by Ted Sorensen
INAUGURATION
Early in January, with work on his program well under way and his principal nominees named, the President-elect’s thoughts turned more and more to his inauguration. He took a lively interest in plans for the Inaugural Concert and five simultaneous Inaugural Balls (all of which he would attend), in plans for the four-hour-long Inaugural Parade (all of which he would watch in twenty-degree temperature), the million-dollar Democratic fund-raising Inaugural Gala (which he greatly enjoyed, despite a two-hour delay due to blizzards) and in all the other festivities. He asked Robert Frost to deliver a poem at the inauguration ceremony. He wanted Marian Anderson to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He sought a family Bible on which he could take the oath of office without arousing the POAU. He indicated that top hats instead of Homburgs would be in order for the official party. And, finally and most importantly, he began to work on his Inaugural Address.
He had first mentioned it to me in November. He wanted suggestions from everyone. He wanted it short. He wanted it focused on foreign policy. He did not want it to sound partisan, pessimistic or critical of his predecessor. He wanted neither the customary cold war rhetoric about the Communist menace nor any weasel words that Khrushchev might misinterpret. And he wanted it to set a tone for the era about to begin.
He asked me to read all the past Inaugural Addresses (which I discovered to be a largely undistinguished lot, with some of the best eloquence emanating from some of our worst Presidents). He asked me to study the secret of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (my conclusion, which his Inaugural applied, was that Lincoln never used a two- or three-syllable word where a one-syllable word would do, and never used two or three words where one word would do).
Actual drafting did not get under way until the week before it was due. As had been true of his acceptance speech at Los Angeles, pages, paragraphs and complete drafts had poured in, solicited from Kraft, Galbraith, Stevenson, Bowles and others, unsolicited from newsmen, friends and total strangers. From Billy Graham he obtained a list of possible Biblical quotations, and I secured a similar list from the director of Washington’s Jewish Community Council, Isaac Franck.
The final text included several phrases, sentences and themes suggested by these sources, as did his address to the Massachusetts legislature. He was, in fact, concerned that the Massachusetts speech had pre-empted some of his best material and had set a mark that would be hard to top. Credit should also go to other Kennedy advisers who reviewed the early drafts and offered suggestions or encouragement.
But however numerous the assistant artisans, the principal architect of the Inaugural Address was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Many of its most memorable passages can be traced to earlier Kennedy speeches and writings. For example:
Inaugural Address Other Addresses
For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. … man…has taken into his mortal hands the power to exterminate the entire species some seven times over.
—Acceptance speech at
Los Angeles
… the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans…. It is time, in short, for a new generation of Americans.
—Acceptance speech and
several campaign
speeches
And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. We do not campaign stressing what our country is going to do for us as a people. We stress what we can do for the country, all of us.
—Televised campaign
address from Washington,
September 20, 1960
No Kennedy speech ever underwent so many drafts. Each paragraph was reworded, reworked and reduced. The following table illustrates the attention paid to detailed changes:
Initially, while he worked on his thoughts at Palm Beach, I worked at my home in a Washington suburb with telephoned instructions from the President-elect and the material collected from other sources. Then I flew down, was driven to his father’s oceanside home, and gave him my notes for the actual drafting and assembling. We worked through the morning seated on the patio overlooking the Atlantic.
He was dissatisfied with each attempt to outline domestic goals. It sounded partisan, he said, divisive, too much like the campaign. Finally he said, “Let’s drop out the domestic stuff altogether. It’s too long anyway.” He wanted it to be the shortest in the twentieth century, he said. “It’s more effective that way and I don’t want people to think I’m a windbag.” He couldn’t beat FDR’s abbreviated wartime remarks in 1944, I said—and he settled for the shortest (less than nineteen hundred words) since 1905.
“I’m sick of reading how we’re planning another ‘hundred days’ of miracles,” he said, “and I’d like to know who on the staff is talking that up. Let’s put in that this won’t all be finished in a hundred days or a thousand.”
That afternoon, as he was busy with other meetings at the house, I put his notes, changes and additions into a clean draft, working beside the Palm Beach Towers Hotel swimming pool.
The next morning, on the patio in sport clothes, he reworked it further. “Let’s eliminate all the ‘I’s,’” he said. “Just say what ‘we’ will do. You’ll have to leave it in about the oath and the responsibility, but let’s cut it everywhere else.” The ending, he said, “sounds an awful lot like the ending of the Massachusetts legislature speech, but I guess it’s OK.” He worked and reworked the “ask not” sentence, with the three campaign speeches containing a similar phrase (Anchorage, Detroit, Washington) spread out on a low glass coffee table beside him.
Later that day—January 17—as we flew back to Washington from Palm Beach, working in his cabin on the Caroline, the final phrasing was emerging. A Biblical quotation that was later used in his American University speech was deleted. The opening paragraphs were redictated by the President-elect to Evelyn Lincoln en route, and he smilingly placed in the plane’s desk drawer his handwritten notes from which he had dictated, saying, “An early draft of Roosevelt’s Inaugural was discovered the other day—and brought $200,000 at an auction.”
Arriving back in Washington, the work went on at his house and in our Senate offices. Kenneth Galbraith suggested “cooperative ventures” with our allies in places of “joint ventures,” which sounded like a mining partnership. Dean Rusk suggested that the other peoples of the world be challenged to ask “what together we can do for freedom” instead of “what you can do for freedom.” Walter Lippmann suggested that references to the Communist bloc be changed from “enemy” to “adversary.” The President-elect inserted a phrase he had used in a campaign speech on Latin America—“a new alliance for progress.” At the last moment, concerned that his emphasis on foreign affairs would be interpreted as an evasion on civil rights, he added to his commitment on human rights the words “at home and around the world.”
On January 19, one day before inauguration, it was finished. The Arrangements Committee was asked to check on the height of the reading lectern. A large-type reading copy was encased in a loose-leaf notebook. A copy sat beside the Kennedy chair at home, and by his seat on a quick trip to New York, so that any spare moment could be used to familiarize himself with it. (He never memorized a speech.) It was beside him when he took time out, amidst the last day’s hectic schedule of conferences and arrangements, to meet seven of my little nieces and nephews as well as their parents.
Inauguration morning dawned cold but clear. Three thousand servicemen stationed in the Washington area had done an amazing job of working through the night with seven hundred plows and trucks to remove the eight inches of snow which, on the previous day, had nearly strangled the city. (On hearing the order go out for snow shovelers, one new Kennedy economic adviser, already burdened with a dozen assignments, had wearily remarked to his chairman, “Don’t be surprised if they call us.”) Visitors from every state, jubilant Kennedy workers we had hardly seen since the primaries, foreign diplom
ats and dignitaries, outgoing and incoming officials, a specially invited group of 155 writers, artists and scholars, and thousands of ordinary citizens of every age and background, all crowded the capital city and Capitol Hill. On the temporary wooden grandstands raised on the east front of the newly painted Capitol, under a glittering sun but in bitter cold, the Cabinet and White House officers of the New Frontier assembled. We bore some resemblance to “frontiersmen,” wearing sweaters beneath our formal togs and woolen gloves along with top hats. As we greeted each other gaily, the chill in the air merely added a certain warmth to the spirit of youth and vigor.
Few will forget the memorable moments of that solemn ceremony at twelve noon:
Robert Frost, with the glare of the sun and the snow making it impossible for his aging eyes to read a new dedication (“… a Golden Age of poetry and power, of which this noonday’s the beginning hour…”), resolutely reciting his older poem from memory…
Richard Cardinal Cushing, delivering a proud (and prolonged) prayer for his famous parishioner while firemen and Secret Servicemen contended with smoldering short-circuited wires in the lectern…
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, thirty-fifth President of the United States, in that marvelously clear voice, repeating after Chief Justice Earl Warren the oath of office he had told the Houston ministers he could take without condition or reservation, “so help me God.”
Few will forget the striking contrast presented by the outgoing and incoming Presidents. One was the likable, dedicated product of the rural Midwest and the Military Academy. The other was the urbane product of the urban East. Both had spent their entire adult careers in the service of their country, yet they were vastly different, not only in age, religion and political philosophy, but in their views of politics as a profession and the Presidency as power. Every eye watched them take their places, the oldest man ever to serve in the office of the Presidency and the youngest man ever elected to it. Dwight Eisenhower, aged seventy—still looking remarkably ruddy, his successor observed—sat next to John Kennedy, aged forty-three, bareheaded as always in the twenty-two-degree air, carrying the top hat he had decreed all should wear. Their contrast lent added meaning to the phrase: “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.”
Grouped behind Kennedy as he removed his overcoat to speak were the young men of his new administration—men with strikingly successful backgrounds in business, law, politics, government and academic affairs—men who were, with few exceptions, unschooled in the old pre-World War I dogmas and pre-depression doctrines—men who had witnessed the folly of unpreparedness and appeasement, the tragedy of war, the dawn of the nuclear age, and the harmful rejection of intellectuals by McCarthyism and the new materialism. These were men who had been concerned about the lack of ideas and idealism in the sterile clash between repressive Communism and narrowly negative anti-Communism, but who were also determined, as their leader put it that day, to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend [or] oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
I know of no way to summarize, condense or excerpt the Kennedy Inaugural Address. It was itself a compact summary of the new President’s hopes and resolves—his pledges to our friends and allies, old and new—his request to the Communists for-a new quest for peace—and his summons to his fellow citizens to bear with him the burdens of freedom. Each of these imperatives was contained in phrases too brief to be summarized and too important to be omitted. They were addressed to the American people of our time but have meaning for all people for all time. For they embody the best of our heritage from the past and the best of our hopes for the future. This one speech, of all John Kennedy’s speeches, must be set forth here in full:
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 belief for which our forebears fought is 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 peoples 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.