Profiles in Courage is a deeply problematic book whose biggest relevance to current US events is as an example of the historic strength of racist & anti-democratic politics. It attacked Reconstruction & celebrated its end, in line with the racist conventional history of the time

It also celebrates Daniel Webster for going against anti-slavery opinion in Massachusetts by supporting the Compromise of 1850 & Fugitive Slave Law

More idiosyncratically, it celebrated & endorsed Robert Taft's opposition to the Nuremberg trials

It celebrated the failure to impeach Andrew Johnson, who sabotaging efforts to provide rights & protections for freed slaves. It makes Edmund Ross, who may well have been bribed, a "profile in courage" for his key vote against impeachment

By contrast Thaddeus Stevens, a genuine "profile in courage" if ever there was one, is described as the" crippled, fanatical personification of the extremes of the Radical Republicans"

It called Reconstruction "the black nightmare the south could never forget"

Maybe most egregiously, it also makes a "profile in courage" of Lucius Lamar, Mississippi senator who gave a "southern gentlemanly" to Charles Sumner".Lamar was an ex-Confederate vicious opponent of any rights for black people

It also celebrates Lamar for his role in the Compromise of 1877,which brought in decades of apartheid in the south

Worth noting that Kennedy, who presumably at least endorsed what Sorensen wrote for him, later seems to have changed his mind about Reconstruction during the civil rights movement. He said during his presidency that he was coming to appreciate the perspective of Thaddeus Stevens

But he only did that privately. Meanwhile Profiles in Courage remains celebrated as a great book, & the idea of Reconstruction as a bad thing was still being repeated by Hillaey Clinton in 2016. You can draw a clear line from opposition to Reconstruction to the Capitol riot