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Honesty and Integrity on President’s Day 2023
JFK’s Total Plagiarism
Some things just don’t age well. I probably shouldn't write this on President’s Day. But when we look back, we see the obvious sexism or racism on the wall. We say, Oh god, how embarrassing. President John F. Kennedy’s essay on Senator Lamar of Mississippi, who served after the Civil War in Congress, in his Pulitzer prize-winning 1956 book, Profiles in Courage, is not one of those things. In fact, it seemed to have aged well because it lacks analysis. People now admire him for the picture on the cover and his bold speeches, completely forgetting the past before he made them.
Because of that blind admiration, it erases the book’s support of known racists and proslavery politicians and if leaves the general public to admire him more, not caring about that support or that he basically cheated by claiming to author a book he didn’t.
This article though is not about the controversy that JFK didn’t even write the book he won the Pulitzer Prize for and instead was written by his speech writer. I’ve been reading this book after learning about it and the Pulitzer Prize it won. It interested me because I was curious about its contents after learning that the Democratic Party before 1964 was the Party of Racism and White Supremacy. It had been since the 1840s. I dug in to learn more. I learned a switch…
