Chapter 1 Summary

This chapter explains that the book is about the author's admiration of the courage shown by elected leaders in the face of adverse factions like their electorates, popular opinion and political action committees that pull these elected men in different directions. Hemingway's definition of courage as grace under pressure is noted early in the chapter because this book is about courage and its different faces as shown in the lives of eight different United States senators.

The author quotes a reporter saying that people don't care about what the elected officials say because most of it is untrue anyway. A cabinet member suggested in the same vein that most Senators are mentally weak, unfit to be senators and vulgar demagogues. This concern for the cabinet's integrity was quoted in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, indicating a historical disregard for integrity in government...