Profile in Courage (Published 2008)

In 1956, Douglas McKay left the Eisenhower cabinet to go back to Oregon and run against Wayne Morse for the Senate. At the Portland airport, he read a ghostwritten arrival statement, took off his glasses and said, to snickers, “Now I’d like to add a few words of my own.”

At about the same time, Senator John F. Kennedy was starting a four-year string of speaking trips around the country to build a following for his 1960 presidential campaign. He was regularly accompanied by Theodore Chaikin Sorensen, an intense young lawyer from Nebraska, and before long there was no telling whose words were whose. “We found in those long plane rides that we enjoyed each other’s company, joking, talking politics and planning his future,” Sorensen writes in his new memoir. When the senator’s voice gave out at one stop, he filled in — and a reporter discovered he had been “reading” Kennedy’s speech from blank pages.

Sorensen, much more than a speechwriter, grew so close that some came to call him the deputy president. After the assassination, his act of mourning was to write “Kennedy,” a rigorous history. Now, four decades later, just as he turns 80 and seven years after a stroke that virtually destroyed his vision, he has written a different kind of book. Much of it is inescapably about J.F.K., and it includes some discreet disclosures and funny historical footnotes. But primarily this is a book, a touching book, about a mellower Sorensen, who here calls himself not Theodore C. but Ted.

Sorensen describes himself as a Danish Russian Jewish Unitarian who grew up in Lincoln. His beloved father, C. A. Sorensen, was the attorney general of Nebraska and a noted Republican progressive, who raised five children almost on his own after Sorensen’s mother was disabled by mental illness.

At the age of 17, Sorensen had intended to enlist in the Navy — but he changed his mind the day after World War II ended. He wound up registering as a conscientious objector, a fact later denounced by critics when President Jimmy Carter nominated him, unsuccessfully, to be the director of central intelligence.

After law school, Sorensen was drawn to public law and Washington. “I picture myself stepping off that train, greenhorn that I was: I had never drunk a cup of coffee, set foot in a bar, written a check or owned a car.” A year and a half later, at 24, he began the long association with Kennedy that was shattered in Dallas.

“Counselor” tells many stories about Sorensen’s post-government work as a global troubleshooter for the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, dealing with leaders like Mandela, Sadat, Mobutu, Ben-Gurion, Arafat and Castro. After his stroke, he learned to live with almost no sight, even resuming, remarkably, his practice of walking to work in Manhattan.

Sorensen looks back on the Kennedy years with perspective. He fills in some names and offers new details about the Cuban missile crisis. “One of the reasons for our success — the fact that we ‘accepted’ Khrushchev’s proposed exchange of moves, in a form and sequence that he never proposed — has not previously been disclosed,” he writes. The missile crisis was Kennedy’s finest hour, and Sorensen reflects on his role with modest pride, citing Dizzy Dean’s philosophy: “If you done it, it ain’t braggin’.”

He acknowledges Kennedy’s promiscuities: “At this stage, it does not honor J.F.K. for me to attempt to cover up the truth. ... Sometimes blind loyalty is trumped by overriding principles of truth and decency.” Once he took a call for “the bachelor senator” from “a young actress, then relatively unknown, Audrey Hepburn.” He says elliptically that “high jinks in the White House swimming pool, long alleged, were perhaps inappropriate but not illegal.” In any case, “I know of no occasion where his private life interfered with the fulfillment of his public duties.”

A highlight of the New Frontier was the June 26, 1963, speech in West Berlin in which Kennedy memorably declared, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Sorensen takes responsibility for incorrectly including the word “ein,” thus making the sentence mean “I am a jelly doughnut.” Nonetheless, the reverberating meaning was clear to the 250,000 other Berliners on hand.

The book offers other historical nuggets. Had J.F.K. won a second term, George Ball or McGeorge Bundy might well have replaced Dean Rusk as secretary of state. In 1962, Kennedy and Khrushchev made extensive plans for an internationally televised discussion, ultimately canceled at the last minute. Sorensen guesses that Kennedy might one day have become a university president, newspaper editor or, more tantalizing, “secretary of state in his brother Bobby’s administration.”

Bill Clinton’s press secretary Mike McCurry once told Sorensen that “everyone who comes to Washington wants to be you.” That was true for me in 1961, when I went to work for Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy as a 25-year-old press assistant. Called on occasionally to write speeches, I remember summoning up the nerve to phone and ask Sorensen which book he turned to for such apt quotations. None, he said. By the time quotes get into books, they’re stale. Make your own book.

Much about political speechwriting has changed since. Then, before the widespread use of the teleprompter, reading copies had to be retyped on speech typewriters that produced quarter-inch-high letters. Then, an assistant might acknowledge that one’s duties included speechwriting, but shrug off any specific credit. Now, speechwriters dispense business cards embossed with the gold presidential seal and quarrel about who wrote which line.

My experience makes me appreciate how Sorensen balanced two kinds of tension inherent in working as a speechwriter. One is transience: even if eloquent, aren’t they just words? The other is pride versus loyalty: whose words are they?

Routine ceremonial events require what White House writers belittle as Rose Garden rubbish, yet even celebratory remarks can reroute government. In White House Ghosts (Simon & Schuster, $30), his lively new history of White House speechwriters since 1932, Robert Schlesinger quotes Will Sparks, a writer for Lyndon B. Johnson. He responded to L.B.J.’s pressure to get headlines out of a bill-signing ceremony by inventing a social program: “The last time I looked at that ‘program’ it carried a price tag of $140,000,000.”

Presidential words can also define momentous policy. John Kennedy’s June 1963 speech at American University moved the world a long step toward the first nuclear arms control treaty. Honorably, Sorensen says it “may have been my draft, but it was J.F.K.’s policy.”

Whose words are one’s own? This tension surfaced early in Sorensen’s career with J.F.K., with claims that he was really the author of “Profiles in Courage,” Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book. It lives on in questions about Kennedy’s Inaugural Address and its most famous line: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

Whose words? It’s impossible to answer: Kennedy’s dictation was based on a draft by Sorensen that was partly based on campaign speeches that in turn were collaborations, to which were added ideas from many sources. Sorensen concludes, with words that demonstrate his enduring pride and his enduring loyalty: “Certainly the line reflected J.F.K.’s lifelong philosophy, calling for sacrifice and dedication for the good of the country, emphasized by his own life of service — that makes it his line.”