The book, authored by John F. Kennedy with Ted Sorensen as a ghostwriter, profiles senators who defied the opinions of their party and constituents to do what they felt was right and suffered severe criticism and losses in popularity as a result.

It begins with a quotation from Edmund Burke on the courage of the English statesman Charles James Fox, in his 1783 "attack upon the tyranny of the East India Company" in the House of Commons, and focuses on mid-19th-century antebellum America and the efforts of senators to delay the American Civil War.

However, in his 2008 autobiography, Kennedy's speechwriter Ted Sorensen, who was presumed as early as 1957 to be the book's ghostwriter, acknowledged that he "did a first draft of most chapters" and "helped choose the words of many of its sentences".

[3][4][5] Jules Davids, who was a history professor for Kennedy's wife Jacqueline when she was a student at Georgetown University, is also acknowledged to have made key contributions to the historical research and organizational planning for the book.

[8] With help from research assistants and the Library of Congress, Sorenson wrote a first draft of the book while Kennedy was bedridden with Addison's disease and recovering from back surgery during 1954 and 1955.

[9] Historian Timothy Naftali remarked that another motivation for Kennedy to write the book was his desire to improve his reputation after failing to vote to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Naftali said it was Kennedy's ambition to become Vice President of the United States, and that he included Edmund Ross to appeal to Southern Democrats.

Kennedy's father Joseph asked columnist Arthur Krock, his political adviser and a longtime member of the prize board, to persuade others to vote for it.

[14][15][16] On December 7, 1957,[17] journalist Drew Pearson appeared as a guest on The Mike Wallace Interview and made the claim that "John F. Kennedy is the only man in history that I know who won a Pulitzer Prize for a book that was ghostwritten for him."

'"[3][12] Joseph P. Kennedy saw the broadcast, then called his lawyer, Clark Clifford, yelling: "Sue the bastards for fifty million dollars!"

[19] In Sorensen's 2008 autobiography, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, he said he wrote "a first draft of most of the chapters" of Profiles in Courage and "helped choose the words of many of its sentences".

Sorensen claimed that in May 1957, Kennedy "unexpectedly and generously offered, and I happily accepted, a sum to be spread over several years, that I regarded as more than fair" for his work on the book.

After Sorensen returned an edited draft of the preface with a request for a mention, Kennedy added a line thanking him "for his invaluable assistance".

[12] Fehrman further claimed Kennedy worked harder on promoting Profiles, signing autographs and making many public appearances for the book, than he did writing it.

And although Sorensen took the lead role in drafting the bulk of the chapters, with significant input on some of them from Professor Jules Davids and Jim Landis, the senator (Kennedy) was responsible for the book's architecture, themes, and arguments."

[20] However, a letter Jules Davids wrote in 1957, which was made public in 1997, backed claims that he and Sorensen were in fact the key contributors to the book's history research.

Of Johnson's defenders in the Senate, Profiles in Courage stated that "Not a single one of them escaped the terrible torture of vicious criticism engendered by their vote to acquit."

Kennedy also praised Lucius Lamar, who, while working in the public eye towards reconciliation, privately was an instigator, according to the claim of author Nicholas Lemann, of growing racial agitation.

[24] In the profile of Lamar, Kennedy had also included a single paragraph condemning Adelbert Ames, the Maine-born governor of Mississippi from 1873 to 1876, as an opportunistic carpetbagger whose administration was "sustained and nourished by Federal bayonets".