JFK aide shares his story

The Associated Press
Published: May 10, 2008

NEW YORK — As he watched the breach and then the break between Sen. Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, former White House speechwriter Ted Sorensen was reminded, as he is so often, of his years with John F. Kennedy.

It was September 1960, Kennedy was addressing a gathering of ministers in Houston, responding to concerns that a Catholic could be trusted as president — a major obstacle then for Kennedy’s campaign.

“All of those conservative Protestants were glaring at him in the audience,” recalls Sorensen, speaking from the living room of his apartment overlooking Central Park, light rain falling on a cool spring morning.

“And he referred to the fact that a lot of these pamphlets quoting popes and priests and prelates from the Catholic church were from other countries, and sometimes other centuries, and then he said, ‘I do not consider these other quotations binding upon my public acts. Why should you?”’

“And I’ve always felt that that’s what Obama should say about Rev. Wright,” Sorensen says of Obama’s former pastor, whom the candidate denounced after Wright suggested that the U.S. government invented the AIDS virus to destroy blacks and made other inflammatory remarks.

Few people were affected more profoundly by the life, and death, of Kennedy than Sorensen, the studious young aide whose liberal ideas and poetic turns of phrase became so entwined with Kennedy’s that the president called him his “intellectual blood bank.”

Sorensen turns 80 this spring, but over the decades he has changed little in appearance — fit and slender in a blue polo shirt and tan slacks, grayish hair brushed back — and in his ideals and adoration for his former boss.

Author of a Kennedy biography that came out in 1965, just two years after the president’s assassination, Sorensen has for years kept details about himself and about Kennedy away from the public. He has ended his silence with “Counselor,” a memoir that in its own way was as difficult to write as the first book.

In the 1960s, he worked through grief and around the sensitivities of widow Jacqueline Kennedy and brother Robert Kennedy, both of whom were still alive. “Counselor” was a great debate with his own body: A stroke in 2001 left him unable to read his own handwriting and forced him to dictate the memoir.

“Everything else I had ever written I had written in longhand, in lined yellow pads, and I edited myself as I went along,” he says. “This book took me six years, and I’ve written several other books, including a very long one (on Kennedy) that took me a year and a half.”

Released by HarperCollins with an announced first printing of 150,000 copies, “Counselor” is a 550-page book that begins with Sorensen’s childhood in Nebraska and continues to the present, and has blurbs from historian Robert Caro and Obama. Sorensen is a supporter of Obama and campaigned for him in Iowa.

“The speeches that he and JFK worked on are the models for all speechwriters,” says Obama speechwriter Adam Frankel, who assisted Sorensen on his memoir.

Acknowledging that even Jacqueline Kennedy believed he had a childlike worship of her husband, Sorensen says his “strong feeling for the man and about the man was totally based in fact, and deserved.” He declines to discuss Kennedy’s private failings during the interview, but he writes about them in his memoir, with sadness and sympathy.

Yes, Kennedy cheated on his wife and Sorensen suspected it in his lifetime. He knows nothing about the president’s legendary liaison with Marilyn Monroe, but does confide in his book that “after 1956 I was vaguely aware of a few flings and fancies along the campaign trail” and that “I knew briefly a few of those who I assumed to have shared his bed.”

“After all these years, it is unpleasant for me to acknowledge even these limited observations of his philandering,” Sorensen writes. “It was wrong, and he knew it was wrong, which is why he went to great lengths to keep it hidden. ... In every other aspect of his life, he was honest and truthful, especially in his job. His mistakes do not make his accomplishments less admirable; but they were still mistakes.”

Despite all the revelations about Kennedy, Sorensen’s appreciation has only deepened. He finds no president over the past 40 years who meets his former boss’ standards of courage, wit and integrity. Even Robert Kennedy, murdered in 1968 during his own presidential run, would not have matched his brother, Sorensen says.

He writes lovingly, and slightly warily, of Jacqueline Kennedy, whom he thinks of with “awe, admiration and affection.” She was “strong-willed, but never arrogant, gentle but never weak.”

She was also highly protective of her husband’s legacy, suggesting numerous deletions in Sorensen’s 1965 biography, especially positive references to his successor, Lyndon Johnson. In the 1980s, she reacted angrily to Sorensen’s plan to publish a collection of Kennedy speeches, accusing him of exploiting her late husband and only changing her mind after family members intervened.

Readers will learn a lot from his memoir; Sorensen already has. As he looked through the presidential archives, Sorensen discovered, to his great surprise, that Kennedy had considered appointing him national security adviser. He also identified an unpopular man in the Kennedy administration: himself.

“I discovered that a lot of people didn’t like me. I was really taken aback and saddened by that,” says Sorensen, who writes of being known as “not the warmest human being” among fellow aides.

“But in addition, writing a book about your whole life really gives you a different perspective about certain themes. And I was quite pleased to find themes in my early life that would later echo in my own.”

Sorensen was born in 1928, the son of Nebraska attorney general C.A. Sorensen, a progressive and forceful Republican. From his father, Ted Sorensen says, he learned “opposition to war and to racial and religious bias, and to a certain extent, using words as tools for getting things done.”

When he turned 18, in 1946, Sorensen declared himself a conscientious objector, a decision that would help bring down his appointment 30 years later as CIA director under President Carter. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was a civil rights activist in Nebraska and he graduated from the law school of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

He moved to Washington, working for the Federal Security Agency. In 1953, he was offered positions on the staffs of two young Democratic senators: Henry Jackson from Washington and John Kennedy from Massachusetts. Jackson was considered the more promising and more liberal politician, but Kennedy made a better first impression and offered Sorensen a more substantial role.

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

As Sorensen writes, the shy reformer’s son from Nebraska and the dashing rich man from Massachusetts seemed to have little in common. But their similarities mattered — a wry sense of humor, a dislike of hypocrisy, a love of books, high-minded regard for public life. The more time they spent together, especially between 1956 and 1960, the more their minds met.

“There was nothing like that three-four year period where, just the two of us, we were traveling across the United States,” Sorensen says. “That’s when I got to know the man.”

He was Kennedy’s collaborator on the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Profiles in Courage” and on countless speeches. Scholars still debate the authorship of “Profiles in Courage” and the president’s inaugural address, but Sorensen says that Kennedy was so involved in the writing process and Sorensen’s words were so rooted in the Kennedy style that any work bearing Kennedy’s name belongs to Kennedy.
Sorensen confirms what others have written about Kennedy: He lived several lives, separating his work from his private life, his family life from his extramarital life. Sorensen rarely socialized with Kennedy, but few rivaled his influence.

“He served Kennedy brilliantly,” says historian Robert Dallek, author of a best-selling Kennedy biography. “And he was as close as any administration figure could get to Kennedy.”

Had Kennedy lived and been re-elected, Sorensen believes he would have avoided Lyndon Johnson’s fateful decision to commit ground troops in Vietnam, although he acknowledges that he has no definitive proof. He also believes that Kennedy would have passed the civil rights bills and other legislation that became the heart of Johnson’s domestic legacy.

Robert Caro, who has been interviewing Sorensen for the fourth volume of his Pulitzer Prize-winning series on Johnson, says a second Kennedy term “is really one of the great questions” of his upcoming book.
“And among the written sources, memos, documents and interviews on that subject, his (Sorensen’s) views are very important,” Caro says.

“That does not mean I totally accept them. But it’s a great gift to a historian like me to be able to talk to someone who not only was present at some of the most crucial scenes I am writing about, but who has a gift for words and is willing to make the effort to find the precise words to describe what happened.”

If Kennedy were alive now, Sorensen believes he would have welcomed the progress in race relations, delighted in Obama’s candidacy and despised the war in Iraq. He remembers Kennedy’s support for funding to preserve artifacts from ancient Egypt and a presidential statement that noted, “We have so much to learn from Islam and ancient Middle Eastern cultures.”

Asked if he believed Kennedy could have run in the unending, unforgiving news cycle of today’s elections, Sorensen answers yes. He said Kennedy himself was a 24-7 campaigner and he didn’t think Kennedy’s sex life would have become public.

“Both in his selection of companions and places, he was extremely discreet,” Sorensen says, adding that “the people around Kennedy were pretty good about keeping secrets.”

He smiles.

“Including me.”