Not having your background in history, InOBU, when I read that we all know now that Salinger (I figure you mean Pierre not J.D.) wrote it Profiles in Courage, it comes across as a knee-jerk pedestal attack. Since it was written at a time when JFK was ill and needed a project to keep him from getting depressed, I assumed he really wrote it. He said he wrote it. His wife said he wrote it and the Encyclopedia Brittanica said he wrote it so it seems fair to say that we don't all know that Salinger wrote it.

That's not to say he didn't but I would be curious where you, and presumably everyone else, learned that he didn't.

Sourdough

PS: I had the same history teacher in high school that Kennedy had, Russell Ayres. He was a remarkable man himself. When I was his student, at the end of his teaching career, he could point to two of his former pupils with great pride, Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy. It is no coincidence that each of them became both students and shapers of history.