Before John F. Kennedy became a legendary young president, he was the junior senator from Massachusetts. The Senate was where JFK’s presidential ambitions were born and first realized. In the first book to deal exclusively with JFK’s Senate years, author John T. Shaw looks at how the young senator was able to catapult himself on the national stage.

Unlike Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic leader in the Senate, JFK never aspired to be The Master of the Senate who made deals and kept the institution under his control. Instead, he envisioned himself as a Historian-Scholar-Statesman, in the mold of his hero Winston Churchill. He realized this ambition with the 1957 publication of Profiles of Courage that earned him a Pulitzer Prize and public limelight. Smart, dashing, irreverent and literary, the press could not get enough of him.

Based on primary documents from JFK’s Senate years as well as memoirs, oral histories, and interviews with his top aides, JFK in the Senate provides new insight into an underappreciated aspect of his political career.