The man behind JFK's stirring words

By MIKE PRIDE

Monitor columnist

Last modified: 11/2/2010 12:00:00 AM

One day in the winter of 1984, Tom Gerber called and asked if I'd like to have lunch with Ted Sorensen. Sorensen was an old acquaintance from Tom's days as a Washington correspondent. Tom had been my predecessor as editor of the Monitor, and he knew everyone. I was accustomed to these calls and considered meeting big shots one of the perks of my job.



Still, this was the Ted Sorensen, the man who had given soaring words to John F. Kennedy. I was 14 when JFK was elected, 17 when he was shot, old enough to be moved by those words even though Kennedy was my father's age.



When I heard Sorensen had died Sunday at the age of 82, I thought about our 1984 lunch in a ferny earlier incarnation of Cheers. We met a second time 23 years later during Sorensen's tour on behalf of Sen. Barack Obama. He asked me that day if we hadn't met before. It took me aback, though I didn't kid myself that he actually remembered me.



Sorensen was a straight-backed Nebraskan, lawyer-careful at all times. When he wanted to undermine the premise of a question, he began by saying 'With all due respect,' but there was little respect in the rest of the sentence. He had an agenda - Sen. Gary Hart's insurgent campaign in 1984, Obama's in 2007. And yet he knew what we journalists of a different generation most wanted from him. We wanted to hear about the Kennedy years.



The phrases Sorensen had helped Kennedy shape were personal to me. To a teenager just becoming politically aware in 1960, there was no question which candidate for president was more appealing. The passing of the torch, the new frontier, youth, vigor - this all seemed like a welcome transition from the gray Eisenhower era.



Only in retrospect did I realize how taken I was by Kennedy's words. Had I never heard him say, 'Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,' I doubt I would have acquiesced so readily to the draft in 1966. Sorensen's words, crafted with and spoken by Kennedy, had the desired effect.



In Sorensen's obituary in the New York Times, the most interesting passage to me was about how the two men invented John F. Kennedy. In any line of work, whenever you see someone who looks like a natural, it is often the case that the effect is actually the result of hard work.



This work took place in the three years before Kennedy's 1960 nomination when he and Sorensen traveled the country together. It was grassroots politics with Kennedy improving his way with a crowd and Sorensen figuring out the words that worked.



'Day after day after day after day, he's up there on the platform speaking,' Sorensen remembered. 'And I'm sitting in the audience listening, and I find out what works and what doesn't, what fits his style.'



When I met Sorensen years later, he was a loyal defender of Kennedy's legacy. I asked him whether the United States would have avoided a ground war in Vietnam had Kennedy not been assassinated. Like all hypothetical questions, this is unanswerable, but Sorensen was dead certain Kennedy would not have escalated the war there.



In both meetings with Sorensen, I asked who really wrote Profiles in Courage, Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning book. It was well known he was a principal author of the book, if not the principal author. Sorensen's answers were battle-tested - a winking acknowledgment of his participation. In his memoir in 2008, he was more explicit about this.



As I look back on the political aspects of his visits, I see that Sorensen was drawn to candidates of change. In 1984, Hart's new ideas pushed the Democratic Party toward the center, signaling an end to the New Deal. 'Change' and 'hope' were Obama's bywords, and, like Kennedy, he was a charismatic speaker.



Yet there was nothing misty-eyed in Sorensen's politics. He liked Hillary Clinton but thought Obama was more electable. He was not shy in talking about the bad blood between him and Sen. Joe Biden, who was also in the 2008 field.



In 1977, President Carter nominated Sorensen to be CIA director, but a reporter found out Sorensen had been a conscientious objector in the late 1940s. Carter defended his nominee until the Senate balked. Sorensen remembered Biden as having joined the stampede to stop the nomination. Afterward, when Sorensen bowed out, Biden complimented him as 'a ten.' Hearing this hypocrisy, an aide whispered in Sorensen's ear, 'on a scale of a hundred.'



It is for the Kennedy years that Sorensen will be remembered. He was not even 30 years old when he signed on with the junior senator from Massachusetts. In retrospect it looks like a lucky choice for both men, but Sorensen made his own luck.



On the hard grind of the campaign trail, he learned to write the words that touched the nation.





