JFK’s ‘ask not’ wordsmith dies at 82

Theodore Sorensen, the studious, star-struck aide and alter ego to President John F. Kennedy, whose poetic turns of phrase helped idealise and immortalise a tragically brief administration, has died at 82.

Mr Sorensen’s death on Sunday came just as supporters of his friend and boss were preparing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of a very different moment in history – the election of JFK as President and the speech that remains the greatest collaboration between Mr Sorensen and President Kennedy and the standard for modern oratory.

With its call for self-sacrifice and civic engagement – “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” – and its promise to spare no cost in defending the country’s interests worldwide, the address was an uplifting but haunting reminder of national purpose and confidence, before Vietnam, assassinations, Watergate, terrorists attacks and economic shock.

Mr Sorensen died at a New York hospital from complications of a stroke, his widow Gillian said.

He 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 autobiography, Counsellor, published in 2008.

Instead, he had to dictate it to an assistant.

US President Barack Obama paid tribute to Mr Sorensen, saying: “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.”

Of all Mr Kennedy’s inner circle, special counsel Sorensen ranked just below President 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 US intervention in Vietnam.

Some of Mr Kennedy’s most memorable speeches, from his inaugural address to his vow to place a man on the moon, resulted from such close collaboration with Mr 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 Mr 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 Mr Sorensen would write in Counsellor, the difference in their lifestyles was offset by the closeness of their minds. Each had a wry sense of humour, a dislike of hypocrisy, a love of books and a high-minded regard for public life.

JFK called him “my intellectual blood bank” and the press frequently referred to Mr Sorensen as Mr Kennedy’s “ghost-writer”.

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,” she said.

Mr Sorensen’s brain of steel was never needed more than in October 1962, with the US and the Soviet Union on the brink of nuclear annihilation over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy directed Mr 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 concession involving US weaponry in Turkey – was credited with persuading the Soviets to withdraw their missiles from Cuba and with averting war between the superpowers.

Mr Sorensen considered that role his greatest achievement.

“That’s what I’m proudest of,” he once told the Omaha (Nebraska) 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.”

Mr Sorensen would witness a brief revival of Kennedy-era idealism with the presidential election of Mr Obama, whom he 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”.

But a year after Mr Obama’s election, Mr Sorensen said he was disappointed with the President’s speeches, saying Mr Obama was “clearly well informed on all matters of public policy, sometimes, frankly, a little too well in-formed.

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”.