Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  Successful stories told by a toastmaster or by another speaker would be jotted down for future reference. Collections of Finley Peter Dunne and Will Rogers, current newspaper columns and quotations, the works of writers who liberally sprinkled their thoughts on history and government with amusing expressions or examples (such as Denis Brogan and T. V. Smith) were all carefully mined. Standard jokebooks were never used, nor would he ever say, “That reminds me of the story of…” as a bridge to some irrelevant and lengthy anecdote, but many an old saw was adapted to modern politics and to a particular audience.

  No laugh-getter once used or even considered was ever discarded. A large “humor folder” in my files grew continuously. Omitting all anecdotes from the texts that were distributed to the press usually avoided their being publicized, and thus made possible their use in another speech in another part of the country. Audiences watching him scribbling away during dinner often thought he was rewriting his speech, as at times he was. More often he was jotting down the opening lines most appropriate to that audience, working in many cases from a typewritten “humor list” of one-line reminders.

  Except for joking about the political liabilities of his own religion, he avoided all ethnic references as well as all off-color remarks in public (although not in private). The only joke which backfired was told early in his Senate career. “The cab driver did such a good job rushing me to this luncheon,” he told a Washington audience, “that I was going to give him a big tip and and tell him to vote Democratic. Then I remembered the advice of Senator Green, so I gave him no tip and told him to vote Republican.” The Associated Press solemnly reported the story as though it had actually happened, and a storm of letters from cab drivers and their wives caused the Senator to think twice about his choice of humor in the future.

  He liked to poke fun at politics and politicians, his party, his colleagues and himself. He liked humor that was both topical and original, irreverent but gentle. In his eight years in the Senate no speech assignment worried him longer or more deeply than his role as Democratic jester for the Washington Gridiron Club Dinner in 1958. His successful ten-minute talk on that occasion was drawn from several hours of material gathered from many sources and tried on many “experts.” Thereafter he tended more and more, except perhaps on the 1960 campaign circuit, to use that kind of political, more subtle and self-belittling humor, for it was naturally consistent with his own personality and private wit.

  His best humor, of course, was spontaneous, and his increasing confidence on the platform brought increasing numbers of spur-of-the-moment gibes. Candor and humor, when combined, can be dangerous weapons politically, and at times he had to restrain his natural instincts in this direction.

  In addition to the humor file, we kept a collection of appropriate speech endings—usually quotations from famous figures or incidents from history which, coupled with a brief peroration of his own, could conclude almost any speech on any subject with a dramatic flourish. On many of the hectic precampaign trips of 1957-1959, he would leave one community for the next with a paraphrase from a favorite Robert Frost poem:

  Iowa City is lovely, dark and deep

  But I have promises to keep

  And miles to go before I sleep.”6

  He soon knew all these closings by heart; and while the standard closings, like the humorous openings, were almost always omitted from his released texts in order to facilitate their continued use elsewhere, his own reading copy (prepared in extra-large type) would have merely a word or a phrase to indicate the appropriate close: e.g., “Candles,” “General Marshall,” “Rising or Setting Sun.”

  Obviously the Senator was capable of selecting and remembering his own peroration without the help of these few words. But he looked upon his text and each part of it as insurance. Should the pressures of the moment or the fatigue of the trip benumb his brain as he stood on his feet, he wanted a complete text in his hands which he could follow or at least take off from. He would often deviate from his text or delete passages previously approved and sometimes discard it entirely. But—particularly in earlier days, when he knew his extemporaneous remarks were likely to be less organized, precise and grammatical than a more carefully prepared text—he wanted the reassurance a manuscript gave him.

  HIS SENATE SPEECHES

  A tremendous amount of staff research preceded every Kennedy talk. He was known in the Library of Congress as the heaviest borrower of their reference works. He did not make as many major Senate speeches as some of his more vocal colleagues, nor did he measure his—or their—effectiveness by the publicity a speech was given.

  One of the most carefully researched, widely publicized and officially ignored speeches Senator Kennedy ever delivered was his address in 1957 outlining the interest of America and the West in a negotiated solution for eventual self-determination in Algeria. The speech proved to be substantially and in some ways distressingly prophetic in subsequent years, but it was bitterly criticized at the time in Washington as well as Paris. His name and speech, he later discovered, were hailed throughout North Africa—and an American correspondent who visited the Algerian camp related to the Senator his surprise at being interviewed by weary, grimy rebels on Kennedy’s chances for the Presidency. There was, however, no Algerian vote in this country, and reporters looked hard for political motives.

  In retrospect, Kennedy never agreed with critics who felt he should not have spoken on the subject—though perhaps “independence” sounded too precise for his purposes, he admitted—nor with those who felt he was insincerely searching for headlines. As a junior Senator, he could do no more than raise his voice, and Secretary of State Dulles told him privately that he used Kennedy’s speech to advantage in putting quiet heat on the French. Moderates in Paris also welcomed the speech as support for their futile attempts to prevent extremists from taking over both sides.

  The Algerian speech was consistent with the Senator’s long-standing convictions about the dangers of Western colonialism and with two earlier speeches he had given on French Indochina. The longer the independence of the Vietnamese people was postponed, he said in 1953 and 1954, and the longer we believed repeated French and American predictions of an imminent French military victory, the more difficult the future would be for Vietnam and her sister states once they were fully free. He could not then have foreseen how deeply he would be involved in those correctly predicted difficulties. Indeed, on many subjects—Algeria, Indochina, India, Poland, Latin America and defense—Kennedy’s speeches were well ahead of both his colleagues and the headlines.

  When a major Kennedy speech on the Senate floor led to debate with the opposition, he usually held his own against more senior Republican Senators—whether it was Homer Ferguson defending Eisenhower’s “new look” cut in Army strength, Styles Bridges opposing Kennedy’s request for increased aid to India, William Knowland defeating by one vote a Kennedy measure to encourage Polish nationalism, or Homer Capehart demanding a secret session of the Senate to debate Kennedy’s complaints about the complacent pace of our strategic forces.

  Outside the labor area, his most successful effort on the Senate floor was in leading the opposition to constitutional changes in the Electoral College aimed at splitting up the strength of the more populous two-party states. (Interestingly enough, had one proposal been in effect in 1960, Nixon would have been elected President. Had the other proposal been in effect, it is likely that no candidate would have had an electoral vote majority, thus throwing the vote into the House of Representatives with no certainty of the result, inasmuch as each state delegation is given only one vote and Nixon carried twenty-six of the fifty states.)

  The Kennedy Senate staff, even when supplemented in later years by the part-time or full-time efforts of Fred Holborn, Harris Wofford and Richard Goodwin, could not keep pace with his demand for new speech ideas and material. Professor Archibald Cox of the Harvard Law School (later Solicitor General) headed a team of outside experts on labor reform. Professor
s Max Millikan and Walt Rostow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the latter was later Assistant Secretary of State) were among many advisers on foreign policy. For material on a speech on nuclear tests, he directed me to call his friend Sir David Ormsby-Gore (later U.K. Ambassador to the U.S.) in the British UN delegation. His 1954 speech on Indochina was checked with Ed Gullion of the Foreign Service (later his Ambassador to the Congo) and with an old family friend, Arthur Krock of the New York Times (later the chief critic of his policy in the Congo). Columnist Joe Alsop helped on a defense speech. Jacqueline translated French documents for his Vietnam speech. Law professors Freund and Howe were consulted on civil rights. Occasionally he would turn to his father’s associate, New Dealer James Landis. In short, while the Senator was a brainy man, his intelligence included the ability to know his own limitations of time and knowledge and to draw on the brains of others.

  HIS WRITINGS

  In addition to speeches, he began in mid-term to produce a large number of magazine articles—on legislation, politics, foreign policy, economic issues and history. He asked me to help on these also. Early in 1954 he asked me to read a passage in Agar’s The Price of Union, which had long intrigued him. It told of John Quincy Adams’ independence as a Federalist Senator from Massachusetts. If we could find more such examples of Senators defying constituent pressures, he said, he would have the raw material for a worthwhile magazine essay. He wanted to remind people that politics was—or could be—the noblest profession.

  Sporadically over the next few months we talked about the proposed article. I suggested Senator Norris from my home state of Nebraska, with whom my father had been associated. Arthur Krock suggested the late Senator Taft’s opposition to the Nuremberg Trials. An article in the American Bar Association Journal told of Edmund G. Ross and the Andrew Johnson impeachment. In a book of great orations was Daniel Webster’s “Seventh of March” speech and the Abolitionist attack on it. Slowly the Kennedy file of examples and material grew during 1954, but he had no time to do anything with it.

  Then, in mid-January, 1955, the Senator had nothing but time. Convalescing from his back operation, he was confined to bed in his father’s house in Palm Beach. At times listless, at times restless, he knew his mind required an absorbing activity to compensate for his body’s painful inactivity. By telephone and letter, the “political courage” project was resurrected, a draft article completed and a copy dispatched for consideration by Harper’s Magazine. It was tentatively entitled “Patterns of Political Courage”—and the thought was already growing in the Senator’s mind that there was enough material of this kind to produce a book instead of an article.

  Harper was interested in a book, and there then began a steady stream of material to the Senator’s bedside stand. I did not see him until the middle of March when I traveled to Palm Beach to work with him for ten days. But I received instructions almost daily by letter and sometimes telephone—books to ship down, memoranda to prepare, sources to check, materials to assemble. More than two hundred books, journals, magazines, Congressional Records and old newspaper files were scanned, as well as my father’s correspondence with Norris and other sources.

  The Senator dictated into a machine, to local stenographers in Palm Beach and to the stenographers I brought down on my two visits. He reshaped, rewrote and coordinated historical memoranda prepared by Professor Jules Davids of George Washington University, whom Jacqueline had recommended, by James Landis and by me. He considered, and mostly rejected, new examples which our research produced, such as Senators Humphrey Marshall and Thomas Corwin. He decided to exclude the story of John Tyler’s resignation from the Senate, which had been included in the original magazine article.

  He insisted on knowing the full historical background of each chapter And he developed, as he read and wrote, a far keener insight into his own political philosophy as well as the obligations of the office-holder in a democracy. Many assumed that the book was intended as a “personal catharsis,” a justification or substitute for his role in the McCarthy censure. In truth this was never mentioned, and the theme of the book predated the censure controversy.

  The work was a tonic to his spirits and a distraction from his pain. A return to the hospital for another dangerous operation in February of 1955 slowed him down only temporarily. Even there, where his survival was again in doubt, he wrote on a board propped up before him as he lay flat on his back. Returning to Palm Beach, he resumed as quickly as possible his steady pace of research and dictation. At first he worked lying in bed, then propped up on the porch or patio and later sitting in the sun near the Atlantic beach or pool.

  Except for the introductory and concluding chapters, the bulk of the manuscript was finished by the time he returned to the Senate on June 1. Several crates of books, mostly the property of the Library of Congress, were shipped from Palm Beach back to Washington. Still the work continued, in his office and home, day and night. Finally a title was selected—Profiles in Courage—a selection he made after a long debate in which he successively considered and rejected “Patterns of Political Courage” (the magazine article title), “Call the Roll” (my favorite at the time), “Eight Were Courageous” (one of the publisher’s suggestions), “The Patriots” and “Courage in the Senate.”

  With publication of Profiles in Courage on January 1, 1956, John Kennedy became more than “just another freshman Senator.” The book was an instant and consistent best-seller. It was favorably reviewed. It was translated into dozens of languages, from Persian to Gujrati. Although, with the exception of one chapter, attempts to convert it into a television or film presentation fell through until 1963, most of its chapters were reprinted in mass circulation magazines and newspapers. Book luncheons and universities invited the author to speak. A rain of honorary degrees began to fall.

  But of all honors he would receive throughout his life, none would make him more happy than his receipt in 1957 of the Pulitzer Prize for biography. And of all the abuse he would receive throughout his life, none would make him more angry than the charge a few months later that he had not written his own book.

  The charge was long rumored in private, despite the fact that the Senator had written a best-selling book years earlier. Finally it was made publicly by columnist Drew Pearson on the ABC television Mike Wallace Show on Saturday night, December 7, 1957. When then asked by Wallace “Who wrote the book for him?” Mr. Pearson replied, “I don’t recall at the present moment.”

  On Sunday afternoon the Senator called me in an unusual state of high agitation and anger. He talked, as he had never done before, of lawyers and lawsuits. “We might as well quit if we let this stand,” he said when I counseled caution. “This challenges my ability to write the book, my honesty in signing it and my integrity in accepting the Pulitzer Prize.”

  Room 362 in the Senate Office Building was as gloomy that week as the weather. We rounded up samples of the manuscript in the Senator’s handwriting. We prepared a list of possible witnesses who had seen him at work on Profiles—secretaries who had taken dictation, visitors to Palm Beach, publishers and others. The services of Washington attorney Clark Clifford were obtained. After further conferences in Washington and New York, a direct confrontation with ABC executives was arranged.

  There followed an unpleasant day. Mr. Pearson, when telephoned by ABC in the presence of the Senator and Clifford, said that Ted Sorensen had “written” the book—not merely worked on the assembly and preparation of the materials upon which much of the book was based, as the Senator had fully acknowledged in the Preface, but had actually been its author.

  The ABC executives, after privately cross-examining me at length, finally agreed that the Senator was clearly the author of Profiles in Courage with sole responsibility for its concept and contents, and with such assistance, during his convalescence, as his Preface acknowledged. But they sought to avoid their own responsibility for publishing an untrue rumor by making a new and equally untrue charge—namely, that I
had privately boasted of being the author.

  More examination and argument ensued. The conversations upon which this latest charge were based proved fictitious, an invention of ABC staff members too eager to please.

  “Perhaps,” said an ABC vice president to the Senator, as I waited in another room, “Sorensen made the statement when drinking.”

  “He doesn’t drink!” snapped the Senator.

  “Perhaps he said it when he was mad at you.”

  “He’s never been mad at me,” said the Senator.

  Finally I was called back into the room. It was agreed that I would furnish a sworn statement that I was not the author and had never claimed authorship of Profiles in Courage, and that ABC would make a complete statement of retraction and apology at the opening of the next Mike Wallace Show.

  The speed as well as the tone of this retraction was gratifying. Two months later, after a talk with the Senator and a review of the evidence, Drew Pearson—though the Senator felt no further retraction was needed—included in his column the small parenthetical note that the “author of‘Profiles in Courage’ is Senator Jack Kennedy of Massachusetts.”

  Flying back to Washington that night in December, Clark Clifford and I could laugh over one aspect of the day’s dismal, though necessary, proceedings. I was not the author of Jack Kennedy’s book—but I had “ghost-written” ABc’s statement of retraction and regret.

  1 The aging but mentally agile Senator Theodore Francis Green from industrialized Rhode Island voted with Kennedy on this issue, for all New England farmers thought high grain supports increased their feed costs; and when Kennedy asked Green if the farmers in Rhode Island were backing him up in this controversy, the old Senator replied, “Oh my, yes—both of them.”