Ted Sorensen
May 8, 1928 — October 31, 2010 — Lincoln, Nebraska / New York, New York
Ted Sorensen was John F. Kennedy's closest adviser, special counsel, and primary speechwriter — the man who helped craft the language of one of the most eloquent presidencies in American history, including the immortal lines of the 1961 inaugural address, and who later wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Kennedy.
The Nebraska Lawyer Who Shaped the New Frontier
Born on May 8, 1928, in Lincoln, Nebraska, Theodore Chaikin Sorensen was the son of a progressive Republican father and a suffragist-pacifist mother, and grew up with a deep commitment to civil liberties. He graduated from the University of Nebraska Law School in 1951 and almost immediately joined Senator John F. Kennedy's staff in Washington. He was twenty-three years old. Over the next decade, Sorensen became Kennedy's alter ego — drafting legislation, developing policy positions, ghostwriting Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1956), and managing the intellectual architecture of Kennedy's political identity. He was so central to Kennedy's operation that the phrase "Kennedy-Sorensen" was used in Washington the way "Rogers and Hammerstein" might be in Broadway.
The Inaugural Address and the Presidency
When Kennedy was elected president in 1960, Sorensen became Special Counsel to the President. Their collaboration reached its peak in the inaugural address of January 20, 1961 — one of the most admired pieces of American political rhetoric, containing the famous injunction: "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country." The authorship of the speech's specific language has been debated for decades; Sorensen always insisted it was a collaborative product. He served throughout the Kennedy administration, participated in deliberations during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and helped draft Kennedy's June 1963 American University speech calling for a nuclear test ban. After Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, Sorensen resigned, devastated.
Did You Know?
Ted Sorensen was a conscientious objector who had registered as a pacifist during the Korean War — a fact he was careful to disclose when President-elect Obama nominated him to be CIA Director in 2008. At age eighty, Sorensen was prepared to take the position but withdrew when it became clear his confirmation would be difficult. He had lost most of his eyesight in a stroke in 2001 and dictated his memoir from memory, dictating to an assistant — at age seventy-six — without access to his notes.
Later Career and Legacy
After the Kennedy administration, Sorensen practiced international law in New York and remained active in Democratic Party politics. His biography Kennedy, published in 1965, won the National Book Award for nonfiction and remains one of the most important accounts of the Kennedy presidency. He died on October 31, 2010, at eighty-two. The eloquence associated with the Kennedy era — the sense that government could inspire as well as administer — owed much to the partnership between a presidential candidate and the Nebraska lawyer who became his voice. The words that generation carries are, at least in part, Sorensen's.