History and Background
Kennedy was elected the member of the House of Representatives in 1946 for the state of Massachusetts. He was later elected the junior Senator from Massachusetts in 1953, where he served until he was elected president in 1960. It was a passage from Herbert Agar's book The Price of Union about an act of courage by an earlier senator from Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams, that gave Kennedy the idea of writing about senatorial courage. He showed the passage to Sorensen and asked him to see if he could find some more examples. This Sorensen did, and eventually they had enough not just for an article, as Kennedy had originally envisaged, but a book. With help from research assistants and the Library of Congress, Kennedy wrote the book while bedridden during 1954 and 1955, recovering from back surgery.
Read more about this topic: Profiles In Courage
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