Patrick Tuohey's Blog

Obama the New Kennedy?

Posted in The Missouri Record by patricktuohey on June 7, 2011

While a member of the US Senate, John F. Kennedy claimed to write a book, Profiles in Courage, that won him a Pulitzer Prize.  Well, sort of.  According to the Wikipedia account of the book:

In May 2008, [Kennedy speechwriter Ted] Sorensen clarified in his autobiography, Counselor, how he collaborated with Kennedy on the book: “While in Washington, I received from Florida almost daily instructions and requests by letter and telephone – books to send, memoranda to draft, sources to check, materials to assemble, and Dictaphone drafts or revisions of early chapters.” (Sorensen, p. 146) Sorensen wrote that Kennedy “worked particularly hard and long on the first and last chapters, setting the tone and philosophy of the book” and that “I did a first draft of most chapters” and “helped choose the words of many of its sentences”. JFK “publicly acknowledged in his introduction to the book my extensive role in its composition” (p. 147) 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. Indeed, this supported a long-standing recognition of the collaborative effort that Kennedy and Sorensen had developed since 1953.

Now there is some question as to who authored President Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father. Of course, ‘some question,’ is a matter of disagreement.  At least two books, however, assert that the book was largely written by Bill Ayers of Weather Underground fame.  One, Deconstructing Obama, is written by Kansas City’s own Jack Cashill.  And unlike JFK, Obama has claimed all credit for himself.

As Obama proves an ever growing disappointment to the Left, Cashill expects Ayers himself will eventually claim responsibility for the book–as Sorensen did of Kennedy’s.

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