John Profumo: A study in redemption

I came across this article a few days ago in Jewish World Review. In it, Paul Greenberg muses about the meaning of honor, and how our concept of it has become changed and distorted over the years. To make his point, he discusses at some length the story of John Profumo, a member of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's cabinet who, in 1963, was the focal point of a sex scandal which eventually brought down Macmillan's government. I have known about the Profumo scandal for many years -- and parenthetically, it came as no surprise to me to learn a few years ago that President John F. Kennedy was fascinated by it; but until I read Greenberg's column, I didn't know what happened to Mr. Profumo himself after the scandal faded away and became a historical footnote of the Cold War era. Here, as Paul Harvey would say, is the rest of the story. I believe there is a valuable lesson here for all of us.