Ted Sorensen RIP

Ted Sorensen, JFK's speechwriter and confidant, dies at 82
Some of Kennedy's most memorable speeches resulted from close collaborations with Sorensen

Associated Press
guardian.co.uk
Monday 1 November 2010

Theodore C Sorensen, the studious aide and alter ego to President John F. Kennedy whose poetic turns of phrase helped idealise and immortalise a tragically brief administration, has died at age 82.

Sorensen died at noon at a New York hospital from complications of a stroke, his widow, Gillian Sorensen, said.

His death came as supporters of his friend and boss were preparing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of a very different moment in history: The election of Kennedy as president and the speech that remains the greatest collaboration between Sorensen and Kennedy and the standard for modern oratory.

With its call for self-sacrifice and civic engagement "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" and its promise to spare no cost in defending the country's interests worldwide, the address is an uplifting but haunting reminder of national purpose and confidence, before Vietnam, assassinations, Watergate, terrorists attacks and economic shock.

President Barack Obama issued a statement saying he was saddened to learn of Sorensen's death.

"I know his legacy will live on in the words he wrote, the causes he advanced, and the hearts of anyone who is inspired by the promise of a new frontier," Obama said.

Of all Kennedy's inner circle, special counsel Sorensen ranked just below Kennedy's brother Bobby. He was the adoring, tireless speechwriter and confidant to a president whose term was marked by Cold War struggles, growing civil rights strife and the beginnings of the US intervention in Vietnam.

Some of Kennedy's most memorable speeches, from his inaugural address to his vow to place a man on the moon, resulted from such close collaborations with Sorensen that scholars debated who wrote what. He had long been suspected as the real writer of the future president's Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage, an allegation Sorensen and the Kennedys emphatically and litigiously denied.

They were an odd, but utterly compatible duo, the glamorous, wealthy politician from Massachusetts and the shy wordsmith from Nebraska, described by Time magazine in 1960 as "a sober, deadly earnest, self-effacing man with a blue steel brain." But as Sorensen would write in his memoir, Counselor, the difference in their lifestyles was offset by the closeness of their minds: Each had a wry sense of humor, a dislike of hypocrisy, a love of books and a high-minded regard for public life.

Kennedy called him "my intellectual blood bank" and the press frequently referred to Sorensen as Kennedy's ghostwriter. Presidential secretary Evelyn Lincoln saw it another way: "Ted was really more shadow than ghost, in the sense that he was never really very far from Kennedy."

Kennedy's daughter, Caroline Kennedy, called Sorensen a "wonderful friend and counselor" for her father and all of her family.

"His partnership with President Kennedy helped bring justice to our country and peace to our world. I am grateful for his guidance, his generosity of spirit and the special time he took to teach my children."

Sorensen's brain of steel was never needed more than in October 1962, with the US and the Soviet Union on the brink of nuclear annihilation over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Kennedy directed Sorensen and Bobby Kennedy, the administration's attorney general, to draft a letter to Nikita Khrushchev, who had sent conflicting messages, first conciliatory, then confrontational.

The carefully worded response which ignored the Soviet leader's harsher statements, and included a US concession involving US weaponry in Turkey was credited with persuading the Soviets to withdraw their missiles from Cuba and with averting war between the superpowers.

Sorensen considered his role his greatest achievement.

"That's what I'm proudest of," he once told the Omaha (Nebraska) World-Herald. "Never had this country, this world, faced such great danger. You and I wouldn't be sitting here today if that had gone badly."

Theodore Chaikin Sorensen was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on May 8, 1928.

He graduated from Lincoln High, the University of Nebraska and the university's law school. At age 24, he explored job prospects in Washington, D.C, and found himself weighing offers from two newly elected senators, Kennedy of Massachusetts and fellow Democrat Henry Jackson, from Washington state.

As Sorensen recalled, Jackson wanted a PR man. Kennedy, considered the less promising politician, wanted Sorensen to poll economists and develop a plan to jump-start New England's economy.

"Two roads diverged in the Old Senate Office Building and I took the one less recommended, and that has made all the difference," Sorensen wrote in his memoir. "The truth is more prosaic: I wanted a good job."

During the next four years the de facto beginning of Kennedy's presidential run he and Sorensen travelled together to every state, with Sorensen juggling various jobs: scheduler, speechwriter, press rep.

After Kennedy's thousand days in the White House, Sorensen worked as an international lawyer, counting Anwar Sadat among his clients. He stayed involved in politics, joining Bobby Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1968 and running unsuccessfully for the New York Senate four years later. In 1976, President Jimmy Carter nominated Sorensen for the job of CIA director, but conservative critics quickly killed the nomination, citing among other alleged flaws his youthful decision to identify himself as a conscientious objector.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/01/ted-sorensen-jfk-speechwriter-dies