DID JFK REALLY WRITE THE PULITZER PRIZE WINNING BOOK PROFILES IN COURAGE?

There are so many conspiracy theories surrounding JFK, and his years in the public that it is hard to know at this point what is right and what is off the deep end. “Profiles In Courage” is a wonderful book with many great stories of the huge sacrifices that Americans have made on numerous occasions throughout history. It is an inspiring and easy read. The idea for the book--a study of heroic U.S. senators--came to Kennedy in 1954, when he was a first-term senator himself. At first he imagined it as a magazine article, but during a long convalescence from a couple of back operations he decided to make it into a book. His chief assistant on the project was his speechwriter Ted Sorensen, who was often described as his alter-ego. The recovering Kennedy sent Sorensen a steady stream of notes and dictation, requested books, asked that memos be prepared, and so on. Sorensen worked virtually full-time on the project for six months, sometimes 12 hours a day. He coordinated the work and drafted many chapters. 

The book was published on January 1, 1956, to lavish praise. It became a best seller and in 1957 was awarded the Pulitzer prize for biography. It established Kennedy--until then considered promising but lacking in political savvy--as one of the Democratic party's leading lights, and setting the stage for his presidential nomination in 1960. But doubts about the book's authorship surfaced early. In December 1957 syndicated columnist Drew Pearson--a muckraking journalist of the day--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."

The most thorough analysis of who did what has come from historian Herbert Parmet in "Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy" (1980). He wrote that Kennedy contributed some notes, mostly on John Quincy Adams, but little that made it into the finished book. "There is no evidence of a Kennedy draft for the main portions of the book," Parmet said. He continued…”the literary craftsmanship was definitely Sorensen's”. But Parmet, like everyone else, denied saying Sorensen was the book's ghostwriter.
Did JFK's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, pressure others to get his son the Pulitzer, as some believe? "Profiles" was not among the first books recommended to the Pulitzer committee by its judges, so when the rather slim volume came out of nowhere and trumped some seriously writers of the day, many got suspicious. There is no direct evidence of this however. It is still a popular volume and inspirational work today.