Theodore C. Sorensen, President John F. Kennedy's Speechwriter and Advisor, Has Died

CONTINUED…

PART THREE…

Sorensen later described the president's assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, as "the worst day of my life."

"Deep in my soul," he wrote in his autobiography, "I have not stopped weeping whenever those events are recalled."

Sorensen continued working as special counsel to President Lyndon Johnson for three months after Kennedy was killed.

When Sorensen resigned, a Washington Post editorial observed, "In the breadth of his interests and the clipped resonance of his writing, Mr. Sorensen exemplified much that was admirable in the Kennedy era in Washington."

Hugh Sidey, writing in Life magazine, referred to Sorensen as Kennedy's "all-purpose aide and co-author of the New Frontier."

After leaving the White House in February 1964, Sorensen began writing "Kennedy," the 1965 bestseller about his years with the man he considered his "best friend."

In 1966, Sorensen joined the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York City. As a prominent international lawyer, he advised governments, multinational organizations and major corporations.

Sorensen helped manage Sen. Robert Kennedy's ill-fated 1968 presidential campaign. In 1970, he ran for the U.S. Senate from New York but was defeated in the Democratic primary.

In 1977, President-elect Carter nominated Sorensen as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. But his confirmation came under attack for various reasons, including his having used classified government documents in writing his book "Kennedy."

After defending his record — he had submitted potentially sensitive sections of his book to Johnson's national security advisor and the passages had been cleared — Sorensen surprised members of the Senate Intelligence Committee by announcing that he had asked Carter to withdraw his name from nomination.

A self-described Danish Russian Jewish Unitarian, he was born Theodore Chaikin Sorensen on May 8, 1928, in Lincoln, Neb.

His trial lawyer father was a progressive Republican who became state attorney general, and his mother was a feminist and pacifist whose maiden name became the middle name to all five of her children.

Raised in the nonviolent philosophy of the Unitarian Church, Sorensen registered for the draft as a conscientious objector for noncombat service when he turned 18 in 1946 — an issue later raised by some who opposed his nomination as CIA director.

Sorensen graduated from the University of Nebraska and, while attending the university's College of Law, served as editor-in-chief of the law review and was tied for first in his class.

Shortly after graduating from law school in 1951, Sorensen boarded a train and headed east in search of a job in Washington, D.C. He initially worked for what later became the Department of Health and Human Services and then was a staff researcher for the joint congressional subcommittee studying railroad pensions before joining Kennedy's staff.

Sorensen suffered a stroke in 2001 that seriously affected his vision. But still associated at the time with the law firm he joined in 1966, he continued on an "of counsel" basis. He also continued to write, lecture and travel. He was hospitalized Oct. 22 after a second stroke, Sorensen's wife said.

In addition to his wife, survivors include a daughter, Juliet Sorensen Jones, of Chicago; three sons from his first marriage, Eric Sorensen, Stephen Sorensen and Philip Sorensen, all of Wisconsin; seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Los Angeles Times

CONTINUED…

PART TWO…

In examining the available evidence over the authorship of "Profiles in Courage" for his 1980 book "Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy" — and "augmented by those who were intimately associated with the project" — Herbert S. Parmet concluded that Kennedy "served principally as an overseer or, more charitably, as a sponsor and editor" of the book, while "the research, tentative drafts, and organizational planning were left to committee labor."

But, Parmet wrote, "the burdens of time and literary craftsmanship were clearly Sorensen's, and he gave the book both the drama and flow that made for readability."

It's as a speechwriter for Kennedy, however, that Sorensen is best remembered.

As such, Dallek told The Times in 2009, Sorensen was especially "influential in helping Kennedy in his reach for the presidency and using oratory to command the loyalty of millions and millions of people."

"Although he never claimed the words were his — and, of course, the format speechwriters follow is to be pretty anonymous — Sorensen was such a master of his craft and helped Kennedy forge some of the most memorable presidential speeches of the 20th century," Dallek said.

Discussing his role as speechwriter in his autobiography, Sorensen wrote that as "a young man raised by his parents to help improve society, I could hardly have asked for a more psychologically rewarding opportunity than to be in a position to help a dynamic leader, whose values I shared, reshape our country and planet at a time when I had no power to do so."

Whatever success he achieved as a speechwriter for Kennedy, Sorensen wrote, "arose from knowing the man so well."

On the morning of Nov. 21, 1963, Sorensen ran onto the South Lawn of the White House to catch up with Kennedy, who was about to board a helicopter that would take him to Andrews Air Force Base.

The president earlier that morning had requested some "Texas humor" for his trip to Texas, Sorensen later recalled, and he handed Kennedy the humorous anecdotes he had collected.

It was the last time the two men would speak to each other.

CONTINUED…

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-ted-sorensen-20101101,0,3192973.sto...

Photo: AP - In this Dec. 26, 1962 file photo, President John F. Kennedy meets with presidential council adviser Theodore Sorensen and other members of his staff in Palm Beach, Fla., regarding his 1963 tax cut proposal.

Theodore C. Sorensen dies at 82; JFK's close advisor and writer-in-residence

The Nebraska native became special counsel to Kennedy and remained chief speechwriter during his tragically brief presidency. He had a long post-White House career as a Manhattan-based international lawyer.

By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times

October 31, 2010

PART ONE…

Theodore C. Sorensen, John F. Kennedy's close advisor and writer-in-residence in the Senate in the 1950s who became special counsel to the president and remained chief speechwriter during Kennedy's tragically brief presidency, has died. He was 82.

Sorensen, who had a long post-White House career as a Manhattan-based international lawyer, died Sunday at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center from complications of a stroke, said his wife, Gillian.

Once referred to by Kennedy as his "intellectual blood bank," Sorensen began his nearly 11-year relationship with the future president in 1953 when Kennedy was the newly elected senator from Massachusetts.

Hired as Kennedy's No. 2 legislative assistant, the 24-year-old graduate of the University of Nebraska School of Law soon was enlisted to help Kennedy draft his speeches and magazine articles, and he played a key role in the research and writing of "Profiles in Courage," Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1956 bestseller.

Sorensen also became a trusted advisor to Kennedy, traveling with him to all 50 states in the four years leading up to his 1960 election as president.

After Kennedy moved into the White House, Sorensen advised the president on issues such as civil rights, the decision to go to the moon and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, which was sparked by the discovery of Soviet nuclear-missile installations under construction in Cuba.

During the crisis, Kennedy asked Sorensen to draft, with guidance from Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy, the crucial letter to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that averted a nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers.

Jacqueline Kennedy once inscribed a photograph to Sorensen: "To Ted, who walked with the President so much of the way and who helped him climb to greatness."

In his 2008 autobiography "Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History," Sorensen acknowledged that Kennedy "was my hero."

During his early years with Kennedy, Sorensen wrote, "I learned not only loyalty but deference, reticence, becoming almost anonymous, never asserting, assuming, or bragging, for fear of antagonizing not only him, but also his father or his brother Robert, both of whom were fiercely protective of Jack's image and career."

His years with Kennedy "were unquestionably the cornerstone of my professional life; and the cornerstone of our relationship was mutual trust.

"JFK brought me into his inner circle, confiding in me secrets that — had I discussed them with others — might have done serious harm to his political career, his public image, or perhaps his marriage."

President Obama said in a statement Sunday: "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."

Historian Robert Dallek, who wrote the 2003 Kennedy biography "An Unfinished Life," told the Associated Press in 2008 that Sorensen "served Kennedy brilliantly. And he was as close as any administration figure could get to Kennedy."

Over the years, Sorensen was often asked about his role in "Profiles In Courage," which chronicled acts of political courage in the Senate throughout history.

In the book's preface, Kennedy thanked Georgetown University professor Jules Davids and many others for their help but noted that the "greatest debt is owed to my research associate, Theodore C. Sorensen, for his invaluable assistance in the assembly and preparation of the material upon which this book is based."

The success of "Profiles in Courage" significantly increased Kennedy's national profile and stature as a politician. But it also spurred speculation that the book had been ghostwritten, in particular by Sorensen.

Responding to those charges, Sorensen stated in an affidavit at the time that the book's author was Kennedy, "who originally conceived its theme, selected its characters, determined its contents, and wrote and rewrote each of its chapters."

In his autobiography, Sorensen wrote that "JFK worked particularly hard and long on the first and last chapters, setting the tone and philosophy of the book. I did a first draft of most chapters, which he revised both with a pen and through dictation."

"Like JFK's speeches," Sorensen wrote, " 'Profiles in Courage' was a collaboration," but the "credit ultimately lies" with Kennedy.

CONTINUED…

CONTINUED…

PART THREE…

In April 1961, weeks into the Kennedy presidency, the Soviet Union launched the first man into orbit. Less than a month later, Alan Shepard became the first American in space with a 15-minute suborbital flight. The idea of a moon landing "caught my attention, and I knew it would catch Kennedy's," Sorensen recalled. "This is the man who talked about new frontiers. That's what I took to him."

Shortly after Shepard's landmark flight, Kennedy said: "I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth." U.S. astronauts met that deadline in July 1969.

Kennedy reinforced the Eisenhower administration's commitment of sending advisers to South Vietnam, but Sorensen maintained that the president, had he not been assassinated, would eventually have withdrawn American troops. Sorensen also believed that the president would have passed the civil rights legislation that successor Lyndon Johnson pushed through.

On the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, Sorensen was leaving his home in Arlington, Va., where he had stopped briefly after lunching with a newspaper editor, when he was summoned to the White House.

There, his secretary told him that the president had been shot in Dallas.

"Sometimes," Sorensen told an interviewer in 2006, "I still dream about him."

Sorensen's youthful worship never faded, even as he acknowledged Kennedy's extramarital affairs. "It was wrong, and he knew it was wrong, which is why he went to great lengths to keep it hidden," Sorensen wrote in his memoir. "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."

Sorensen would witness a brief revival of Camelot with the presidential election of Obama, whom Sorensen endorsed "because he is more like John F. Kennedy than any other candidate of our time. He has judgment as he demonstrated in his early opposition to the war in Iraq."

A year after Obama's election, Sorensen said he was disappointed with the president's speeches, saying that Obama was "clearly well informed on all matters of public policy, sometimes, frankly, a little too well informed. And as a result, some of the speeches are too complicated for typical citizens and very clear to university faculties and big newspaper editorial boards."

Theodore Chaikin Sorensen was born in Lincoln, Neb., on May 8, 1928. His father, C.A. Sorensen, was a lawyer and a progressive politician who served as Nebraska's attorney general.

His son described the elder Sorensen as "my first hero." Growing up, Sorensen once joked, "I wasn't involved in politics at all - until about the age of 4."

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."

At the 1956 Democratic National Convention, the charismatic Kennedy attracted wide attention as a candidate for vice president. He eventually withdrew, but his exposure at the convention led to a flurry of invitations to speak around the country.

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

"There was nothing like that three-four year period where, just the two of us, we were traveling across the United States," Sorensen told The Associated Press in 2008. "That's when I got to know the man."

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 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.

Besides "Counselor," his books included "Decision Making in the White House" (1963), "Kennedy" (1965) and "The Kennedy Legacy" (1969). In 2000, Hollywood turned the Cuban missile crisis into a movie called "Thirteen Days." Actor Tim Kelleher played Sorensen.

His role, according to Sorensen? To "think and worry. ... often bent over."

Gillian Sorsensen told the AP that a public memorial service would be held for her husband in about a month, but the exact date has yet to be set. She said there would be no formal funeral.

Survivors also include a daughter, Juliet Sorensen Jones, of Chicago; three sons from his first marriage, Eric Sorensen, Stephen Sorensen and Philip Sorensen, all of Wisconsin; and seven grandchildren.

---

Associated Press writer Mike Stewart and AP National Writer Hillel Italie contributed to this report.

CONTINUED…

PART TWO…

Sorensen's brain of steel was never needed more than in October 1962, with the U.S. 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 U.S. concession involving U.S. 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 (Neb.) 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."

Robert Dallek, a historian and the author of "An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-163," agreed that Sorensen played a central role in that crisis and throughout the administration.

"He was one of the principal architects of the Kennedy presidency - in fact, the entire Kennedy career," he said Sunday.

Of the many speeches Sorensen helped compose, Kennedy's inaugural address shone brightest. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations includes four citations from the speech - one-seventh of the entire address, which built to an unforgettable exhortation: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

Much of the roughly 14-minute speech - the fourth-shortest inaugural address ever, but in the view of many experts rivaled only by Lincoln's - was marked by similar sparkling phrase-making:

- "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

- "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."

- "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate."

As with "Profiles in Courage, Sorensen never claimed primary authorship of the address. Rather, he described speechwriting within Kennedy's White House as highly collaborative - with JFK a constant kibitzer.

CONTINUED…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/31/AR2010103102870....

washingtonpost.com

Photo: FILE - In this Nov. 18, 2008 file photo, Ted Sorensen, speech writer and former adviser to John F. Kennedy, speaks in Lincoln, Neb. Sorensen, the studious, star-struck aide and alter ego to President John F. Kennedy whose crisp, poetic turns of phrase helped idealize and immortalize a tragically brief administration, has died. He was 82. His wife Gillian Sorensen says he died Sunday, Oct. 31, 2010 at a New York hospital from complications of a stroke. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File)

Theodore Sorensen, top JFK aide, dies at 82 in NY

By VERENA DOBNIK
The Associated Press
Sunday, October 31, 2010; 5:35 PM

PART ONE…

NEW YORK -- Theodore C. Sorensen, the studious, star-struck aide and alter ego to President John F. Kennedy whose crisp, poetic turns of phrase helped idealize and immortalize a tragically brief administration, died Sunday. He was 82.

He died at noon at Manhattan's New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center from complications of a stroke, his widow, Gillian Sorensen, said.

Sorensen had been in poor health in recent years and a stroke in 2001 left him with such poor eyesight that he was unable to write his memoir, "Counselor," published in 2008. Instead, he had to dictate it to an assistant.

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.

Hours after his death, Gillian Sorensen told The Associated Press that although a first stroke nine years ago robbed him of much of his sight, "he managed to get back up and going."

She said he continued to give speeches and traveled, and just two weeks ago, he collaborated on the lyrics to music to be performed in January at the Kennedy Center in Washington - a symphony commemorating a half-century since Kennedy took office.

"I can really say he lived to be 82 and he lived to the fullest and to the last - with vigor and pleasure and engagement," said Gillian Sorensen, who was at his side to the last. "His mind, his memory, his speech were unaffected."

Her husband was hospitalized Oct. 22 after a second stroke that was "devastating," she said.

Of the courtiers to Camelot's king, 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 U.S. 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 "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," especially after the release of "Profiles in Courage." 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."

CONTINUED…

CONTINUED…

PART THREE…

In 1970, two years after Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on the presidential campaign trail, Mr. Sorensen ran for the Senate seat that Robert Kennedy had held in New York. The run was a mistake, he conceded. “I simply thought that if I were to carry on the Kennedy legacy, if I were to perpetuate the ideals of John Kennedy, as Robert Kennedy tried to do, that I would need to be in public office,” he said. “Frankly, it was an act of hubris on my part.”

In December 1976, out of the blue, President-elect Jimmy Carter offered Mr. Sorensen the post of director of central intelligence. “I had to make a very quick decision,” Mr. Sorensen remembered. “I did not know whether a lawyer and a moralist was suitable for a position that presides over all kinds of law-breaking and immoral activities. But I wanted to be involved. I wanted to be back in government at a position where I could help things in a sound and progressive way, and so I said, ‘Yes, I accept.’ ”

Opponents of the nomination pointed out a potential problem. More than 30 years before, after the end of World War II, Mr. Sorensen, not yet 18, had registered with his draft board as a conscientious objector to combat. President-elect Carter’s top aide, Hamilton Jordan, placed an angry call to Mr. Sorensen, asking why he had not mentioned this suddenly salient fact before accepting the nomination.

“I said, ‘I didn’t know that the C.I.A. director was supposed to kill anybody,’ ” Mr. Sorensen recalled. “He wasn’t too happy with that answer.”

The nomination was withdrawn. That ended Mr. Sorensen’s ambition to return to work in Washington.

Mr. Sorensen remained active in Democratic politics and took a particular liking to a freshman senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, when he arrived in Washington in 2005. When Mr. Obama began running for president two years later, Mr. Sorensen endorsed his candidacy and campaigned across the country, particularly to audiences who were opposed to the Iraq war.

“It reminds me of the way the young, previously unknown J.F.K. took off,” Mr. Sorensen said in an interview with The Times in 2007. “Obama, like J.F.K., is such a natural. He’s very comfortable with who he is.”

A year after Mr. Obama took office, Mr. Sorensen acknowledged frustration with the Obama presidency, particularly on the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, a conflict that he called “Obama’s Vietnam.” But Mr. Sorensen said, “The foreign policy problems are more difficult than they were in Kennedy’s day.”

“I still think it was amazing that a man with his skin color – and also he was a liberal Democrat, let’s face it – was elected,” Mr. Sorensen said in a 2009 interview in his Manhattan apartment, where a photograph of Mr. Obama joined a tableau of images from the Kennedy administration. “I haven’t the slightest doubt that there are a lot of white men who still find it difficult to accept the fact, the reality, that we have a black president in this country.”

Mr. Sorensen’s 1949 marriage to Camilla Palmer and his 1964 marriage to Sara Elbery ended in divorce. In 1969, he married Gillian Martin. She survives him, along with their daughter, Juliet, and three sons from Mr. Sorensen’s first marriage, Eric, Steve and Phil; and seven grandchildren.

Despite his stroke in 2001 and diminishing eyesight, Mr. Sorensen worked on and completed “Counselor,” his memoir, over the next six years. “I still believe that the mildest and most obscure of Americans can be rescued from oblivion by good luck, sudden changes in fortune, sudden encounters with heroes,” he concluded. “I believe it because I lived it.”

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting for this article.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

CONTINUED…

PART TWO…

Theodore Chaikin Sorensen was born in Lincoln, Neb., on May 8, 1928 — Harry S. Truman’s 44th birthday, as he was fond of noting. He described himself as a distinct minority: “a Danish Russian Jewish Unitarian.” He was the son of Christian A. Sorensen, a lawyer, and Annis Chaikin, a social worker, pacifist and feminist. His father, a Republican who had named him after Teddy Roosevelt, ran for public office for the first time that year; he served as Nebraska’s attorney general from 1929 to 1933.

Lincoln, the state capital, was named for the 16th president. Near the statehouse stood a statue of Abraham Lincoln and a slab with the full text of the Gettysburg Address. As a child, Mr. Sorensen read it over and over. The Capitol itself held engraved quotations; one he remembered was “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

He earned undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Nebraska and, on July 1, 1951, at the age of 23, he left Lincoln to seek his fortune in Washington. He knew no one. He had no appointments, phone numbers or contacts. Except for a hitchhiking trip to Texas, he had never left the Midwest. He had never had a cup of coffee or written a check.

Eighteen months later, after short stints as a junior government lawyer, he was hired by John F. Kennedy, the new Democratic senator from Massachusetts. Mr. Kennedy was “young, good-looking, glamorous, rich, a war hero, a Harvard graduate,” Mr. Sorensen recalled. The new hire was none of those, save young. They quickly found that they shared political ideals and values.

“When he first hired me,” Mr. Sorensen recalled, Mr. Kennedy said: “ ‘I want you to put together a legislative program for the economic revival of New England.’ ” Mr. Kennedy’s first three speeches on the Senate floor — late in the evening, when nobody was around — presented the program Mr. Sorensen proposed.

Senator Kennedy made his mark with “Profiles in Courage,” published in January 1956. It was no great secret that Mr. Sorensen’s intellect was an integral part of the book. “I’ve tried to keep it a secret,” he said jokingly in his interview with The Times. But Mr. Sorensen drafted most of the chapters, and Mr. Kennedy paid him for his work. “I’m proud to say I played an important role,” Mr. Sorensen said.

He spent most of the next four years working to make his boss the president of the United States. “We traveled together to all 50 states,” Mr. Sorensen wrote in his book “Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History,” a memoir published in 2008, “most of them more than once, initially just the two of us.” There was no entourage until Mr. Kennedy won the Democratic nomination in 1960. It was not clear at the outset that he could do that, much less capture the White House.

“It was only after we had crisscrossed the country and began to build support at the grass roots, largely unrecognized in Washington, where Kennedy was dismissed as being too young, too Catholic, too little known, too inexperienced,” Mr. Sorensen said in the interview.

In those travels, Mr. Sorensen found his own voice as well as Mr. Kennedy’s. “Everything evolved during those three-plus years that we were traveling the country together,” he said. “He became a much better speaker. I became much more equipped to write speeches for him. Day after day after day after day, he’s up there on the platform speaking, and I’m sitting in the audience listening, and I find out what works and what doesn’t, what fits his style.”

The Kennedy White House was never a Camelot: “Neither Kennedy nor any of us who worked with him were mythical characters who had magical powers,” he said, “and we obviously had our share of mistakes.” But Mr. Sorensen was not ashamed to say he worshipped President Kennedy. He was devastated by his assassination in November 1963.

“It was a feeling of hopelessness,” he said, “of anger, of bitterness. That there was nothing we could do. There was nothing I could do.”

For more than 40 years after he left the White House, Mr. Sorensen practiced law, mostly as a senior partner at the New York firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. He counseled leaders including Nelson Mandela of South Africa and Anwar Sadat of Egypt.

His life went on, in public and private; he was writing and making speeches well past his 80th birthday. But it was never the same.

CONTINUED…

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/us/01sorensen.html?_r=1&hp

The New York Times

Photo: Theodore C. Sorensen with President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office in 1961

October 31, 2010
Theodore C. Sorensen, 82, Kennedy Counselor, Dies
By TIM WEINER

PART ONE...

Theodore C. Sorensen, who was a close adviser and counselor to John F. Kennedy for 11 years, writing words and giving voice to ideas that shaped the president’s image and legacy, died Sunday in New York. He was 82 and lived in Manhattan.

He died after complications from a stroke he suffered a week ago, according to his wife, Gillian Sorensen. A previous stroke, in 2001, had taken away much of his eyesight.

Mr. Sorensen said he suspected the headline on his obituary would read: “Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy Speechwriter,” misspelling his name and misjudging his work. “I was never just a speechwriter,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2007.

True, he was best known for working with Mr. Kennedy on passages of soaring rhetoric, including the 1961 inaugural address proclaiming that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans” and challenging citizens: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Mr. Sorensen drew on the Bible, the Gettysburg Address and the words of Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill as he helped hone and polish that speech.

But Mr. Sorensen was more than Mr. Kennedy’s ghost-writer. “You need a mind like Sorensen’s around you that’s clicking and clicking all the time,” President Kennedy’s archrival, Richard M. Nixon, said in 1962. He said Mr. Sorensen had “a rare gift:” the knack of finding phrases that penetrated the American psyche.

First hired as a researcher by Mr. Kennedy, a newly elected senator from Massachusetts who took office in 1953, Mr. Sorensen became a political strategist and a trusted adviser on everything from election tactics to foreign policy. He collaborated closely — more closely than most knew — on “Profiles in Courage,” the 1956 book that won Mr. Kennedy a Pulitzer Prize and a national audience.

After the president’s assassination, Mr. Sorensen practiced law and politics. But in the public mind his name was forever joined to the man he had served; his first task after leaving the White House was to recount the abridged administration’s story in a 783-page best-seller simply titled “Kennedy.”

He held the title of special counsel, but Washington reporters of the era labeled him the president’s “intellectual alter ago” and “a lobe of Kennedy’s mind.” Mr. Sorensen called these exaggerations, but they were rooted in some truth.

President Kennedy had plenty of yes-men. He needed a no-man from time to time. The president trusted Mr. Sorensen to play that role in crises foreign and domestic, and he played it well, in the judgment of Robert F. Kennedy, his brother’s attorney general. “If it was difficult,” Mr. Kennedy said, “Ted Sorensen was brought in.”

Mr. Sorensen was proudest of a work written in haste, under crushing pressure. In October 1962, when he was 34 years old, he drafted a letter from President Kennedy to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, which helped end the Cuban missile crisis. After the Kennedy administration’s failed coup against Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs, the Soviets had sent nuclear weapons to Cuba. They were capable of striking most American cities, including New York and Washington.

“Time was short,” Mr. Sorensen remembered in his interview with The Times, videotaped to accompany this obituary. “The hawks were rising. Kennedy could keep control of his own government, but one never knew whether the advocates of bombing and invasion might somehow gain the upper hand.”

Mr. Sorensen said, “I knew that any mistakes in my letter — anything that angered or soured Khrushchev — could result in the end of America, maybe the end of the world.”

The letter pressed for a peaceful solution. The Soviets withdrew the missiles. The world went on.

CONTINUED…