During John F. Kennedy's presidency, Plimpton recalled, he attended a private function at the White House, the sort of dinner party usually described as "glittering." Afterward Kennedy led Plimpton and a small group on a private tour. At one point he pulled Plimpton aside and said, "George, I need to talk to you about your grandmother."
That was not a sentence Plimpton ever expected to hear from the president, but it resonates in 2017, as we struggle with the memory of the Civil War and its repercussions. Plimpton's grandmother, Blanche Ames Ames, had been pelting Kennedy with letters complaining about his treatment of her father, Adelbert Ames, in his Pulitzer-winning book, Profiles in Courage. The bombardment, Kennedy said, was beginning to "interfere with state business." (Plimpton relished the choice of words.) The writer promised to ask her to stop.
Ames was a remarkable man. He graduated from West Point in 1861, and received a promotion to brigadier general of U.S. Volunteers while still in his 20s. He fought with distinction in the Civil War, earning a Medal of Honor for his valor at First Bull Run. In Reconstruction, he served as military governor of Mississippi, where he appointed the first black officeholders in that black-majority state. He resigned from the army to become a U.S. senator and later governor of Mississippi, emerging as a leading voice for racial equality as he worked closely with such black allies as state legislator Charles Caldwell.
But a rising tide of white-supremacist violence overwhelmed this experiment in multiracial democracy. In 1875, the state's Democratic Party essentially staged an insurrection—led in part by Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, whom Kennedy would choose for a profile in courage. Caldwell took up arms against Lamar's forces and was murdered, along with countless of other black Republicans. Ames reluctantly resigned and left Mississippi in 1876.
Kennedy praised Lamar as a leader in healing the nation after the Civil War, and condemned his foe Ames as a corrupt carpetbagger. It infuriated Ames's daughter Blanche, who better knew the truth. Kennedy could not ignore her; as a suffragist, ally of Margaret Sanger, and philanthropist, she was a formidable figure in Massachusetts. But at Plimpton's request she relented, and wrote her own biography of her father.
