Hart is a published writer with a background in literature and creative writing. In the following essay, she looks at the price of courage in the lives of four of the senators portrayed in Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.

John F. Kennedy ends his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage with his definition of courage. Or at least he tries to define it. He can't quite put his finger on a specific definition, but he does know what courage requires, what it may cost an individual, and finally what courage means to democracy. He concludes that courage—this abstract concept that he can only allude to through stories about people who have displayed it through the resolution of conflict—is the "basis of all human morality." The conflicts that the people in his stories faced, although set in the political arena, affected more than just their political careers...