I write, you decide.

Chris Matthews is an all-things-Kennedy fan from way back (though as a kid, he wanted Nixon to beat JFK in 1960 and cried when RN lost), so while he mocks Palin he is, of course, aware that there is a ghost, or at least a skeleton, in the Camelot closet.

When I was a young boy, my dad gave me a copy of Profiles in Courage, written by none other than John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It took me a while, but I made my way through it and still have that copy in my library. It was a cool book about statesmen who had defied the political correctness of their day (another irony?) and did what they thought was right. It was as much a work about character as it was about courage.

I loved the book and the author became an early hero of mine. When he was killed, I cried.

Later, though, I learned – as most of us do when we grow up – that the story behind the story is often the real story. Discovering that the man who wrote about two important virtues and values seemed himself to be deficient in both was, well, a bummer, to say the least. He had a lot of girl friends, a practice that didn’t seem to reinforce the idea of sterling character. But, at least, I still had that courage thing to embrace.

Then I found out – oh, sad, sad day that it was – that the book I loved, that little bestseller that had won a Pulitzer Prize (which I heard was, like, a really big deal), had been written mostly by, gulp, someone else.

I must have spent days walking around in a funk, looking down at bells at the bottoms of my not-quite-long-enough-geek-jeans, for days.

A guy named “Theodore” had done most of the work, I heard. Theodore? The very name didn’t not bespeak, “cool” as Kennedy’s did. I had an image in my head of a bookish guy with old-man glasses. So, I looked him up in the library – and sure enough.

Then it got worse. You remember that Pulitzer Prize? Well, I came to find out that John F. Kennedy’s daddy – a pretty rich and powerful guy, I was told – got a buddy of his on the Pulitzer committee, New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, to champion his boy’s book. Originally, the book was not on the committee’s short list, one that had been submitted by some expert reviewers, but somehow it made it to that important table. At any rate, it wasn’t as “weighty” as prize winners usually turned out to be. But, before long “it came out of nowhere” and won the roses.

It was all pretty good publicity in the run up to the 1960 campaign. After all, though most candidates these days have books out while they run for the big office, Kennedy was one of the pioneers of the practice. And his had won a Pulitzer, which said that he was smart, erudite, eloquent, and therefore would make a good leader.

But his erudition and eloquence were implants.

So, Mr. Matthews – go ahead and make fun of Sarah Palin. Do your best to color her ditzy and as someone with no depth. But just remember, she actually has character and courage. And Americans will be seeing more of her graceful, politically popular, and winning profile for many years to come.