Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Yes, there’s a consensus about Profiles in Courage (1956), which established JFK’s intellectual credentials and helped make him a credible presidential candidate. We’ll get to that. Yes, we know who did most of the heavy lifting for the book–we’ll get to that too. The principal controversy, apparently, has been what to call the curious process by which the book came to be. Even Garry Wills, a Kennedy critic, writes that JFK was the author of the book in the sense that he “authorized” it. Come now. Kennedy conceived the book and supervised its production, but did little of the research and writing. If you or I were discovered doing the same for a sophomore term paper in sociology, we’d get an F.
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, 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.
