"Politician" and "courage" are words not often put together in these times, when both pols and the journalists who cover them often appear corrupted by big money, special interests, and ego. But buoyed by idealism about the nobility of public service (like that found in The West Wing's weekly story line), a group of journalists and public-service advocates led by Caroline Kennedy convened May 6 for a forum at the JFK Library on "The State of Political Courage Today."

Each of the panelists — including Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne; Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund; Al Hunt, of the Wall Street Journal and CNN’s The Capital Gang; Bill Kovach, long-time New York Times reporter and editor, and now chair of the Committee for Concerned Journalists; and Steve Roberts, writer and political commentator — contributed an essay about an elected official who took a controversial stand in spite of public opinion or political pressure to Profiles in Courage for Our Time (Hyperion, $23.95), edited by Kennedy.

Moderator Gwen Ifill, of PBS’s Washington Week and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, asked each panelist to define political courage with regard to the subject of his or her book essay. Edelman — who profiled Dr. Corkin Cherubini, a school superintendent in rural Georgia who fought his school system’s deeply ingrained "educational apartheid" — took the opportunity to extol "citizen courage." Henry David Thoreau was once considered a "social crank," she said, but his writings about social responsibility and civil disobedience inspired Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Hunt wrote about Senators John McCain and Russell Feingold’s fight for campaign-finance reform. "They won, but McCain paid a price as far as popularity," he said.

Asked by an audience member to give more-recent examples of political courage, Roberts named Senator Orrin Hatch, who went against the grain of his constituency to favor human cloning, and Senator James Jeffords of Vermont, who left the Republican Party and thus threw the majority to the Democrats.

Refreshing.