speechwriter for jfk

Ted Sorensen on the Kennedy Style of Speech-Writing

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

In his final book, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History (2008), Ted Sorensen offered a prediction:

"I have little doubt that, when my time comes, my obituary in the New York Times ( misspelling my last name once again) will be captioned: 'Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy Speechwriter.'"

On November 1, 2010, the Times got the spelling right: "Theodore C. Sorensen, 82, Kennedy Counselor, Dies." And though Sorensen did serve as ​a counselor and alter ego to John F. Kennedy from January 1953 to November 22, 1963, "Kennedy Speechwriter" was indeed his defining role.

A graduate of the University of Nebraska's law school, Sorensen arrived in Washington, D.C. "unbelievably green," as he later admitted. "I had no legislative experience, no political experience. I'd never written a speech . I'd hardly been out of Nebraska."

Nevertheless, Sorensen was soon called on to help write Senator Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1955). He went on to co-author some of the most memorable presidential speeches of the last century, including Kennedy's inaugural address , the "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, and the American University commencement address on peace.

Though most historians agree that Sorensen was the primary author of these eloquent and influential speeches, Sorensen himself maintained that Kennedy was the "true author." As he said to Robert Schlesinger, "If a man in a high office speaks words which convey his principles and policies and ideas and he's willing to stand behind them and take whatever blame or therefore credit go with them, [the speech is] his" ( White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters , 2008).

In Kennedy , a book published two years after the president's assassination, Sorensen spelled out some of the distinctive qualities of the "Kennedy style of speech-writing." You'd be hard-pressed to find a more sensible list of tips for speakers.

While our own orations may not be quite as momentous as a president's, many of Kennedy's rhetorical strategies are worth emulating, regardless of the occasion or the size of the audience . So the next time you address your colleagues or classmates from the front of the room, keep these principles in mind.

The Kennedy Style of Speech-Writing

The Kennedy style of speech-writing--our style, I am not reluctant to say, for he never pretended that he had time to prepare first drafts for all his speeches--evolved gradually over the years. . . . We were not conscious of following the elaborate techniques later ascribed to these speeches by literary analysts. Neither of us had any special training in composition, linguistics or semantics. Our chief criterion was always audience comprehension and comfort, and this meant: (1) short speeches, short clauses and short words, wherever possible; (2) a series of points or propositions in numbered or logical sequence wherever appropriate; and (3) the construction of sentences, phrases and paragraphs in such a manner as to simplify, clarify and emphasize. The test of a text was not how it appeared to the eye, but how it sounded to the ear. His best paragraphs, when read aloud, often had a cadence not unlike blank verse--indeed at times key words would rhyme . He was fond of alliterative sentences, not solely for reasons of rhetoric but to reinforce the audience's recollection of his reasoning. Sentences began, however incorrect some may have regarded it, with "And" or "But" whenever that simplified and shortened the text. His frequent use of dashes was of doubtful grammatical standing--but it simplified the delivery and even the publication of a speech in a manner no comma, parenthesis or semicolon could match. Words were regarded as tools of precision, to be chosen and applied with a craftsman's care to whatever the situation required. He liked to be exact. But if the situation required a certain vagueness, he would deliberately choose a word of varying interpretations rather than bury his imprecision in ponderous prose. For he disliked verbosity and pomposity in his own remarks as much as he disliked them in others. He wanted both his message and his language to be plain and unpretentious, but never patronizing. He wanted his major policy statements to be positive, specific and definite, avoiding the use of "suggest," "perhaps" and "possible alternatives for consideration." At the same time, his emphasis on a course of reason--rejecting the extremes of either side--helped produce the parallel construction and use of contrasts with which he later became identified. He had a weakness for one unnecessary phrase: "The harsh facts of the matter are . . ."--but with few other exceptions his sentences were lean and crisp. . . . He used little or no slang, dialect, legalistic terms, contractions, clichés, elaborate metaphors or ornate figures of speech. He refused to be folksy or to include any phrase or image he considered corny, tasteless or trite. He rarely used words he considered hackneyed: "humble," "dynamic," "glorious." He used none of the customary word fillers (e.g., "And I say to you that is a legitimate question and here is my answer"). And he did not hesitate to depart from strict rules of English usage when he thought adherence to them (e.g., "Our agenda are long") would grate on the listener's ear. No speech was more than 20 to 30 minutes in duration. They were all too short and too crowded with facts to permit any excess of generalities and sentimentalities. His texts wasted no words and his delivery wasted no time. (Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy . Harper & Row, 1965. Reprinted in 2009 as Kennedy: The Classic Biography )

To those who question the value of rhetoric, dismissing all political speeches as "mere words" or "style over substance," Sorensen had an answer. "Kennedy's rhetoric when he was president turned out to be a key to his success," he told an interviewer in 2008. "His 'mere words' about Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba helped resolve the worst crisis the world has ever known without the U.S. having to fire a shot."

Similarly, in a New York Times op-ed published two months before his death, Sorensen countered several "myths" about the Kennedy-Nixon debates, including the view that it was "style over substance, with Kennedy winning on delivery and looks." In the first debate, Sorensen argued, "there was far more substance and nuance than in what now passes for political debate in our increasingly commercialized, sound-bite Twitter-fied culture, in which extremist rhetoric requires presidents to respond to outrageous claims ."

To learn more about the rhetoric and oratory of John Kennedy and Ted Sorensen, have a look at Thurston Clarke's Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America, published by Henry Holt in 2004 and now available in a Penguin paperback.

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Who Wrote JFK’s Inaugural?

Does it matter.

I n my childhood imagination, John F. Kennedy slotted somewhere below DiMaggio and above De Niro in a loose ranking of latter-day American deities. When I was just a toddler, the late president left a lasting impression on me, literally, after I pulled a terracotta reproduction of Robert Berks’ iconic sculpture—weighing considerably less, thankfully, than the 3,000-pound original—down from a sideboard and onto my head. On my bedroom wall hung two plaques, one a list of “coincidences”—many trivial, some factually incorrect—between the political careers and assassinations of Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. The other, also arguably incorrect, was a portrait of Kennedy embossed on black metal, staring out above his famous entreaty in all caps:

“ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU … ASK WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR COUNTRY.”              J.F.K.

It’s no secret that presidents often speak words they themselves did not write. When George Washington delivered the very first inaugural address, on Apr. 30, 1789, he was reading from a reworked draft composed by his friend and frequent ghostwriter James Madison. In 1861, with the country on the brink of civil war, Lincoln pitched his address to a restive South and planned to end on the crudely formed question, “Shall it be peace or sword?” That is, until his soon-to-be Secretary of State William Seward suggested a less combative, more poetic conjuring of “mystic chords” and “the better angel guardian angel of the nation,” which Lincoln then uncrossed and altered to “the better angels of our nature.” Small matter, perhaps. We don’t require that our politicians be great writers, after all, only effective communicators, and they in turn sometimes benefit from a misattribution in perpetuity of someone else’s eloquence.

In Kennedy’s case, the gift of rhetoric was owed largely to his longtime counsel and legislative aide, Ted Sorensen, who later became his principal speechwriter after the two developed a simpatico understanding of oratory. In his 1965 biography Kennedy , Sorensen wrote:

As the years went on, and I came to know what he thought on each subject as well as how he wished to say it, our style and standard became increasingly one. When the volume of both his speaking and my duties increased in the years before 1960, we tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to find other wordsmiths who could write for him in the style to which he was accustomed. The style of those whom we tried may have been very good. It may have been superior. But it was not his.

Kennedy believed his inaugural address should “set a tone for the era about to begin,” an era in which he imagined foreign policy and global issues—not least the specter of nuclear annihilation—would be his chief concern. But while Sorensen may have been the only person who could reliably give voice to Kennedy’s ideas, the coming speech was too historic to entrust to merely one man. On Dec. 23, 1960, less than a month before Kennedy would stand on the East Portico of the Capitol to take the oath of office, Sorensen sent a block telegram to 10 men, soliciting “specific themes” and “language to articulate these themes whether it takes one page or ten pages.”

Although Sorensen was without question the chief architect of Kennedy’s inaugural, the final draft contained contributions or borrowings from, among others, the Old Testament, the New Testament, Lincoln, Kennedy rival and two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and, we believe, Kennedy himself.

But an unequivocal puzzling out of exactly who wrote what is, with some exceptions, impossible. Late in his life, Sorensen, who died in 2010, admitted to destroying his own hand-written first draft of the speech at the request of Jacqueline Kennedy, who was deeply protective of her husband’s legacy. When pressed further, Sorensen was famously coy. If asked whether he wrote the speech’s most enduring line, for example, he would answer simply, “Ask not.” During an interview with Richard Tofel, author of Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address , Sorensen seemed to suggest that preservation of the myth was more essential than any single truth about the man:

I recognize that I have some obligation to history, but all these years I have tried to make clear that President Kennedy was the principal author of all his speeches and articles. If I say otherwise, that diminishes him, and I don’t want to diminish him.

If Jacqueline Kennedy and Ted Sorensen were willing to tear up what may have been the only categorical proof of Sorensen’s primary authorship, President Kennedy—in an incident that can only be described as out-and-out deception—was willing to lie. On Jan. 16 and 17, 1961, at the Kennedy vacation compound in Palm Beach, Fla., Sorensen and JFK polished a near-final draft of the inaugural address and even typed it up on carbon paper. Later on the 17 th , the two flew back to Washington aboard Kennedy’s private plane, the Caroline , with Time correspondent Hugh Sidey, whose reporting on the president veered between the credulous and the hagiographic.

At some point during the flight, Kennedy began scribbling on a yellow legal pad in front of Sidey, as if working out just then his thoughts about the speech. What Kennedy in fact wrote was some of the precise language that had already been committed to typescript. During an interview with historian Thurston Clarke, author of Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech that Changed America , Sidey recalled thinking, “My God! It’s three days before the inauguration, and he hasn’t progressed beyond a first draft?”

Not only had Kennedy progressed well beyond that, but he and Sorensen had nailed down what we know to be the penultimate version. Even worse, Kennedy later copied out by hand six or seven more pages—directly, one assumes, from the typewritten copy—and dated it “Jan 17, 1961.” After JFK’s assassination, the pages were displayed in what would become his presidential library and identified as an early draft.

There are a total of 51 sentences in the only text of the inaugural that now matters to the world, the speech as read on Jan. 20, 1961, though it can’t be said, without at least some conjecture, that Kennedy was the principal author of any one of them. I asked Tofel, who is now president of ProPublica, what it means that Kennedy may have been a mere messenger of what many Americans consider to be one of the most pivotal speeches of the 20 th century, second only to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream”:

Kennedy lives on in our history not because of, frankly, enormous accomplishment—he died, at the most generous, before he could accomplish a great deal—but because of his ability to articulate, I think, our most profound values and highest aspirations much better than anyone has before or since. And that is his. It is not Sorensen’s. It is not Galbraith’s. It is not Schlesinger’s. We are talking about him at great length here 50 years after his death, and I believe we are doing that because of the power of words. And in that sense they are his words.

Should Sorensen’s original draft or other lost fragments ever materialize, whatever they might say is surely no match for the shrine that history has erected and the symbolism that hung on the walls of my childhood bedroom. And in that sense, those words belong to me.

Read more in Slate on the 50 th anniversary of the JFK assassination.

Our Last Great Adventure

My husband, Richard Goodwin, drafted landmark speeches for JFK and LBJ. Late in life, we dived into his archives, searching for vivid traces of our hopeful youth.

O ne summer morning, seven months after he had turned 80, my husband, Dick Goodwin, came down the stairs, clumps of shaving cream on his earlobes, singing, “The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye,” from the musical Oklahoma!

“Why so chipper?” I asked.

“I had a flash,” he said, looking over the headlines of the three newspapers I had laid out for him on the breakfast table in our home in Concord, Massachusetts. Putting them aside, he started writing down numbers. “Three times eight is 24. Three times 80 is 240.”

“Is that your revelation?” I asked.

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“Look, my 80-year life span occupies more than a third of our republic’s history. That means that our democracy is merely three ‘Goodwins’ long.”

I tried to suppress a smile.

“Doris, one Goodwin ago, when I was born, we were in the midst of the Great Depression. Pearl Harbor happened on December 7, 1941, my 10th birthday. It ruined my whole party! If we go back two Goodwins, we find our Concord Village roiled in furor over the Fugitive Slave Act. A third Goodwin will bring us back to the point that, if we went out our front door, took a left, and walked down the road, we might just see those embattled farmers and witness the commencement of the Revolutionary War.”

He glanced at the newspapers and went to his study, on the far side of the house. An hour later, he was back to read aloud a paragraph he had just written:

Three spans of one long life traverse the whole of our short national history. One certain thing that a look backward at the vicissitudes of our country’s story suggests is that massive and sweeping change will come. And it can come swiftly. Whether or not it is healing and inclusive change depends on us. As ever, such change will generally percolate from the ground up, as in the days of the American Revolution, the anti-slavery movement, the progressive movement, the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay-rights movement, the environmental movement. From the long view of my life, I see how history turns and veers. The end of our country has loomed many times before. America is not as fragile as it seems.

“It’s now or never,” he said, announcing that the time had finally come to unpack and examine the 300 boxes of material he had dragged along with us during 40 years of marriage. Dick had saved everything relating to his time in public service in the 1960s as a speechwriter for and adviser to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy, and Eugene McCarthy: reams of White House memos, diaries, initial drafts of speeches annotated by presidents and presidential hopefuls, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, photographs, menus—a mass that would prove to contain a unique and comprehensive archive of a pivotal era. Dick had been involved in a remarkable number of defining moments .

He was the junior speechwriter, working under Ted Sorensen, during JFK’s 1960 presidential campaign. He was in the room to help the candidate prepare for his first televised debate with Richard Nixon. In the box labeled DEBATE were pages torn from a yellow pad upon which Kennedy had scrawled requests for information or clarification. Dick was in the White House when the president’s coffin returned from Dallas, and he was responsible for making arrangements to install an eternal flame at the grave site. He was at LBJ’s side during the summit of his historic achievements in civil rights and the Great Society. He was in New Hampshire during McCarthy’s crusade against the Vietnam War, and in the hospital room when Robert Kennedy died in Los Angeles. He was a central figure in the debate over the peace plank during the mayhem of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

For years, however, Dick had resisted opening these boxes. They were from a time he recalled with both elation and a crushing sense of loss. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy; the war in Vietnam; the riots in the cities; the violence on college campuses—all the turmoil had drawn a dark curtain on the entire decade. He had wanted only to look ahead.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: The divided legacy of Lyndon B. Johnson

Now he had resolved to go back in time. “I’m an old guy,” he said. “If I have any wisdom to dispense, I’d better start dispensing.” A friend, Deb Colby, became his research assistant, and together they began the slow process of arranging the boxes in chronological order. Once that preliminary task had been completed, Dick was hopeful that there might be something of a book in the material he had uncovered. He wanted me to go back with him to the very first box and work our way through all of them. I was not only his wife but a historian.

“I need your help,” he said. “Jog my memory, ask me questions, see what we can learn.” I joined him in his study, and we started on the first group of boxes. We made a deal to try to spend time on this project every weekend to see what might come of it.

Our last great adventure together was about to begin.

Some 30 boxes contained materials relating to JFK’s 1960 presidential campaign. From September 4 to November 8, 1960, Dick was a member of the small entourage that flew across the country with Kennedy for more than two months of nonstop campaigning. The first-ever private plane used by a presidential candidate during a campaign, the Caroline (named for Kennedy’s daughter) had been modified into a luxurious executive office. It had plush couches and four chairs that could be converted into small beds—two of them for Dick and Ted Sorensen. Kennedy had his own suite of bedrooms farther aft.

“You were all so young,” I marveled to Dick after looking up the ages of the team. The candidate was 43; Bobby Kennedy, 34; Ted Sorensen, 32. “And you—”

“Twenty-eight,” he interrupted, adding, “Youngest of the lot.”

After midnight on October 14, 1960, the Caroline landed at Willow Run Airport, near Ypsilanti, Michigan. Three weeks remained until Election Day. Everyone was bone-tired as the caravan set out for Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan.

As they approached the Michigan campus, there was little to suggest that one of the most enduring moments of the campaign was about to occur. It was nearly 2 a.m. by the time the caravan reached the Michigan Union, where Kennedy was scheduled to catch a few hours of sleep before starting on a whistle-stop tour of the state. No one in the campaign had expected to find as many as 10,000 students waiting in the streets to greet the candidate. Neither Ted nor Dick had prepared remarks for the occasion.

As Kennedy ascended the steps of the union, the crowd chanted his name. He turned around, smiled, and introduced himself as “a graduate of the Michigan of the East—Harvard University.” He then began speaking extemporaneously, falling back on his familiar argument that the 1960 campaign presaged the outcome of the race between communism and the free world. But suddenly, he caught a second wind and swerved from his stock stump speech. He asked the crowd of young people what they might be willing to contribute for the sake of the country.

How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete.

What stirred Kennedy to these spontaneous questions is not clear. Weariness, intuition, or—most likely, I suspect—because they had lingered in his mind after the third debate with Nixon, which had taken place only hours before and had been focused on whether America’s prestige in the world was rising or falling relative to that of Communist nations. The concept of students volunteering for public service in Africa and Asia might well bolster goodwill for America in countries wavering (as Kennedy had put it) “on the razor edge of decision” between the free world and the Communist system.

Drawing his impromptu speech to a close, Kennedy confessed that he had come to the union on this cold and early morning simply to go to bed. The words elicited raucous laughter and applause that continued to mount when he threw down a final challenge: “May I just say in conclusion that this university is not maintained by its alumni, by the state, merely to help its graduates have an economic advantage in the life struggle. There is certainly a greater purpose, and I’m sure you recognize it.”

Kennedy’s remarks lasted only three minutes—“the longest short speech,” he called it. Yet something extraordinary transpired: The students took up the challenge he posed. Led by two graduate students, Alan and Judith Guskin, they organized, they held meetings , they sent letters and telegrams to the campaign asking Kennedy to develop plans for a corps of American volunteers overseas. Within a week, 1,000 students had signed petitions pledging to give two years of their lives to help people in developing countries.

When Dick and Ted learned of the student petitions, they redrafted an upcoming Kennedy speech on foreign policy to be delivered at the Cow Palace, in San Francisco, working in a formal proposal for “a peace corps of talented young men and women.” We pulled the speech from one of the boxes. Dick’s hand can be readily detected in the closing lines, which used a favorite quote of his from the Greek philosopher Archimedes. “Give me a fulcrum,” Archimedes said, “and I will move the world.” Dick would later invoke the same line in a historic speech by Robert Kennedy in South Africa.

Two days after JFK’s speech at the Cow Palace, the candidate was flying to Toledo, Ohio . He sent word to the Guskins that he would like to meet them and see their petitions, crammed with names. A photo captures the moment when an eager Judy Guskin clutches the petitions before she presents them to the weary-eyed Kennedy, who is reaching out in anticipation.

Later, Dick and Ted had coffee with Judy and Alan. They talked of the Peace Corps and the election, by then only five days away. Nixon had immediately denounced the idea of a Peace Corps—“ a Kiddie Corps ,” he and others called it—warning that it would become a haven for draft dodgers. But for Judy and Alan, as for nearly a quarter of a million others, the Peace Corps would prove a transformative experience. The Guskins were in the first group to travel to Thailand, where Judy taught English and organized a teacher-training program. Alan set up a program at the same school in psychology and educational research. Returning home, they served as founders of the VISTA program, LBJ’s domestic version of the Peace Corps.

For Dick, the Peace Corps, more than any other venture of the Kennedy years, represented the essence of the administration’s New Frontier vision. After JFK’s inauguration, as a member of the White House staff, Dick joined the task force that formally launched the Peace Corps. He was barely older than the typical volunteer.

SUMMER 1963

Dick and I often talked, half-jokingly, half-seriously, about the various occasions when we were in the same place at the same time before we finally met—in the summer of 1972, when he arrived at the Harvard building where I had my office as an assistant professor. I knew who he was. I had heard that he was brilliant, brash, mercurial, arrogant, a fascinating figure. He was more than a decade older than me. His appearance was intriguing: curly, disheveled black hair; thick, unruly eyebrows; a pockmarked face; and several large cigars in the pocket of his casual shirt. We began a conversation that day about LBJ, literature, philosophy, astronomy, sex, gossip, and the Red Sox that would continue for 46 years.

The first occasion when we could have crossed paths but didn’t was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, on August 28, 1963. It was not surprising that we didn’t meet, given that some 250,000 people had gathered for the event.

I was spending the summer before my senior year at Colby College as an intern at the State Department. All government employees had been given the day off and been cautioned to stay home, warned that it wasn’t safe. I was 20 years old—I had no intention of staying home. But I still remember the nervous excitement I felt that morning as I walked with a group of friends toward the Washington Monument. We had been planning to attend the march for weeks.

A state of emergency had been declared as people descended on the capital from all over the country. Marchers arriving by bus and train on Wednesday morning were encouraged to depart the city proper by that night. Hospitals canceled elective surgery to make space in the event of mass casualties. The Washington Senators baseball game was postponed . Liquor stores and bars were closed. We learned that thousands of National Guardsmen had been mobilized to bolster the D.C. police force. Thousands of additional soldiers stood ready across the Potomac, in Virginia.

I asked Dick if these precautions had seemed a bit much. He explained that Kennedy was worried that if things got out of hand, the civil-rights bill he had introduced in June could unravel, and “take his administration with it.” Though government workers were discouraged from attending the march, Dick grabbed Bill Moyers, the deputy Peace Corps director, and headed toward the National Mall.

So there Dick and I were, unknown to each other, both moving along with what seemed to be all of humanity toward the Reflecting Pool and the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where the march would culminate. I carried a poster stapled to a stick: Catholics, Protestants and Jews Unite in the Struggle for Civil Rights . A sense that I was connected to something larger than myself took hold.

It’s easy to cast a cynical eye upon this youthful exultation, to view it in retrospect as sentimental idealism, but the feelings were genuine, and they were profound. At the start of the march, I had wondered what proportion of the vast throng was white (it was later estimated at 25 percent). By the time I returned to my rooming house in Foggy Bottom, I had forgotten all about calculations and proportions. I had set out that morning apprehensive, yet had been lifted up by the most joyful day of public unity and community I had ever experienced.

Facing the Lincoln Memorial, with Martin Luther King’s soaring “I Have a Dream” speech still ahead, we all held hands, our voices rising as we sang “We Shall Overcome”—the hymn that had long instilled purpose and courage in the foot soldiers of the civil-rights movement. That moment made as deep an impression on Dick as it did on me.

SPRING 1964

During our years of archival sifting, Dick and I, like two nosy neighbors on a party line, tracked down transcripts of conversations recorded by Lyndon Johnson’s secret taping system.

“How splendid to be flies on the wall, to eavesdrop across the decades!” That was Dick’s gleeful response after I read him a transcript of a telephone call between the president and Bill Moyers—by then a special assistant to Johnson—on the evening of March 9, 1964. Here Dick and I were, he in his 80s and I in my 70s, finally privy to the very conversation that, previously unbeknownst to Dick, had led him from the nucleus of the Kennedy camp, through a period of confusion and drift in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, to the highest circles of the Johnson administration.

The phone call began with Johnson grousing about the dreary language in the poverty message that he soon planned to deliver to Congress. Passionately invested in the poverty program, he was dissatisfied with the drafts he had seen and was now pressing Moyers to find “whoever’s the best explainer of this that you can get.”

Johnson: Since [Ted] Sorensen left, we’ve got no one that can be phonetic, and get rhythm … Moyers: The only person I know who can—and I’m reluctant to ask him to get involved in this, because right now it’s in our little circle—is Goodwin. Johnson: Why not just ask him if he can’t put some sex in it? I’d ask him if he couldn’t put some rhyme in it and some beautiful Churchillian phrases and take it and turn it out for us tomorrow … If he will, then we’ll use it. But ask him if he can do it in confidence. Call him tonight and say, “I want to bring it to you now. I’ve got it ready to go, but he wants you to work on it if you can do it without getting it into a column.” Moyers: All right, I’ll call him right now. Johnson: Tell him that I’m pretty impressed with him. He’s working on Latin America already; see how he’s getting along. But can he put the music to it?

As we reached the end of the conversation, Dick swore that he could hear Johnson’s voice clearly in his mind’s ear. “Lyndon’s a kind of poet,” Dick said. “What a unique recipe for high oratory: rhyme, sex, music, phonetics, and beautiful Churchillian phrases.”

We both knew him so well: Dick because he worked with him intimately in the White House and on the 1964 campaign, and I because, after a time as a White House fellow, I’d joined a small team in Texas to help him go through his papers, conduct research, and draft his memoir. From the time Dick and I met, we often referred to the president simply as “Lyndon” when speaking with each other. There are a lot of Johnsons, but there was only one Lyndon .

SPRING 1965

A year and a half after the March on Washington, the memory of its transcendent finale returned to become the heart of the most important speech Dick ever drafted. We pulled a copy of the draft, some notes, the final speech, and newspaper clippings from one of the Johnson boxes.

The moment Dick stepped into the West Wing on the morning of March 15, 1965, he sensed an unusual hubbub and tension. Pacing back and forth in a dither outside Dick’s second-floor office was the White House special assistant Jack Valenti. Normally full of glossy good cheer, Valenti pounced on Dick before he could even open his office door.

The night before, Johnson had decided to give a televised address to a joint session of Congress calling for a voting-rights bill. He believed that the conscience of America had been fired by the events at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, a week earlier, when peaceful marchers had been attacked by Alabama state troopers wielding clubs, nightsticks, and whips.

“He needs the speech from you right away,” Valenti said.

“From me! Why didn’t you tell me yesterday? I’ve lost the entire night,” Dick responded.

“It was a mistake, my mistake,” Valenti acknowledged. He explained that the first words out of the president’s mouth that morning had been “How is Goodwin doing on the speech?” and Valenti had told him he’d assigned it to another aide, Horace Busby. Johnson had erupted, “The hell you did! Get Dick to do it, and now !”

The speech had to be finished before 6 p.m., Valenti told Dick, in order to be loaded onto the teleprompter. Dick looked at his watch. Nine hours away. Valenti asked Dick if there was anything—anything at all—he could get for him.

“Serenity,” Dick replied, “a globe of serenity. I can’t be disturbed. If you want to know how it’s coming, ask my secretary.”

“I didn’t want to think about time passing,” Dick recalled to me. “I lit a cigar, looked at my watch, took the watch off my wrist, and put it on the desk beside my typewriter. Another puff of my cigar, and I took the watch and put it away in my desk drawer.”

“The pressure would have short-circuited me,” I said. “I never had the makings of a good speechwriter or journalist. History is more patient.”

“Well,” Dick said, laughing, “miss the speech deadline and those pages are only scraps of paper.”

Dick examined the folder of notes Valenti had given him. Johnson wanted no uncertainty about where he stood. To deny fellow Americans the right to vote was simply and unequivocally wrong. He wanted the speech to be affirmative and hopeful. He would be sending a bill to Congress to protect the right to vote for all Americans, and he wanted this speech to speed public sentiment along.

In the year since Dick had started working at the White House, he had listened to Johnson talk for hundreds of hours—on planes and in cars, during meals in the mansion and at his ranch, in the swimming pool and over late-night drinks. He understood Johnson’s deeply held convictions about civil rights, and he had the cadences of his speech in his ear. The speechwriter’s job, Dick knew, was to clarify, heighten, and polish a speaker’s convictions in the speaker’s own language and natural rhythms. Without that authenticity, the emotional current of the speech would never hit home.

I knew that Dick often searched for a short, arresting sentence to begin every speech or article he wrote. On this day, he surely found it:

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy … At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.

No sooner would Dick pull a page out of his typewriter and give it to his secretary than Valenti would somehow materialize, a nerve-worn courier, eager to express pages from Dick’s secretary into the president’s anxious hands. Johnson’s edits and penciled notations were incorporated into the text while he awaited the next installment, lashing out at everyone within range—everyone except Dick.

The speech was no lawyer’s brief debating the merits of the bill to be sent to Congress. It was a credo, a declaration of what we are as a nation and who we are as a people—a redefining moment in our history brought forth by the civil-rights movement.

The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro. His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this nation … He has called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for his persistent bravery, and his faith in American democracy?

As the light shifted across his office, Dick became aware that the day suddenly seemed to be rushing by. He opened the desk drawer, peered at the face of his watch, took a deep breath, and slammed the drawer shut. He walked outside to get air and refresh his mind.

In the distance, Dick heard demonstrators demanding that Johnson send federal troops to Selma. Dick hurried back to his office. Something seemed forlorn about the receding voices—such a great contrast to the spirited resolve of the March on Washington. Loud and clear, the words We shall overcome sounded in his head.

It was after the 6-o’clock deadline when the phone in Dick’s office rang for the first time that day. The voice at the other end was so relaxed and soothing that Dick hardly recognized it as the president’s.

“Far and away,” Dick told me, “the gentlest tones I ever heard from Lyndon.”

“You remember, Dick,” Johnson said, “that one of my first jobs after college was teaching young Mexican Americans in Cotulla. I told you about that down at the ranch. I thought you might want to put in a reference to that.” Then he ended the call: “Well, I won’t keep you, Dick. It’s getting late.”

“When I finished the draft,” Dick recalled, “I felt perfectly blank. It was done. It was beyond revision. It was dark outside, and I checked my wrist to see what time it was, remembered I had hidden my watch away from my sight, retrieved it from the drawer, and put it back on.”

There was nothing left to do but shave, grab a sandwich, and stroll over to the mansion. There, greeted by an exorbitantly grateful Valenti, Dick hardly had the energy to talk. Before he knew it, he was sitting with the president in his limousine on the way to the Capitol.

A hush filled the chamber as the president began to speak. Watching from the well of the House, an exhausted Dick marveled at Johnson’s emotional gravity. The president’s somber, urgent, relentlessly driving delivery demonstrated a conviction and exposed a vulnerability that surpassed anything Dick had seen in him before.

There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of states’ rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights … This time, on this issue, there must be no delay, or no hesitation or no compromise with our purpose … But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches in every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And — we — shall — overcome.

The words came staccato, each hammered and sharply distinct from the others. In Selma, Alabama, Martin Luther King had gathered with friends and colleagues to watch the president’s speech. At this climactic moment when Johnson took up the banner of the civil-rights movement, John Lewis witnessed tears rolling down King’s cheeks.

The time had come for the president to draw on his own experience, to tell the formative story he had mentioned to Dick on the phone.

My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican American school. Few of them could speak English, and I couldn’t speak much Spanish. My students were poor, and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry. And they knew, even in their youth, the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so, because I saw it in their eyes. I often walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes were finished, wishing there was more that I could do … Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child. I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance—and I’ll let you in on a secret: I mean to use it.

The audience stood to deliver perhaps the largest ovation of the night.

I told Dick that I had read an account that when Johnson was later asked who had written the speech, he pulled out a photo of his 20-year-old self surrounded by a cluster of kids, his former students in Cotulla. “ They did,” he said, indicating the whole lot of them.

“You know,” Dick said with a smile, “in the deepest sense, that might just be the truth.”

“God, how I loved Lyndon Johnson that night,” Dick remembered. He long treasured a pen that Johnson gave him after signing the Voting Rights Act. “How unimaginable it would have been to think that in two years time I would, like many others who listened that night, go into the streets against him.”

Nor could I have imagined, as I talked excitedly with my graduate-school friends at Harvard after listening to the speech—certain that a new tide was rising in our country—that only a few years later I would work directly for the president who delivered it. Or that 10 years later, I would marry the man who drafted it.

SPRING 2015

One morning, two years into our project, I found Dick mumbling and grumbling as he worked his way along the two-tiered row of archival containers. “Look how many boxes we have left!” he exclaimed. “See Jackie and Bobby here, more Lyndon, riots and protests, McCarthy, anti-war marches, assassinations. Look at them!”

“I guess we better pick up our pace,” I offered.

“You’re a lot younger than me. Shovel more coal into our old train and let’s go.”

This determination to steam ahead had only increased as Dick approached his mid-80s. A pacemaker regulated his heart, he needed a hearing aid, his balance was compromised. One afternoon, he tripped on the way to feeding the fish in our backyard. He sat down on a bench, a pensive expression on his face. I asked if he was okay.

“I heard time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” he said, quoting Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” but then added, “Maybe it was only the hiss of my hearing aid.”

From the June 1971 issue: Richard Goodwin on the social theory of Herbert Marcuse

“Who would you bet on?” he asked me one night at bedtime. “Who will be finished first—me or the boxes?”

Our work on the boxes kept him anchored with a purpose even after he was diagnosed with the cancer that took his life in 2018.

I realize now that we were both in the grip of an enchanted thought—that so long as we had more boxes to unpack, more work to do, his life, my life, our life together would not be finished. So long as we were learning, laughing, discussing the boxes, we were alive. If a talisman is an object thought to have magical powers and to bring luck, the boxes and the future book they held had become ours.

*Lead image sources (left to right from top) : Richard N. Goodwin Papers / Courtesy of Briscoe Center for American History; Cecil Stoughton / Courtesy of LBJ Library; Gibson Moss / Alamy; Associated Press; Yoichi Okamoto / Courtesy of LBJ Library; Marc Peloquin / Courtesy of Doris Kearns Goodwin; Heritage Images / Getty; Bob Parent / Getty; Paul Conklin / Getty; Bettmann / Getty

This essay has been adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s . It appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “The Speechwriter.”

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Kennedy Aide Ted Sorensen Dies At 82

David Folkenflik

Ted Sorensen, adviser and speechwriter to President John Kennedy, died over the weekend. He was 82.

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The New York Times

The caucus | kennedy speechwriter’s new memoir.

Kennedy Speechwriter’s New Memoir

Politics and Prose ran out of books last night as Ted Sorensen, the former speechwriter/close adviser to John F. Kennedy, signed and kept signing copies of his new memoir, “Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History” at the Washington bookstore.

In a brief talk, Mr. Sorensen, now 80, described Kennedy’s assassination as the saddest day of his life. “It changed this country and it changed the world,” he said.

A strong supporter of Barack Obama, Mr. Sorensen minimized his involvement in this campaign, “contrary to a lot of speculation in the press.” He did acknowledge that he occasionally “calls and suggests a line in a speech” (his writing assistant for the book was Adam Frankel, a speechwriter for Mr. Obama). He has visited “eight or nine” states for the campaign.

He said that Mr. Obama is facing an issue in some ways “fiercer” than the religious objections Mr. Kennedy faced as a Catholic. He said he did not believe that bringing the Democratic rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, onto the ticket would have any effect in the campaign. A lengthy profile of Mr. Sorensen was published last week in the New Yorker.

Comparing Mr. Obama to Kennedy (“another senator accused of being too inexperienced”), he read an excerpt from a Seamus Heaney poem, “The Cure at Troy.”:

History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme.

“I’ve seen it two times in my lifetime,” Sorensen said.

Comments are no longer being accepted.

‘He said he did not believe that bringing the Democratic rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, onto the ticket would have any effect in the campaign.’ ____________

Makes sense to me.

But if May 31 will tilt the election results meaning MI, FL and Puerto Rico will be allowed to decide then Obama will be faced with yet another challenge.

For those who may have missed it, here’s a link to Diane Rehm’s interview of Ted Sorensen on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 @ 11:00 am:

Ted Sorensen “Counselor”

It’s worth a listen.

The Obama camp is garnering support by tagging on Obama to the legacy of JFK–despicable. Modern politics has come to require the dirtiest of tactics. Too bad Obama wont’ reflect JFK’s vision if elected–he’s only using his legacy as a temporary thruway to the White House.

A beautiful poem. Especially meaningful coming from Sorensen.

I was a young college student when John Kennedy was president. While there was excitement and optimism when he was in office, we were not aware that he was a president with Mt. Rushmore proportions. Many definitions of presidential greatness are in the eyes of the beholders. President Kennedy had great hair, was young and had a beautiful wife and handsome children. His days as president were not some kind of national utopia. He made mistakes, fought insurmountable problems, made some good decisions and some bad ones. Sometimes he was the brunt of jokes of made by pundits and columnists, just as President Bush is today. His image catapulted to sainthood with his martyrdom. People who are excited by Senator Obama’s similarities to President Kennedy need to remember that the Kennedy legacy was not defined as particularly heroic until the shots were fired at Dallas. We Americans have a tendency to worship past presidents. There are people walking around today who feel that John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, for that matter, performed on a par with Washington and Lincoln. That is nonsense and people caught up in infatuation with Barack Obama would do well to remember that.

I have much respect for Mr. Sorensen & find his thought & words very moving.

I appreciate Mr. Sorensen’s service and work within the Kennedy Administration. However, to compare Senator Obama to President Kennedy is going way too far. Kennedy was the last true leader this nation had, and where Obama would do much to unite the world and inspire a nation, he is no John Kennedy. I do hope however that when Sen. Obama is elected the next president he thinks outside the proverbial box like Kennedy did when he appointed his “court historian” Arthur Schlesinger and find a similar post for Mr. Thomas Friedman.

I feel the same way. Thank you, NYT

Poetry is a wonderful thing and the best of it brings clarity. The danger is that poems can be used as an emotional tools to support a poltiical agenda that takes us aware from clarity. However if we’re going to delve into poetry, how about Frost’s … “the woods are lovely dark and deep but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep…”

How about the promise to keep moving forward to accomplish the tasks (keeping this country stong) at hand and not jumping on an Obama bandwagon because the fantasy he offers is comforting. I’ll chose solutions over comfort any day which is why Obama is not my candidate.

Thank you, Mr Sorensen for the extract from Seamus Heaney’s poem, “The Cure at Troy”. All my life – I am in my sixties – I had hoped and prayed for justice. Perhaps, just perhaps, I am going to see it for the first time in my life – Senator Obama, son of a white mother and black father, President of America. His presidency will bring so much hope for so many not so privileged people – black, white and other – right across the world. God be with you.

Yes, we know…Obama is the second coming.

I mean really, is there anyone else becoming nauseated at the constant glory?? Go ahead, call me a sore loser…but it’s true. I hope this guy lives up to the HUGE expectations everyone has of him.

I listened to Ted Sorensen on the Diane Riehm show. He did quite a bit of white washing on the Kennedy records and was busy trying comparing Obama to Kennedy. Even though he tried to blame Johnson for the Vietnam War, most of us who come of age during the Vietnam War will remember that Kennedy got the US much more heavily involved with Vietnam because he bought into the Domino theory. JFK gave the go ahead to the CIA to assassinate Diem and put Nguyen van Theiu and Nguyen gao ki in power… and Sorensen said something to the effect that Obama, like JFK, will make the right choice even if he is have no prior policy experience in that area.

The February day I voted for Obama I returned from the polls, remembered reading that poem long ago, and re-read it. I found the opening lines galvanizing:

Human beings suffer, they torture one another, they hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song can fully right a wrong inflicted or endured.

Gitmo, anyone? Proof of Pound’s dictum: poetry is news that stays news.

We are all so worked over in this country. Is it jaded to be critical of Obama? I guess it depends on if it’s mean-spirited. I just received an email from someone who railed about the so-called Obama family in Africa and how they are behind corruption and much violence in Kenya.

I want to believe. It’s that simple. Or is it?

Elizabeth (@ 6:11 pm)

Here is the Wiki essay on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident . I remember the days vividly, even remembering where I was sitting as the television reported the air strikes against targets in Viet Nam. My Dad had no doubt what was occurring.

Not long thereafter (March, 1965), I enlisted in the USAR.

Basic Training was quite an experience, but my howitzer (then later JAG) unit was never called up during my service.

My take is that we will never know how far Kennedy would have taken US involvement in Viet Nam; but the Gulf of Tonkin incident under Johnson was clearly the watershed moment when US intervention was determined.

It’s also true that Sorensen didn’t want to talk about Kennedy’s lady friends (may I put it that way?) It was seemingly as lively a love life as the former Governor of New York’s, but perhaps more carefully undertaken. Or, perhaps Kennedy would not have avoided scrutiny today (When will it end? Ohio just lost its Attorney General Marc Dann to extramarital activities with employees).

One thing for sure, Sorensen is a partisan.

#11 Keep telling yourself that, the first coming carried the rural voters.. this second coming doesnt have those voters and is doomed cause of it, like Kerry, Gore, Dukaukis and a few others.. This will become more apparent after KY, and that Edwards endrosement was just political play..

Obama is just like Kennedy with one slight difference. Kennedy challenged Americans to ask what they could do for their country, not what their country could do for them. Obama tells Americans to ask what their country can do for them, not what they can do for their country. Like I said, slight difference.

Sorenson contributed “a line or two” to Obama speeches, just as he contributed a line or two to Profiles in Courage (he has just admitted he essentially ghost-wrote the book). Obama was a mediocre politician who put audiences to sleep back when he ran for Congress. With the words of Sorenson and cadence of Wright, he can read speeches very movingly now. In debates, however, he is halting, uncertain, and much less effective.

Another story about JFK, who presidency has been built up to mythological proportions. Sorenson is right to compare Obama to JFK. The Kennedy’s wanted nothing but power and did everything to get the White House. The great irony is that they did not even spend one full term in it. The Kennedys are about nothing but power. They hide it behind the words “public service.” The Kennedys are frauds. JFK, who sat on the House Un-Americans Committee, was a fraud. Obama is a fraud. Ted Kennedy, who got his Senate seat through his father, is a fraud. Obama is a fraud, selling Oprah Winfreyism, while using old-style Chicago politics. It takes frauds to know a fraud. Obama is about nothing new. He is just fooling gullible people. He wants power every bit as much as the Kennedys.

People who are excited by Senator Obama’s similarities to President Kennedy need to remember that the Kennedy legacy was not defined as particularly heroic until the shots were fired at Dallas.

— Posted by Mike McCaffrey

I think we must have lived in parallel universes, since I remember President Kennedy’s term as a time of great hope that was tragically cut short. It was a huge thing to have a young and vital President and First Family taking on the country’s problems, with bright, energetic people in the Cabinet.

As to Vietnam, we’ll never know what Kennedy would have done. But, no question, Johnson dragged us into the mire, like Bush. The difference is, he had enough sense to realize what he’d done.

And the news media then were responsible, and brought the war right into American living rooms, not like today when it’s sanitized into barely impinging on the average person’s horizon, unless they have lost a loved one or when they realize the economy is going into the dumpster because of it.

I am so tired of all the older women trying to bring Obama down because he has spoiled their chance at seeing a woman be elected president.

Why aren’t they asking themselves why Hillary has not galvanized younger women like myself? The answer is simple: we younger women voters have been brought up to look at the person, not their race or their gender, and we see a candidate who supported the Iraq War whole-heartedly and who doesn’t call on us to act differently as women leaders. She plays by the same book as the men always have.

Older women that support Hillary are entitled to be sad. But to turn their anger onto Obama is wrong. Afterall, what they are really angry at is a whole new generation who thinks differently about the world than they do.

Dear Logan(#15): Agreed. Sorensen tried to make the same point about Johnson was the one who sent the troops in an effort to absolve the Kennedy administration from its responsibilities in sending military advisors to Vietnam, and escalating its involvement by assassinating its President and installing leadership that is ” US friendly”. Vietnam was a French colny and the US did not have strong strategic interest in Vietnam other than the fact it bought into MacNamara argument for the need for containment ( Domino theory) If Kennedy had not given the ok to the assassination of Diem and then installed two “Pro US” leaders, there would be little need for the US to escalate its involvement in Vietnam in the first place. It is the same reason why the US is stuck in Iraq.

Who really gives a flying fig about what Ted Sorensen says about contemporary events? He was the coiner of platitudes for JFK, who lacked the gumption to defend Martin Luther King’s crusade for justice because the Kennedy machine was too beholden to a strategy of not offending Southern white racists to achieve and retain power. How do I know that? Because I was there as a gullible young reporter, at Selma and other tragic milestones in America’s sad quest for human decency. History will show that it was LBJ who brought equality a huge step closer with his epic voting rights act, before he veered off into the quagmire of Viet Nam, which is altogether another tragic farce I had the dubious distinction of covering. The good news? America is a self-righting democracy that will survive the revisionist historical remblings of Sorenson et al.

First, Sorenson is well positioned to say whether Obama is reminiscent of JFK; after all, Sorenson knew JFK about as well as anyone except Robert Kennedy did and Sorenson wouldn’t throw away the analogy to his revered mentor on just any hack politician.

Second, Obama is indeed reminiscent of JFK in that, like JFK, Obama is indeed calling on Americans to step forward and get involved in the hard tasks of solving their country’s problems. He is careful to remind his audiences that he is an imperfect man and an imperfect candidate, and — more important, that true solutions to the nation’s problems come from a creative and mutually reinforcing partnership between elected officials and the people. Just as that partnership was responsible for the ratification of the Constitution and its amendment by the Bill of Rights — just as that partnership made a success of the Lincoln Administration’s efforts to meet the crisis of disunion and secession — just as that partnership worked in the New Deal and in the heady early days of JFK and the heady early days of the Great Society — so it can work again.

Civic engagement is what Obama is talking about, just as it is what JFK was talking about, and Sorenson’s speeches for JFK and his writings after 1963 all speak to civic engagement.

Finally, public support for Obama is far from some weird charismatic cult — though some may want to portray it that way. Let’s instead listen to Ted Sorenson, one of the best men in American public life, and understand that Obama and we have a priceless opportunity to seize — and let’s not blow it.

Regarding post #19

It should read that JFK sat on the House Un-Amerian Activities Committee (HUAC).

Pardon the error.

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Historic speeches.

President Kennedy believed in the power of words -- both written and spoken -- to win votes, to set goals, to change minds, to move nations. He consistently took care to choose the right words and phrases that would send the right message. This section presents some of John F. Kennedy's most historic speeches; view a broader selection of his pre-presidential speeches and presidential speeches in our Speeches section. For a complete record of President Kennedy's public statements, see the  Public Papers of the Presidents .

Courtesy of Google, six of these speeches have been translated into twelve languages. 

Acceptance of Democratic Nomination for President

July 15, 1960

Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association

September 12, 1960

The City Upon a Hill Speech

January 9, 1961

Inaugural Address

January 20, 1961

Address to Joint Session of Congress

May 25, 1961

Address at University of Washington

November 16, 1961

Address at Independence Hall

July 4, 1962

Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort

September 12, 1962

Address During the Cuban Missile Crisis

October 22, 1962

Address at Vanderbilt University

May 18, 1963

American University Commencement Address

June 10, 1963

Televised Address to the Nation on Civil Rights

June 11, 1963

Remarks at the Rudolph Wilde Platz, Berlin

June 26, 1963

Address Before the Irish Parliament

June 28, 1963

Televised Address on Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

July 26, 1963

Remarks at Amherst College on the Arts

October 26, 1963

IABC Chicago

The Chicago Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators

Welcome to IABC Chicago

February 1, 2012

Secrets from JFK’s speechwriter

Ted Sorensen was one of the great wordsmiths in American history.

An advisor and legendary speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, Sorensen will always be remembered for penning some of the most eloquent and inspiring language ever spoken by a U.S. president.

Sorensen — who died at the age of 82 in 2010 of complications from a stroke — wrote eight books from 1965 to 2008. In his final book, Counselor , he outlined the basic rules that made JFK’s speeches powerfully persuasive. These rules apply to all types of presentations, not just formal speeches. You can make your next presentation more effective by following them:

1. Less is almost always more: A presentation or speech should be lean and mean. When attempting to persuade, less is more. Keep your focus narrow, and be direct. Nobody ever says, “Gee, I wish that speech was longer.”

2. Organize the text to simplify, clarify and emphasize: According to Sorensen, speeches should have a “tightly organized, coherent, and consistent theme.” Setting the theme of your presentation from the beginning — and providing guideposts along the way — make it easier for your audience to follow.

A good example would be a sales manager who kicks off a presentation by saying: “Today we’re introducing a new software tool that will help you meet and in many cases exceed your quarterly quotas [sets the theme]. There are three features of this software that I would like to highlight for you today. Let’s start with the first one [provides verbal guideposts].” An organized theme repeated consistently throughout the presentation is easier to follow and more memorable.

3. Use variety to reinforce your message: Variety can keep your audience engaged. For instance, funny stories are great, but a half-hour of nothing but funny stories will have the audience viewing you more as a stand-up comic than an expert on a subject. Pelting listeners with factoids for 40 minutes is usually a mistake, but removing them altogether is also an error. Mix it up.

4. Employ elevated but not grandiose language: According to Sorensen, JFK believed in elevating the sights of his listeners (“We choose to go to the moon…”) and simplifying his language at the same time. Sorensen and Kennedy kept the sentences short and the words understandable. They grasped the importance of avoiding terms that could not be understood by the average listener.

5. Substantive ideas are the key to any speech: “A great speech is great because of the strong ideas conveyed,” Sorensen writes. “If the words are soaring, beautiful, eloquent, it is still not a great speech if the ideas are flat or empty.” Often, executives spend thousands of dollars on the venue (audio/video, presentation design, etc.) and not enough time developing ideas. No one ever says, “Great presentation. I especially liked the design on slide 14.” Instead, you are more likely to hear: “Great presentation. I think our company could reduce our expenses by adopting your ideas.” The effectiveness of your presentation will ultimately rest on the power of your ideas.

Whether you are delivering a PowerPoint presentation or a formal speech, the way you craft and deliver your ideas will leave your audience either inspired and energized or bored to tears. Sorensen says: “A speech can ignite a fire, change men’s minds, open their eyes, alter their votes, bring hope to their lives, and, in all these ways, change the world.”

Image credit: boston.com

Historic Documents

"ask not what your country can do for you".

We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom — symbolizing an end, as well as a beginning — signifying renewal, as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago. The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe — the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans — born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage — and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge — and more. To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided, there is little we can do — for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder. To those new States whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom — and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside. To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required — not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge — to convert our good words into good deeds — in a new alliance for progress — to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbours know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this Hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house. To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support — to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective — to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak — and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run. Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction. We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed. But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course — both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final war. So let us begin anew — remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate. Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belabouring those problems which divide us. Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms — and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations. Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce. Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah — to "undo the heavy burdens -. and to let the oppressed go free." And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavour, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved. All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin. In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than in mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe. Now the trumpet summons us again — not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are — but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation" — a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself. Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort? In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility — I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavour will light our country and all who serve it — and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.

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Writing rules of JFK's speechwriter

Ted sorensen, john f. kennedy's "intellectual blood bank", and his speechwriting principles which are still relevant in 2020.

Hello everyone, and happy Monday.

Today, I want to share Ted Sorensen’s speechwriting principles with you. Ted was John F. Kennedy’s advisor and speechwriter, and a contributor to many of JFK’s famous speeches and writings, including Kennedy’s correspondence with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Ted Sorensen’s rules of crafting a powerful speech are enduring, and as relevant in 2020, a year of global calamity, as they were during the Cold War.

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Why am I fascinated by Ted Sorensen

I am currently reading Ted’s memoir, Counselor: A life at the edge of history . Ted wrote it just two years before passing away in 2010. In the book, Sorensen talks about his experience working with JFK, starting as a legislative assistant to the newly elected senator in 1953, and until Kennedy’s assassination a decade later. Ted’s account is of a humble, idealistic, devoted advisor, serving both John F. Kennedy and America through the crucial days of the world’s history.

Kennedy’s electrifying, yet simple and easily digestible speeches are part of American History and serve as an inspiration to many until today.

Ted Sorensen was the man who wrote most of these speeches. Or, as he humbly puts it himself, substantially contributed to drafting them.

I’m talking about speeches like Kennedy’s iconic Inaugural Address of 1961, with JFK’s probably most-well known quote:

“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”

Or Kennedy’s Address to Rice University on the Nation’s Space Effort in 1962, better known as “We choose to go to the moon” speech:

“But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Six rules of Ted Sorensen

Sorensen’s speechwriting principles are both timeless and universal. Sorensen says that every great speech has to consider these six rules.

Less is better than more.

Omit unnecessary words, and make it as direct and straightforward as the Ten Commandments. Instead of stretching as few thoughts as possible into as many words as possible - do just the opposite.

Translating this into advice for 2020: cut your 2-page emails, 50-slide presentations, and 15-minute long monologues on Zoom. Less is more.

Choose each word precisely.

Care and prudence in selecting the right words, and their sequence, is paramount. Avoid the terminology trap. Metaphors can be powerful - but use them sparingly. Also, remove divisive or alienating metaphors altogether.

In our times, every piece of written and spoken language sticks. And mistakes are costly for individual careers and multinational brands alike. Carefully considering the implications of wording and tone you use is good advice.

Organize your communication

There should be a logical order to your communication. Have the outline, number your points, and use paragraphs when writing. The same applies to speeches.

Nobody will read an unstructured memo or act on a request that isn’t well specified. Organizing your communication for the recipient increases your chances of getting the required attention.

Vary your writing and speech to reinforce, not confuse or distract

Use repetition and rhyming to make your points memorable. Add the right quotations to strengthen your message. Your ultimate goal is to make your message easy to digest, without confusing the recipient.

The way I apply this principle in my emails is by putting my crucial message at the forefront. I then elaborate on it in the email body and conclude with the same statement. Through this, I have repeated my substantive point from multiple angles, making it easy for the recipient to follow.

Elevate, yet simplify

Use communication to motivate and inspire others. However still, keep your sentences short, your words understandable, and your ideas clear.

Sorensen stresses that elevation doesn’t have to be achieved by using unusual wording or sentence constructs. Quotes all of us know from the most memorable speeches and writings are rarely hard to understand. It’s the simplicity that makes them stand out, not complexity.

The substantive idea is at the core of communication.

A speech should be built on top of your key message, not the other way around. No communication can be excellent if the ideas behind it are flat and empty.

It’s the “idea first” principle for me here. Ultimately, it is not the speech or the writing that resonates with the audience. It is what’s being talked or written about.

The relevance of Ted’s ideas for 2020

Communication channels have changed massively since the 1960ies. The amount of information processed by each individual is ever-growing. Attention spans are getting shorter.

Most of us aren’t trying to de-escalate the Cold War or to win over the hearts of a nation with what we’re saying or writing. Instead, we are preparing investment proposals, providing project updates, and elevating our teams ahead of a complex project phase.

Yet, rules for crafting and delivering a powerful message, either spoken and written, are still mostly the same.

Be concise and to the point. Choose your words carefully for maximum impact. Use structure to make the message easy to digest. Reinforce what you say to make it stick. Elevate through simplicity, not complexity. And, first and foremost, focus on the quality of your message itself.

That’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed my take on Ted Sorensen’s timeless communication principles. Stay tuned for the next issue.

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Richard Goodwin, Speechwriter For LBJ, JFK and RFK, Dies At 86

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By Benjamin Ivry May 22, 2018

Richard Goodwin, who died in Massachusetts on May 20 at age 86, was more than just a distinguished speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Robert F. Kennedy. Goodwin furthered social progress with his brilliantly crafted words, coining the phrase “Great Society” to describe the Johnson’s government’s efforts to battle poverty and racial injustice, made possible in 1965 when more progressives were elected to the House of Representatives than had been seated since the Great Depression.

Goodwin’s talent was never more evident than in an historic speech delivered by LBJ to Congress in March 1965, after civil rights demonstrators were brutally attacked by law enforcement officers in Selma, Alabama. Having the Texas president reiterate the title of the Civil Rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” the words plainly and convincingly pronounced by Johnson likened the historic battles of Lexington and Concord and Appomattox with latter-day violence at Selma. LBJ stated, “I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” adding that in the human search for freedom, the “real hero of this struggle is the American Negro. His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this nation… What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to accrue for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

Even jaded politicians were moved to applause. No less influential on an international scale was the anti-apartheid speech Goodwin wrote in 1966 for Senator Robert F. Kennedy to give at the University of Cape Town, South Africa:

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“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

This visionary eloquence and compassion for the sufferings of minorities surely derived from Goodwin’s Jewish roots. His family had emigrated from Vilna, Lithuania to America in the 1890s. Goodwin claimed to be uncertain about specific details, but told a journalist for New York Magazine in August 1975 that his father’s real name was “Naradovitch or some complicated Lithuanian variation of that.” U.S. Immigration officials had changed the family name to Ginsberg, which it remained until Goodwin was a senior in high school, at which point his father chose a more assimilated-sounding name starting with the letter G from the Boston telephone directory. Vagueness in nomenclature continued with Goodwin’s middle name, listed as Naradof in most obituaries. However, in the JFK and LBJ Presidential libraries, based on his White House service in the early 1960s, it was written as Naradhoff.

By any other name, Goodwin was a Boston-born East Coast intellectual who had graduated first in his class at Harvard Law School. That was enough to please JFK, who would delight in assigning Goodwin tasks involved with exceedingly rural farming issues which impacted America’s heartland. JFK was tickled to do the same with another political aide, Philadelphia-born Myer Feldman, known as Mike, (1914–2007) who was likewise given responsibilities for agricultural issues, so that Kennedy could greet him with delight, asking “Mike, how are the crops?”

LBJ appreciated Goodwin’s identity more seriously. Some of the president’s peremptory speech-writing assignments to Goodwin may be heard online at the University of Virginia website on LBJ’s long-secret tapes. According to the 1975 New York Magazine profile, the speech about Selma, Alabama had first been assigned to a Texan crony of the President’s, whereupon LBJ exclaimed, “You [expletive]! Don’t you know that an Eastern Jew has the pulsebeat of America in his blood and you ask a Texas banker to write this speech? Get Goodwin to write it.”

Indeed Goodwin, who had endured beatings by anti-Semitic children when he spent some time growing up in suburban Maryland, had a lasting sense of the nation’s “pulsebeat.” After law school, he clerked for Felix Frankfurter, one of the first Jewish Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. He also helped the Legislative Oversight Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives to investigate the fixed TV quiz show “Twenty One.” The result, described in Goodwin’s memoir “Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties,” inspired the 1994 movie “Quiz Show” directed by Robert Redford.

When Goodwin married the historian Doris Kearns in 1975, the wedding guests included Norman Mailer, while the ecumenical ceremony was co-presided over by Rabbi Sumner Z. Kaplan a brigadier general in the U.S. Army Reserves who organized Bostonians to march in pro-Israel demonstrations. After the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Goodwin termed him “my best and last friend in politics.” He would write Al Gore’s concession speech in the 2000 presidential election, citing without irony Senator Stephen Douglas’s admission to Abraham Lincoln, who had just defeated him for the presidency, “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism,” as if Gore was ceding to an opponent of Lincolnesque stature instead of George W. Bush. Clearly something had shrunk in the American political landscape.

Lacking such outsized personalities as LBJ to write for, Goodwin next sought historical characters of some grandeur to put words in their mouths. He chose the astronomer Galileo Galilei and Pope Urban VIII, devising a play called “The Hinge of the World” when it premiered in England in 2003, later retitled “Two Men of Florence” for its U.S. premiere in 2009. The play received mixed reviews, with Variety claiming that the controversy over science versus church dogma “comes across as History Channel Plus… the production never rises much above Great Debate Theater.”

Continuing to write articles into his eighties, Goodwin published an opinion piece last year in the Boston Globe under the headline, “Democracy teeters on the income gap.” Still fighting the good fight for social equality against all odds, he concluded:

“Though recent statistics reveal an even greater hardening of class division and income inequality, I’d like to believe that… if we abandon the struggle for economic justice we will have abandoned our essential allegiance to the great experiment that is America.”

Benjamin Ivry is a frequent contributor to the Forward.

Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.

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Speechwriter of LBJ, JFK has died

John Martin Meek, who wrote speeches for JFK and LBJ, was part of the White House legislative team that passed Medicare and the 1965 Voting Rights Act and was the coordinator of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, died March 11 at the Southern Arizona Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Tucson at age 86 of a long illness originating from his combat service with the Marines in the Korean War.

Notable achievements from Meek's life:

During almost 40 years in Washington, D.C., Meek served as press secretary to the late U.S. Sens. Robert S. Kerr and J. Howard Edmondson, both Oklahoma Democrats. Early in his career he also was press office manager for Robert F. Kennedy's successful 1964 U.S. Senate campaign in New York, press assistant at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, press assistant for the 1965 Presidential Inaugural and then worked for President Lyndon B. Johnson until the fall of 1968.

He wrote a speech on the space program for President John F. Kennedy and numerous others for President Johnson, for whom Meek also served in the administration's efforts to pass “Great Society” legislation.

Public relations executive

After leaving politics for the private sector, Meek, as an executive of one of the world's largest communications firms, Edelman, led the public relations and legislative efforts to get U.S. landing rights for the British-French Concorde SST, to lift the arms embargo against NATO partner Turkey, and stopped federal government efforts to remove seat belts in American-manufactured automobiles instead of solely relying on air bags.

Meek also was involved with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington for two decades beginning in 1979 and even helped sculptor Frederick Hart mold the clay for the “Three Servicemen” sculpture at The Wall site.

Among the numerous honors during his career was in 2011, when he was included with Oklahoma astronauts and NASA officials recognized by the Oklahoma Historical Society for their contributions to the nation's space program.

Dick Goodwin, the Kennedy-LBJ Speechwriter Who Changed the ’60s—and the Country

For Jack, Bobby, and Lyndon, he wrote some of the most eloquent words they ever spoke and was one of the most important figures of his year.

Jeff Greenfield

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

In the summer of 1954, Richard Goodwin walked into the Harvard Law School library, ready to begin his first day as a member of the Harvard Law Review; a position all but guaranteeing a path to a life of privilege and prestige. For the son of lower middle-class Jews, it was the reward for years of intense study, with summers working as a fry cook at Revere Beach, supplementing a full scholarship to Harvard Law.

But as he prepared for the dreary work of checking footnotes from a law review article, something snapped. It was as if, he wrote years later, that he was in a prison. So he turned on his heel, drove back to Brookline, waived his student deferment, and joined the army. After his service, he went back to Harvard Law, where he finished first in his class, was president of the Law Review, and won a clerkship from Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

Fourteen years later, 2 miles east of Harvard Law, Goodwin sat in his office at MIT, where he held a cushy faculty position. It was early 1968, and Goodwin was increasingly despairing of a Vietnam War that had lost all purpose, and a nation seized by racial and generational tumult. His close friend Robert Kennedy had refused to challenge President Johnson for the Democratic nomination, but Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy was embarked on that quixotic effort in New Hampshire.

So Goodwin quit his post, jumped into his car, and at midnight, arrived at the Perkins Motel in Manchester, New Hampshire, where he rousted McCarthy’s press secretary, Sy Hersh, walked him to his car, pointed to his typewriter and said, “You, me and this typewriter, Sy; together we’re going to overthrow the president of the United States.”

A month later, McCarthy won 42 percent of the primary vote—a stunning, unexpected achievement; four days later, Robert Kennedy entered the race, and two weeks after that, Johnson announced he would not run for another term.

These two anecdotes say much about who Dick Goodwin was: the blend of determination, ability, and, yes, a touch of arrogance; but more than that— they point to what made Goodwin so compelling a figure. The last of the New Frontiersmen—when he died Sunday at 85, he was the last surviving member of President John Kennedy’s 1960 campaign team—he embodied one of Kennedy’s favorite observations, from fellow New Englander Emerson: that “a man must share the actions and passions of his time on peril of being judged not to have lived.” Goodwin didn’t just “share” the actions and passions of his time—he threw himself into them, and in so doing, put his mark on those times.

Goodwin is best known as a speechwriter, who wrote perhaps the single greatest presidential oration of the post-FDR era: Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 speech on the Voting Rights Act (video here ), which proclaimed that “it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

He was also a principal author, along with Adam Walinsky, of Robert Kennedy’s 1966 “Day of Affirmation” speech in South Africa (video here ), which declared: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

But his influence extended beyond rhetoric; he was, in a way, an embodiment of at least one part of the ’60s; an era that began with the rise of a younger generation to power, armed with the conviction—which a times shaded into hubris—that it could move mountains, and that ended with an assassin’s bullet in a kitchen pantry in a Los Angeles hotel.

In his late twenties, Goodwin was a lawyer for a House Committee that investigated the enormously popular TV quiz shows of the late 1950s. It was Goodwin, the scholarship kid from a Jewish neighborhood in Boston, who confronted and revealed the fraud behind the performance of Charles Van Doren, the epitome of WASP elitism. (The movie Quiz Show tells the story.)

It was Goodwin who, at age 29, became Ted Sorensen’s deputy speechwriter in JFK’s 1960 campaign. It was Goodwin who, not yet 30, became the deputy assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs and caused a political firestorm by meeting secretly with Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara in Uruguay. (The meeting led to no diplomatic breakthrough, but Guevara did gift Goodwin with a box of fine Havanas, which appealed mightily to the cigar-loving Goodwin.)

By his mid-thirties, he was a close friend of Robert Kennedy, accompanying him on tumultuous trip through South America, where they were harassed by Communist students and swam in piranha-infested waters. It was that friendship that ultimately drew him to leave Gene McCarthy’s campaign and join RFK’s effort, where he worked with director John Frankenheimer on the television ads that helped win primaries in Indiana, Nebraska, South Dakota, and California, where Sirhan Sirhan was waiting in that hotel kitchen.

That, in shorthand, describes what Dick Goodwin did in that decade. But it doesn’t really capture who he was. For one thing, Goodwin shared with Robert Kennedy a mordant sense of humor; a puckish delight in upending the pieties of politics. In his memoir Remembering America , Goodwin describes a memo from a White House aide warning him that a file cabinet of his had been found open at 12:45 a.m. In response, Goodwin sent a memo to the aide, explaining that the aide had just blown up “the most skillful espionage operation in the history of the American government.” The cabinet, he wrote, was filled with deliberately false information.

“Then I usually invite someone from the Russian embassy over for a nightcap. At the appropriate moment (around 12:45 am) I say I have to go over to the mansion and leave”—thus leaving the Soviet agent in possession of totally misleading data.

Goodwin’s political disappointments in the years after Robert Kennedy’s death were leavened by the arrival in his life of Doris Kearns, with whom he shared more than four decades of marriage. What he—and she—brought to that union was a zest for life that could have powered a medium-sized city. When I traveled to Concord, Massachusetts, to interview them for various books I was writing, dinner at the local inn was endlessly interrupted by a parade of locals from all walks of life—cops, firefighters, lawyers, business folks, politicians, all wanting to trade a quip, or share a conversation with them. (It made the interview tougher, but it made the memory of the dinners indelible.)

Goodwin was a less visible presence in the last decades of his life; he wrote for The New Yorker , Rolling Stone , and other venues, as well as a play about Galileo, but he took the most satisfaction from helping Doris Kearns Goodwin with her succession of best-selling histories.

In his 2014 introduction to the e-book version of Remembering America , Goodwin wrote that “the memory of the Sixties remains fresh in my mind This is not simply the nostalgia of a man in his eighties. The decade of the Sixties was one of those special moments in our history, when important public issues animated our citizens, when large achievement seemed a realistic possibility; and when the American faith was charged with a determination equal to the needs and the promise of the nation.”

This is, of course, a romantic version of that time, one that is rejected and even scorned by a significant segment of the American populace. And Dick’s words have an almost quaint ring in our current political climate. But it’s worth remembering that when Dick Goodwin and his colleagues entered the White House in 1961, no black or woman or Italian had ever sat on the Supreme Court; no African-American had ever been a member of the Cabinet, or led a Fortune 500 company; that from Capitol Hill to Wall Street to the powerhouse law firms and ad agencies, to the executive offices of newspapers, magazines, and broadcasting, your skin color, religion, gender, and family background imposed sharp limits on what you could do and what you could be. Goodwin was part of a movement that changed that bleak reality for good.

You can look back on Dick Goodwin’s life and work and see him as a key player in a time, and a politics burdened by its fair share of illusion and overreach. What I see is someone armed with an incandescent intellect, a razor-sharp wit and a fragrant Havana , who put his gifts in the service of causes that changed the lives of millions for the better. John and Robert Kennedy often liked to cited a Greek definition of happiness: “the full use of your powers, along lines of excellence in a life affording scope.” By that definition Dick Goodwin was among the happiest people of his time.

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Ted Sorensen, speechwriter for JFK, dead at age 82

Bryan Marquard The Boston Globe 10/31/2010

Theodore Chaikin Sorensen, whose prose mingled with the thoughts and words of his close friend John F. Kennedy to create some of the most memorable presidential speeches of the 20th century, died today, nine days after suffering a stroke.

Mr. Sorensen’s wife, Gillian, said he died at noon in a hospital in New York City of complications from the stroke.

He was 82 and despite a stroke nine years ago that left him nearly sightless, Mr. Sorensen had continued to be a vibrant link intellectually and philosophically to the Kennedy administration and the Camelot aura that defined the clan, launching the political careers of the president’s younger brothers, Robert and Edward. Considered by many to be the premier presidential speechwriter of his lifetime — some thought him the best ever — Mr. Sorensen played significant roles in crafting JFK’s enduring speeches, including his 1961 inaugural address, and the president’s book “Profiles in Courage,” which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1957.

“I think Ted became the most important adviser and on balance, I think he was the best of the brightest and best,” said Harris Wofford, a former US senator from Pennsylvania who had served as an adviser to Kennedy. “He also knew what John Kennedy thought. They had an extraordinary relationship. It would be hard to know where one person’s thoughts ended and the other began.”

Officially, Ted Sorensen was special counsel to the president, a role he reprised with Lyndon B. Johnson. Mr. Sorensen worked so closely with Jack Kennedy, however, that he became widely regarded as the president’s alter ego, liberal conscience, and intellectual confidante. Kennedy sought Mr. Sorensen’s counsel at every key juncture, from campaigning for the White House to guiding the country through perilous times such as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis.

By Mr. Sorensen’s description, the two were as one as they drafted turns of phrase Kennedy made famous. Scholars in decades since have parsed sentences and scoured records while trying to deduce who wrote which words. With a grace born of his Midwestern roots, Mr. Sorensen always tipped the spotlight toward Kennedy, casting himself in the role of artist’s apprentice who assisted the master “in the execution of the final work of art.”…

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Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You

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Download Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You by John F. Kennedy in PDF

Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You by John F. Kennedy(Text-Version)

We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom–symbolizing an end as well as a beginning–signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forbears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago.

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe–the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans–born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage–and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

This much we pledge–and more.

To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided there is little we can do–for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.

To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom–and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.

To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required–not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge–to convert our good words into good deeds–in a new alliance for progress–to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this Hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.

To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support–to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective–to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak–and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run.

Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.

We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.

But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course–both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war.

So let us begin anew–remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.

Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms–and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations.

Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce.

Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah–to “undo the heavy burdens . . . (and) let the oppressed go free.”

And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.

All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.

Now the trumpet summons us again–not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need–not as a call to battle, though embattled we are– but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”–a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility–I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it–and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.

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The Big Hurdle Between R.F.K. Jr. and the Debate Stage (It’s Not a Poll)

The independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he’s confident he will qualify. But CNN’s rules have put an urgently ticking clock on his already-critical ballot access efforts.

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By Chris Cameron and Rebecca Davis O’Brien

President Biden’s campaign has been clear: He will debate former President Donald J. Trump only one-on-one.

That hasn’t stopped Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from trying.

As the deadline to qualify for the June 27 debate draws closer, Mr. Kennedy, who is running for president as an independent, has said he’s confident he can still meet host CNN’s requirements, while ramping up accusations that the news organization rigged the process. Last week, in an escalation of his pressure campaign on the host network, he filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against CNN , saying that it had colluded with the Biden and Trump campaigns to exclude Mr. Kennedy from the debate in violation of campaign finance law.

“CNN adopted criteria that they believed would keep me off the stage,” Mr. Kennedy said in an interview that aired last week, adding that the network was also interpreting those criteria in a way that “weights them towards the candidates they want on the stage.”

CNN has denied the accusations. But Mr. Kennedy’s rivals do have a mutual interest in boxing him out, as The New York Times previously reported. Mr. Kennedy is drawing support away from both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, and both campaigns are concerned about the potential for him to swing the election in key battleground states.

In at least one respect, Mr. Kennedy has reason for optimism. Recent polling has positioned Mr. Kennedy closer to qualifying for the debate stage than any third-party candidate in more than three decades. Mr. Kennedy must earn at least 15 percent support in four approved national polls by June 20 to qualify for the debate.

He currently has three of those qualifying polls, one from CNN , one from Quinnipiac University and one from Marquette University Law School .

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