Ted Sorensen - Kennedy Administration

Kennedy Administration

Sorensen was President Kennedy's Special Counsel & Adviser, and primary speechwriter, the role for which he is best remembered today. He was particularly famous for having helped draft the inaugural address in which Kennedy exhorted listeners to "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." This call to service is the phrase still most closely associated with the Kennedy administration. Although Sorensen played an important part in the composition of the Inaugural Address, "the speech and its famous turn of phrase that everyone remembers was," Sorensen firmly states (counter to what the majority of authors, journalists and other media sources have claimed), "written by Kennedy himself." In later years, when pressed in interviews if he wrote the phrase, Sorenson would reply tongue-in-cheek "Ask not."

In the early months of the administration the scope of Sorensen's responsibilities lay within the domestic agenda; however, after the Bay of Pigs debacle Kennedy asked Sorensen to take part in foreign policy discussions as well. During the Cuban Missile Crisis Sorensen served as a member of ExComm and was named by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara as one of the "true inner circle" members who advised the president, the others being Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, General Maxwell D. Taylor (the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs), former Ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson and McNamara himself. Sorensen played a critical role in drafting Kennedy's correspondence with Nikita Khrushchev and worked on Kennedy's first address to the nation about the crisis on October 22.

Sorensen was devastated by Kennedy's assassination, which he called "the most deeply traumatic experience of my life...I had never considered a future without him." He later quoted a poem that he said summed up how he felt: 'How could you leave us, how could you die? We are sheep without a shepherd when the snow shuts out the sky'. He submitted a letter of resignation to President Johnson the day after the assassination but was persuaded to stay through the transition. Sorensen drafted Johnson's first address to Congress as well as the 1964 State of the Union. He officially resigned February 29, 1964, and was the first member of the Kennedy Administration to do so.

Prior to his resignation, Sorensen stated his intent to write Kennedy's biography, calling it "the book that President Kennedy had intended to write with my help after his second term." He was not the only Kennedy aide to turn to writing; historian and Special Assistant Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. wrote his Pulitzer-winning memoir A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House during the same time span. Sorensen's biography Kennedy was published in 1965 and became an international bestseller.