Editing Profiles in Courage (section)

==Background and history==
Kennedy was elected to the House of Representatives in 1946, 1948, and 1950 from the state of Massachusetts. In 1952 and 1958, he was elected a senator from Massachusetts and served in the Senate until resigning after he was elected president in [[1960 United States presidential election|1960]]. It was a passage from [[Herbert Agar]]'s 1950 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 [[Ted 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.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Myers |first1=Joanne |last2=Sorenson |first2=Ted |title=Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History |url=https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/studio/multimedia/20080521-counselor-a-life-at-the-edge-of-history |website=Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs |access-date=August 12, 2020 |date=May 21, 2008}}</ref> 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.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Sorensen |first1=Theodore C. |title=Counselor : a life at the edge of history |date=2008 |publisher=Harper |location=New York, NY |isbn=978-0060798710 |edition=1st}}</ref>

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.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://think.kera.org/2019/02/22/the-past-present-and-future-of-impeachment/ |title=The Past, Present And Future Of Impeachment |date=February 22, 2019 |publisher=[[KERA-FM]] |at=10 min - 12 min |type=audio}}</ref>