Theodore (Ted) Sorensen
was born in Lincoln, Nebraska on 8th May, 1928. He studied at the
University of Nebraska and graduated in 1949. Sorensen developed left-wing
political views and was a member of the Americans
for Democratic Action. He then went on to obtain a law degree
from Nebraska's College of Law. Sorensen moved to Washington
where he was an attorney with the Federal Security Agency (1951-53).
Sorensen did some Senate
committee staff work for Paul H. Douglas of Illinois. Douglas introduced
Sorensen to the recently elected John
F. Kennedy.
In 1960 Kennedy appointed Sorensen
as his special counsel. He also wrote a large number of Kennedy's
speeches. He was also the coordinator of planning for domestic policy
and had a key role in formulating Kennedy's recommendations to Congress.
In 1964 Sorensen joined
a New York City law firm (Paul, Weiss,
Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison). He later becoming a television commentator.
In 1970, he ran for the New York State Senate. Among his writings
are Decision Making in the White House
(1963), Kennedy (1965), The
Kennedy Legacy (1969), Kennedy
Legacy (1970), Watchmen in the
Night: Presidential Accountability After Watergate (1975),
Different Kind of Presidency: A Proposal
for Breaking the Political Deadlock (1984), Let
the Word Go Forth: The Speeches, Statements, and Writings of John
F. Kennedy (1988), The Kennedy
Legacy: A Peaceful Revolution for the Future (1993), Why
I Am a Democrat (1996) and Leaders
of Our Time: Kennedy (1999).
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Pierre
Salinger, With Kennedy (1966)
Ted (Sorensen), a Unitarian
from Lincoln, Nebraska, is the son of a former Republican attorney
general of that state, but an heir to the progressive tradition of
Senator George W. Norris (and organizer of the Lincoln chapter of
Americans for Democratic Action). Sorensen was first in his class
at the University of Nebraska Law School and came to Washington to
work for the Federal Security Agency. He left there in 1953 to join
JFK's staff after his election to the Senate. They hit it off magnificently.
Sorensen not only had strong social convictions echoing those of the
young senator, but a genius for translating them into eloquent and
persuasive language. During the Kennedy for President campaign, Ted
was in charge of the special task force that developed policy positions
and speech drafts for JFK. I must add that nothing eats up material
faster than a presidential campaign in which a candidate speaks three
or four times a day on subjects ranging from nuclear armaments to
conservation. The voters expect not only that he be knowledgeable
but that he have new and positive alternatives to present policy.
Ted somehow was able to keep up with the demand and to maintain a
high level of creativity.
Like O'Donnell, Sorensen
wore more than one hat at the White House. He was the coordinator
of planning for domestic policy and had a key role in formulating
JFK's recommendations to Congress. But he also continued to serve
as the principal speech writer. Actually, speeches were not written
for the President but with him. He knew what he wanted to say and
how he wanted to say it. The role of the speech writer was to organize
JFK's thoughts into a rough draft, on which he himself would put the
final touches. His revisions would often change it dramatically.
Ted, who did all his writing
in longhand on yellow legal pads, had been grinding out words for
JFK for eight years and knew his style best. As one reporter wrote,
"Sorensen had the glory of words." But he was also widely
read and could always find exactly the right classical reference to
bring a major point into critical focus.
(2)
Theodore
C. Sorensen, Kennedy (1965)
The worst disaster of that
disaster-filled period, the incident that showed John Kennedy that
his luck and his judgment had human limitations, and the experience
that taught him invaluable lessons for the future, occurred on April
17 in the Zapata Swamp at the Cuban Bay of Pigs. A landing force of
some fourteen hundred anti-Castro Cuban exiles, organized, trained,
armed, transported and directed by the United States Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), was crushed in less than three days by the vastly more
numerous forces of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. America's powerful
military might was useless, but America's involvement was impossible
to deny. Both publicly and privately the President asserted sole responsibility.
Many wondered, nevertheless, how he could have approved such a plan.
Indeed, the hardest question in his own mind after it was all over,
he told one reporter, was "How could everybody involved have
thought such a plan would succeed?"
What was really important
in the Bay of Pigs affair was the very "gap between decision
and execution, between planning and reality", which he had deplored
in his first State of the Union. John Kennedy was capable of choosing
a wrong course but never a stupid one; and to understand how he came
to make this decision requires a review not merely of the facts but
of the facts and assumptions that were presented to him.
The Eisenhower administration
authorized early in 1960 the training and arming of a Cuban exile
army of liberation under the direction of the CIA. Shortly before
the Presidential election of 1960, it was decided (although Eisenhower
was apparently not informed of the decision) that this should be a
conventional war force, not a guerrilla band, and its numbers were
sharply increased.
On January 20, 1960, John
Kennedy inherited the plan, the planners and, most troubling of all,
the Cuban exile brigade-an armed force, flying another flag, highly
trained in secret Guatemalan bases, eager for one mission only. Unlike
an inherited policy statement or Executive Order, this inheritance
could not be simply disposed of by Presidential rescission or withdrawal.
When briefed on the operation by the CIA as President-elect in Palm
Beach, he had been astonished at its magnitude and daring. He told
me later that he had grave doubts from that moment on.
But the CIA authors of
the landing plan not only presented it to the new President but, as
was perhaps natural, advocated it. He was in effect asked whether
he was as willing as the Republicans to permit and assist these exiles
to free their own island from dictatorship, or whether he was willing
to liquidate well-laid preparations, leave Cuba free to subvert the
hemisphere, disband an impatient army in training for nearly a year
under miserable conditions, and have them spread the word that Kennedy
had betrayed their attempt to depose Castro.
(3)
Theodore
C. Sorensen, Kennedy (1965)
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
had no fear or premonition of dying. Having narrowly survived death
in the war and in the hospital, having tragically suffered the death
of a brother and a sister, having been told as a young man that his
adrenal deficiency might well cut short his years, he did not need
to be reminded that the life he loved was a precious, impermanent
gift, not to be wasted for a moment. But neither could he ever again
be worried or frightened by the presence of death amidst life. "I
know nothing can happen to him," his father once said. "I've
stood by his deathbed four times. Each time I said good-bye to him,
and he always came back."
John Kennedy could speak
of death like all other subjects, candidly, objectively and at times
humorously. The possibility of his own assassination he regarded as
simply one more way in which his plans for the future might be thwarted.
Yet he rarely mentioned death in a personal way and, to my knowledge,
never spoke seriously about his own, once he recovered his health.
He looked forward to a long life, never talking, for example, about
arrangements for his burial or a memorial...
He mentioned more than
once - but almost in passing - that no absolute protection was possible,
that a determined assassin could always find a way, and that a sniper
from a high window or rooftop seemed to him the least preventable.
Occasionally he would read one of the dozens of written threats on
his life that he received almost every week in the White House. But
he regarded assassination as the Secret Service's worry, not his.
"Jim Rowley," he quipped, "is most efficient. He has
never lost a President." He paid little attention to warnings
from racist and rightist groups that his safety could not be guaranteed
in their areas.
He went to Caracas where
Nixon had been endangered by rioters, he stood overlooking the Berlin
Wall within Communist gunshot, he traveled more than 200,000 miles
in a dozen foreign countries where anti-American fanatics or publicity-seeking
terrorists could always be found, he waded into uncontrolled crowds
of handshakers at home and abroad, he advocated policies he knew would
provoke venom and violence from their opponents, and he traveled in
an open car in Dallas, Texas, where the Lyndon Johnson and Adlai Stevenson
had been manhandled by extremists not to prove his courage or to show
defiance but because it was his job. "A man does what he must,"
he had written in Profiles in Courage, "in spite of personal
consequences, in spite of... dangers - and that is the basis of all
human morality." Life for him had always been dangerous and uncertain,
but he was too interested in its opportunities and obligations to
be intimidated by its risks.
His trip to Texas, like
his mission in life, was a journey of reconciliation - to harmonize
the warring factions of Texas Democrats, to dispel the myths of the
right wing in one of its strongest citadels, and to broaden the base
for his own re-election in 1964.
(4)
Theodore
C. Sorensen, Kennedy (1965)
He (Kennedy) would not
have condemned the Dallas police, the FBI and the Secret Service.
Certainly there were limitations on their ability to guard an active,
strong-willed President in a free society, and certainly to this President
his agents were deeply devoted. Yet we can never be certain what prevented
a more alert coordination of all the known facts on the Kennedy route
and the potential Kennedy assassin.
He would not, finally,
have doubted the conclusions of guilt pronounced by the Warren Commission.
Certainly the members and staff of that Commission deserve the highest
praise for their painstaking investigation and report. Yet, in the
Commission's own words, "because of the difficulty of proving
negatives to a certainty, the possibility of others being involved
... cannot be established categorically"; and thus we can never
be absolutely certain whether some other hand might not have coached,
coaxed or coerced the hand of President Kennedy's killer.
Personally I accept the
conclusion that no plot or political motive was involved, despite
the fact that this makes the deed all the more difficult to accept.
For a man as controversial yet beloved as John Kennedy to be killed
for no real reason or cause denies us even the slight satisfaction
of drawing some meaning or moral from his death. We can say only that
he died as he would have wanted to die-at the center of action, being
applauded by his friends and assaulted by his foes, carrying his message
of reason and progress to the enemy and fulfilling his duty as party
leader.
He regarded Dallas' reputation
for extremism as a good reason to include it on his schedule, not
a good reason to avoid it. For, with all his deep commitments, Kennedy
was fanatical on only one subject: his opposition to fanatics, foreign
as well as domestic, Negro as well as white, on the Left as well as
the Right. He was against violence in foreign relations and in human
relations. He asked his countrymen to live peacefully with each other
and with the world. Mental illness and crime, racial and religious
hatred, economic discontent and class warfare, ignorance and fear
of this world's complex burdens, malice and madness in the individual
and society-these are the causes contributing to the atmosphere of
violence in which a President may be assassinated-and these are the
very evils which John Kennedy strove most often to root out.
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