Kennedy’s contributions remain unknown, but it seems to have been limited to simply outlining the chapters and making helpful suggestions in the margins. While ghostwriting is an accepted aspect of the profession and most celebrity books are basically impossible without the aid of more experienced writers, it’s necessary to point out Kennedy was a Harvard grad and already a best-selling, internationally-respected author before finishing college. If he’d fessed up, that’d be one thing, but the lie was covered up with the passion usually reserved for crashed UFOs.
When the going got tough, he paid a bunch of smarter people to do it for him because he had a filthy rich dad and was too busy trying to get famous. Joe Kennedy, JFK’s dad, drafted the contract offering Sorensen royalties. From the very start, journalists smelled something fishy. When reporters tried to report on the true scale of Sorensen’s role in the book, they were allegedly bullied into submission. For 50 years, it was an open secret among DC intelligentsia. Not that JFK didn’t go out of his way to try and fool journalists and his closest friends and family into thinking he was the sole creator of his own speeches. Out of insecurity, he laboriously wrote out by hand Sorensen’s notes word by word to con naïve onlookers. The sad thing is, it tricked almost everybody.
In other words, the rich jock made the nerd do his homework. Leaning on nepotism one more time, JFK called in some favors. Kennedy’s brother-in-law was an editor at Harper & Brothers, the publisher that produced his supposed magnum opus. As you can see, this is probably the worst lesson imaginable for kids; every step of this book’s production is more sordid than the next. His rapidly-expanding ego was responsible for one of the douchiest pick-up lines/humblebrags in history, with the Massachusetts senator uttering the line, “I would rather win a Pulitzer Prize than be president.” This while actively in the process of paying a 24-year-old newbie staffer to write a book for him in order to enhance his political reputation to stage a presidential run.