s no good, they find them. A couple of Post-It notes I’ve kept read, “Pops, your a crimanal!” and “Pops, your goin to jail.”

I catch up with her, too late. She’s already there, her little hand feeling inside the drawer, finding a lemon drop.

Which summons up a final memory from family lore.

In 1943, my mother married my father, George Golson, a young Navy officer she met a couple of years after her college mixer days. He was on a short leave in this very state. They were married in Miami on Christmas Eve. I guess my mother had a penchant for Navy heroes. My father would go back to sea. The destroyer he commanded, at 26, would be sunk off Sicily, and he evacuated his crew under deadly fire from German fighter planes. He was awarded the Silver Star. I was born a year after their wedding, while he was still at sea.

My mother returned to her home in Lynn, Massachusetts, to wait out the war. In her bedside table, she kept things that were dear to her — letters, postcards, remembrances. Among them, the yarn-wrapped letters from her first crush, John F. Kennedy.

She put her hand in the bedside table the day she returned, and — no letters. Dismayed, she confronted her mother, my Grandma.

“Mom, what did you do with the letters?”

Grandma, no fan of the elder Kennedy clan, and in truth a bit of a Boston battle ax, said, “Dear, a new Catholic wife does not keep letters from an old beau. I threw them in the trash.”

OK, so not all grandmothers are heroic.

But there are still heroes among us. And that is cause to cheer.

Guest columnist Barry Golson covers the Tampa Bay senior scene. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Playboy, Forbes and AARP. He is the author of “Gringos in Paradise” (Scribner). He can be reached at gbarrygolson@gmail.com.