In John F. Kennedy’s 1956 book, “Profiles in Courage,” the then-Senator from Massachusetts wrote that if Americans better understood the pressures “which drive a Senator to abandon or subdue his conscience”, then they might be “more appreciative of those still able to follow the path of courage.” The Kennedy family would go on to create the Profiles in Courage Award to honor individuals who displayed the courage that Kennedy described. In 2021, they decided that no one better fit this description than Mitt Romney.

Romney, the junior U.S. Senator from Utah and the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, announced last month that he would not seek reelection in 2024. It is clear that the senator has displayed a level of political courage which has become rare in our ever more polarized political landscape. In the 2020 impeachment of Donald Trump, he became the first senator in American history to vote to remove a President from his own party from office. In Trump’s second impeachment in 2021, he would vote to convict again, one of only seven Republican senators to do so. He marched with Black Lives Matter protesters after the killing of George Floyd, was one of only three Republican senators to vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, and has openly stated that he did not vote for his party’s nominee in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. He is also aware of America’s gerontocracy. In his announcement of his reelection plans, Romney stated that “it’s time for a new generation of leaders,” an important sentiment that leaders in both parties have failed to echo.

Even more unusually, Romney has unrestrainedly criticized members of his own party. Last year, he called Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Green and Paul Gosar “morons” for attending an event organized by white nationalist Nick Fuentes. He stated publicly that Senators Josh Hawley LAW ’06 and Ted Cruz  “were making a calculation that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution” when they denied the 2020 election results. And of course, he has been one of the GOP’s most vocal critics of Donald Trump ever since 2015.

I admire Romney for these actions. It couldn’t have been easy going against the party that he once hoped to lead. He rapidly underwent a transformation from being seen as Republicans’ future to a pariah in the party. That’s a journey not many politicians would be willing to make. Romney has been a symbol of moral strength at a time when peoples’ views of their elected officials have been highly negative. But it’s important to acknowledge that Romney has also compromised his values in many of the same ways as the people he criticized. 

When Romney was running in the 1994 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, he emphatically declared that he supported “a woman’s right to choose,” only to backtrack on those comments when he pursued the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. After Obamacare was passed in 2010, he attacked the legislation as an “unconscionable abuse of power” despite signing similar reforms into law when he was governor of Massachusetts. And in 2012, Romney played into the racially motivated birther movement when he told a cheering crowd in Michigan that “no one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate.” He even accepted the endorsement of future nemesis Donald Trump, back when Trump was known primarily as a business magnate and TV personality, despite Trump’s promotion of birther conspiracy theories. Romney, like many of the politicians he now derides, did a great deal attempting to ingratiate himself with some of the most conservative factions of his party. He has a history of forsaking his morals and succumbing to the pressures of realpolitik. It’s obvious that he’s not the paragon of virtue that many believe him to be.

Romney is not someone we should idolize, but he isn’t someone whom we should cast aside, either. His role as a prominent Republican made the courage he displayed through his criticism of Trump’s GOP more impactful than any Democrat’s disapproval ever could have been. But he has also shown that he’s willing to cross moral boundaries in the pursuit of power. He is someone whose career we can learn from, someone whose example our leaders should seek to follow in some instances and seek to do better in others.

VITTAL SIVAKUMAR is a first-year in Berkeley College. Contact him at vittal.sivakumar@yale.edu.