Congressional career

House of Representatives

In 1946, U.S. Representative James Michael Curley vacated his seat in the strong Democratic 10th Congressional district in Massachusetts to become mayor of Boston. Kennedy ran for the seat, beating his Republican opponent by a large margin; this, despite not having previously included politics in his career planning. He was a congressman for six years but had a mixed voting record, often diverging from President Harry S. Truman and the rest of the Democratic Party.

Senate

In 1952, he defeated incumbent Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. for the U.S. Senate. The following year he was married to wife Jacqueline.^[24]
Kennedy underwent several spinal operations over the following two years, was at times critically ill and received Catholic last rites, and was often absent from the Senate. During his convalescence in 1956, he published Profiles in Courage, a book about U.S. Senators who risked their careers for their personal beliefs, and which received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1957.^[25] Rumors that this work was co-authored by his close adviser and speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, were confirmed in Sorensen's 2008 autobiography.^[26]
At the 1956 Democratic National Convention, Kennedy was nominated for Vice President, for the presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, but finished second in that balloting to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Kennedy received national exposure from that episode; his father thought it just as well that his son lost, due to the political debility of his Catholicism, and the strength of the Eisenhower ticket.
One of the matters demanding Kennedy's attention in the Senate was President Eisenhower's bill for the Civil Rights Act of 1957^[27] Kennedy cast a procedural vote on this which was considered by some as an appeasement of Southern Democratic opponents of the bill.^[27] Kennedy did vote for Title III of the act, which would have given the Attorney General powers to enjoin, but Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson agreed to let the provision die as a compromise measure.^[28] Kennedy also voted for Title IV, termed the "Jury Trial Amendment". Many civil rights advocates at the time criticized that vote as one which would weaken the act.^[29] A final compromise bill, which Kennedy supported, was passed in September 1957.^[30][31] In 1958, Kennedy was re-elected to a second term in the Senate, defeating his Republican opponent, Boston lawyer Vincent J. Celeste, by a wide margin.
Senator Joseph McCarthy was a friend of the Kennedy family; Joseph Kennedy, Sr. was a leading McCarthy supporter, Robert F. Kennedy worked for McCarthy's subcommittee, and McCarthy dated Patricia Kennedy. In 1954, when the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, Kennedy had drafted, but not delivered, a speech supporting the censure, but was in the hospital. Though absent, he could have participated procedurally by "pairing" his vote against that of another senator, but did not do so. He never indicated how he would have voted, but the episode damaged Kennedy's support in the liberal community, including Eleanor Roosevelt, in the 1956 and 1960 elections.^[32]