The selection of Lincoln for the Emancipation Proclamation would be unremarkable, except for Whalen’s suggestion that Lincoln freed the slaves largely because he thought it would help win the Civil War. Indeed, Lincoln hesitated to issue the proclamation earlier, fearing that it would lose him the support of border states. Whalen quotes the 16th president as admitting, “I want to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.”

Lincoln surely must be on the list, but perhaps his decision to fight the war in the first place was the more courageous one. Remember that his predecessor, James Buchanan, was of a mind to let the South secede.

If I have dwelled on Whalen’s selections, it’s because his historical accounts themselves are superficial. He selects good snippets but familiar ones, and his portraits are rather conventional. This tendency serves him poorly in his one truly bad pick: Andrew Jackson, for scuttling the Bank of the United States. Old Hickory waged a war against the country’s young central bank under the dubious premise that bankers were the enemies of “farmers, mechanics, and laborers.” What a lovely and ignorant view. Actually, as Daniel Webster noted at the time, Jackson used his power to “inflame” the poorer classes against the rich. Jackson’s prejudices were understandable, given his 18th-century backwoods origins, but after 200 years of at least some progress in economic thought, Whalen should not have fallen for such a crude economic populist.

The author doesn’t insist that his heroes always acted courageously; F.D.R., for one, was hardly immune to political calculation. This raises a question that Whalen does not address: Can one identify the raw material of courage in advance? Does Hillary Clinton have it? Does Mitt Romney? It seems that Churchill was courageous his entire life; Gerald Ford rose to the occasion.

By focusing on moral courage as distinct from bodily courage, Whalen misses a possible connective thread. It is at least interesting to note, as Whalen does not, that a great many of his heroes were also physically valiant. One thinks of Jackson in wartime, Lincoln nobly enduring depression, the once sickly Theodore Roosevelt going on safari (“I hope the first lion who sees him does his duty” was J.P. Morgan’s acerbic observation after T.R. had busted up his railroad conglomerate), as well as F.D.R. refusing to surrender to polio, and J.F.K. rescuing his shipwrecked PT boat crew and later maintaining a cheerful front as president when seriously ill with Addison’s disease. Perhaps spiritual courage begins in one’s guts.

This is further ammunition for those who believe that George W. Bush—an unenthusiastic National Guardsman who avoided Vietnam duty—does not have the right stuff. Whalen’s heavy-handed preface is dedicated to debunking the notion that Bush’s Iraqi escapade qualifies him as courageous. Much as I agree, this was better left unsaid: Besides its partisan tilt, which seems inappropriate in a work of history, Whalen’s foray into real-time politics is also at odds with his thesis. The guiding leitmotif of A Higher Purpose, after all, is that courage often goes unrecognized in the moment.