But he insisted that he was the book’s author and bristled even at teasing suggestions to the contrary. Kennedy made no secret of Sorensen’s involvement in Profiles, crediting him in the preface as “my research associate,” and likewise acknowledged the contributions of Davids and others.

In December 1957 syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, interviewed on TV by Mike Wallace, said, “Jack Kennedy is … the only man in history that I know who won a Pulitzer prize on a book which was ghostwritten for him.” Outraged, Kennedy hired lawyer Clark Clifford, who collected the senator’s handwritten notes and rounded up statements from people who said they’d seen him working on the book, then persuaded Wallace’s bosses at ABC to read a retraction on the air.

It established Kennedy, till then considered promising but lacking in gravitas, as one of the Democratic party’s leading lights, setting the stage for his presidential nomination in 1960.īut doubts about the book’s authorship surfaced early. It became a best seller and in 1957 was awarded the Pulitzer prize for biography. The book was published on January 1, 1956, to lavish praise. Others also made contributions, most importantly Georgetown University history professor Jules Davids. He coordinated the work and drafted many chapters. Sorensen worked virtually full-time on the project for six months, sometimes 12 hours a day. (Remember the bit about “Ask not what your country can do for you”? Sorensen was in on that one.) The recuperating Kennedy sent Sorensen a steady stream of notes and dictation, requested books, asked that memos be prepared, and so on. His chief assistant on the project was his speechwriter Ted Sorensen, often described as his alter ego. Initially he imagined it as a magazine article, but during a long convalescence after a couple back operations he decided to make it into a book. senators - came to Kennedy in 1954, when he was a first-term senator himself. The idea for the book - a study of heroic U.S. If you or I were discovered doing the same for a sophomore term paper in sociology, we’d get an F. Kennedy conceived the book and supervised its production, but did little of the research and writing. Even Garry Wills, a Kennedy critic, writes that JFK was the author of the book in the sense that he “authorized” it. The principal controversy, apparently, has been what to call the curious process by which the book came to be. Yes, we know who did most of the heavy lifting for the book - we’ll get to that too. Yes, there’s a consensus about Profiles in Courage (1956), which established JFK’s intellectual credentials and helped make him a credible presidential candidate.

Profiles in courage by john f kennedy