Nevertheless, the speech had little initial domestic impact. Ten days later, Schlesinger was with Kennedy when the president was given a breakdown on the mail received for the previous week. Of almost 50,000 letters received at the White House, fewer than 900 had to do with the American University speech, as opposed to more than 28,000 regarding a freight rate bill. “That is why I tell people in Congress they’re crazy if they take their mail seriously,” Kennedy said, disgustedly.
The Western European reaction was almost uniformly positive (except in France, which was skeptical), but most important was the Soviet response, where actions let Kennedy’s words speak loudly: When Voice of America broadcasted a translated version of the speech, only one paragraph in the transmission was jammed, and upon rebroadcast the Soviets let it all play.
The Moscow negotiations produced a ban on atmospheric, but not underground, testing—not the comprehensive treaty Kennedy had sought, but still a significant step forward in defusing the nuclear arms race. Schlesinger later asked Polish diplomat Marian Dobrosielski, with whom he had the occasional amiable lunch, whether the negotiation could have succeeded without the American University speech. No, came the reply, the speech was responsible for breaking the logjam.
But even as Kennedy and Sorensen had been preparing the June 10 international peace speech, the administration was monitoring a mounting situation at home. On May 21, a federal district judge had ruled that the University of Alabama must allow two black students to enter for the school’s summer session, starting in June. Alabama was the last state in the Union with segregated universities, and Governor George Wallace was determined at least to make a show of trying to keep it that way.
The criticism that Schlesinger had heard in March 1961—that Kennedy had not properly used public education to sway the voters—had continued, and on no issue was it sharper than civil rights. “He has neglected his opportunities to use the forum of the Presidency as an educational institution,” one writer observed in a typical criticism. But for JFK, presidential greatness lay not in rhetoric but in accomplishment. “It is clear that his measure is concrete achievement and people who educate the nation without necessarily achieving their goals, like Wilson and TR, rate below those, like Truman and Polk, who do things without bringing the nation along with them,” Schlesinger noted in his diary.
The relationship between leadership and accomplishment on civil rights was particularly trying for Kennedy, and more so for his admirers. JFK wanted to maintain a position just ahead of the crest of public opinion but not too far out in front of it. A week before the federal court ruled that the University of Alabama had to admit the black students, he spent forty-five minutes with leaders from Americans for Democratic Action. That morning, the Times’s front page featured a picture of a Birmingham police dog lunging at a black protestor. The situation made him “sick,” Kennedy told the liberals, but constitutionally he had little power to affect it. “I must confess that I have found his reaction to Birmingham disappointing,” Schlesinger noted in his diary four days later. “Even if he has no power to act, he has unlimited power to express the moral sense of the people; and in not doing so, he is acting much as Eisenhower used to act when we denounced him so.”
JFK was skeptical of the power of exhortation. The president’s pulpit might be bully, but in order to be effective, the context in which he spoke had to be right. Dining with Schlesinger in October 1961, Kennedy had noted that a recent telecast featuring ex-President Eisenhower had scored a seven share of the viewing audience as against twenty for competing programs about cowboys and crime. “People forget this when they expect me to go on the air all the time educating the nation,” he said. “The nation will listen only if it is a moment of great urgency. They will listen after a Vienna [his June 1961 summit meeting]. But they won’t listen to things which bore them. That is the trouble.” JFK liked to quote from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I where, in response to Owen Glendower’s boast that he can “call spirits from the vasty deep,” Hotspur replies: “Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?”
Even before the Birmingham confrontation reached its climax, Kennedy and his staff had debated the merits of giving a speech. The president was unsure, and his senior staff opposed. Only Robert Kennedy favored it. “We’ve got a draft which doesn’t fit all these points, but it’s something to work with, and there’s some pretty good sentences and paragraphs,” JFK told his senior aides on June 10, hours after giving the American University speech. “It will help us to get ready anyway, because we may want to do it tomorrow.” In fact, there was no draft.
On June 11, Wallace stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama’s registration building in a show of symbolic protest. Less than three hours later, the governor stood aside for Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, who had the commander of the just-federalized Alabama National Guard at his side. The two students were allowed to register. The crisis had been defused.
Along with the nation, Kennedy and his staff watched the confrontation on television. With no crisis at hand, Sorensen assumed there would be no speech. But Kennedy sensed that the time was finally right for presidential education of the public on civil rights, followed by new legislation. “We better give that civil rights speech tonight,” he said at around 2 pm, turning in his chair toward Sorensen. (More than forty years later, Sorensen still marveled over Kennedy’s use of the word “We.”)
With roughly six hours until airtime at 8 pm, there was no speech. After consulting with the president on what he wanted to say, Sorensen and others, including Robert Kennedy and Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, worked on a draft. With an hour to go, JFK found them in the Cabinet Room still revising. “C’mon Burke, you must have some ideas,” Kennedy quipped. Sorensen managed two drafts, the first incomplete.
At 7:40 pm, the Kennedy brothers retreated to the Oval Office to outline an extemporaneous speech in case Sorensen did not finish in time, with JFK taking notes on the back of an envelope and whatever scrap paper was handy. Sorensen appeared in the Oval Office less than five minutes before eight with a draft (“For the first time, I thought I was going to have to go off the cuff,” JFK told Sorensen later), which the president glanced over as the minutes ticked by. Robert Kennedy suggested that he still extemporize some parts of the talk—a bold suggestion, given the gravity of the speech and the fact that it would be broadcast live to the nation. (“The speech was good,” Robert Kennedy later said. “I think that probably, if he had given it [entirely] extemporaneously, it would have been as good or better.”)
The country faced not a sectional or partisan issue, Kennedy told his audience. And while it had legal dimensions, it was broader than that. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he said. “It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”
Drawing from the notes he had jotted down with Robert Kennedy, JFK extemporized a new closing on the speech.
This is one country. It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents. We cannot say to ten percent of the population that you can’t have the right; that your children can’t have the chance to develop whatever talents they have; that the only way that they are going to get their rights is to go into the streets and demonstrate. I think we owe them and we owe ourselves a better country than that.
The address was widely praised as one of his best, but Kennedy remained skeptical of the power of the rhetorical presidency. When Schlesinger lauded the speech to him, Kennedy replied: “Yes—and look what happened to area redevelopment the next day in the House.” He was referring to the surprise defeat of a bill that would have expanded a program of loans and grants to economically depressed areas of the country. He might hav
e summoned high ideals from the vasty deep, Kennedy was saying, but it had made little difference in the practical business of governing the country. After a pause, though, he added: “But of course I had to give that speech, and I am glad that I did.”
In his diary later that week, Schlesinger noted of Kennedy, “He is deeply—excessively—skeptical about the value of speeches per se.”
But the partial ad-lib also demonstrated Kennedy’s facility for gathering his own thoughts and written notes or text. He had honed the skill particularly in the presidential campaign, becoming so adept at moving back and forth between his written speech and ad-libs that the press often assumed whole speeches were delivered extemporaneously when in fact they were partially written. Frustrated reporters, trying to follow along with the candidate and report his speeches, called him a “text deviate.”*
As president, his ad-libs tended to be at small, campaign-style and other informal events. Extemporizing in a large speech was rare but not unheard of. Speaking to Congress in a special “second” State of the Union address in May 1961, JFK called for an effort to put a man on the moon by decade’s end. The assembled legislators—perhaps sensing a program that would involve great sums of money directed to districts that were not theirs—responded with perfunctory applause, it seemed to Kennedy. For the only time in his short presidency, he ad-libbed before Congress. “It is a heavy burden, and there is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful,” Kennedy said. “If we are not, we should decide today and this year.”
Perhaps the best-known instance of Kennedy discarding his prepared remarks came in a setting that, while campaignlike, was not in the United States. In June 1963, he made a trip through Europe, stopping in West Germany and Berlin before returning to the United States by way of his ancestral homeland of Ireland.
Berlin had been divided by the occupying powers at the end of World War II, and the Cold War had frozen that division into place. Deep inside Soviet-dominated East Germany, Berlin became the focus of early Cold War tensions. At times, for example the 1948 Soviet blockade of the Western-occupied portions of the city, it seemed on the verge of becoming the flashpoint for a third world war. And while succeeding U.S. presidents had pledged to defend Berlin, doubts about American resolve lingered. Those doubts had found voice in the hot summer of 1961.
The free sectors in Berlin were a hole in the iron curtain through which East German citizens were fleeing to a better life in the West, 2.5 million of them since 1949, mostly valuable workers and professionals. Faced with an intellectual and labor hemorrhage that was starting to impinge on production, the East German government had prevailed upon the Soviet leadership to seal the border. At midnight on Saturday, August 12, 1961, they started stringing up circles of barbed wire and posting armed guards at checkpoint crossings. Within days, the Berlin Wall cut a gash across the city.
President Kennedy was publicly silent about the Wall. He eventually sent a 1,500-strong battle group, headed by Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Berlin blockade hero General Lucius Clay, across East Germany to test that Allied access to and from the city had not been cut off. In West Berlin, 300,000 demonstrated in the Rudolph Wilde Platz, in front of the City Hall. Some brandished signs that read BETRAYED BY THE WEST or THE WEST IS DOING A SECOND MUNICH. Almost two years later, on June 26, 1963, 150,000 Berliners jammed into the same space to greet Kennedy.
Before JFK left Washington, Robert Kennedy had suggested that he say something in German to the West Berliners. As Air Force One crossed a divided Germany toward the tiny Western outpost that was the city, the president turned to Special Assistant Kenneth O’Donnell and asked: “What was the proud boast of the Romans—Civis Romanus sum? Send Bundy up here. He’ll know how to say it in German.” Bundy later told Michael Beschloss that Kennedy had no feeling for foreign languages. “So there we were on the goddamn airplane coming down on Berlin while he repeated the phrase over and over again…and it worked. God, how it worked!”
At some point Kennedy scrawled three key phrases on a piece of lined paper, spelling them phonetically to help himself remember the pronunciation: “Ish bin ein Bearleener,” he wrote, underlining the middle letters to emphasize the long “e” (with his Boston accent, it came out closer to “Beer-leener”); “Kiwis Romanus sum”; and “Lust z nach Bearlin comen.” West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt coached JFK on his pronunciation before the speech.
Sorensen had written remarks outlining the city’s history since the onset of the Cold War. Driving to the City Hall, Kennedy showed the speech, printed on reading cards, to General James Polke, the American commander in the city. “You think this is any good?” the president asked.
The general was blunt: “This is terrible, Mr. President.”
“I think so too,” Kennedy replied.
How much of the prepared remarks he intended to use is unclear. He had scribbled his three phrases on the speech cards. And he had handwritten in new lines. But after dispensing with the introductory remarks, he mostly ignored the whole thing in favor of improvisation.
“Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was ‘civis Romanus sum.’ Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner,’” he said, ad-libbing.
As the crowd bellowed its approval, he quipped, “I appreciate my interpreter translating my German.”
There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass’ sic nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin.
Kennedy had gotten carried away. In his speech at American University two weeks earlier, he had said, in essence, that we can work with the Communists.* Speaking later that day at the Free University of Berlin, he backtracked and spun his speech as having been about governments cooperating with local Communist parties.
Not quite ready to pick up the thread of his prepared remarks, Kennedy aimed one more improvised dart at the Soviets. “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.” He finally started to pick up on his prepared text, before closing with more ad-libbing, and then repeating, “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
The speech was uncharacteristic of Kennedy, who avoided rhetorical excess and disliked emotionalism. Afterwards, in Brandt’s office, translator Robert Lochner heard Bundy say, “I think that went a little too far.” Kennedy too was disquieted. He told his military aide that “If I told them to go tear down the Berlin Wall, they would do it.” The crowd’s passionate reaction also made Chancellor Konrad Adenauer uneasy. “Does this mean Germany can one day have another Hitler?” he asked Rusk.
Bundy later realized that he had given his boss a bad translation. Grammatically, he should have dropped the article ein, leaving “Ich bin Berliner” (colloquially, “ein Berliner” was a popular pastry). “Fortunately the crowd in Berlin was untroubled by my mistake,” Bundy told Beschloss. “No one in the square confused JFK with a doughnut.”
Flying out of East Germany that evening, Kennedy told Sorensen that he would leave a note for his successor, “to be opened at a time of some discouragement.” The missive would have three words: “Go to Germany.”
Around 10:45 am on November 21, 1963, Sorensen dashed across the South Lawn trying to catch the president before he boarded his helicopter. Sorensen handed up some suggestions for “Texas humor” for Kennedy’s upcoming trip to the Lone Star State. The two men parted—for the last time.
Sorensen has over the decades re
mained a chief defender of the Kennedy memory, eloquently guarding his old boss’s reputation and legacy. Part of that defense has involved explicating his own role as JFK’s chief speechwriter and arguing that Kennedy had a role as well.
Because of the high level of JFK’s speeches, critics have questioned the president’s part in their preparation, a position expressed most crudely by Richard Nixon in 1962. The defeated pol told Redbook that Kennedy had been nothing more than a “puppet who echoed his speechmaker” during the presidential campaign. “It’s easier for Kennedy to get up and read Sorensen’s speeches, but I don’t think it’s responsible unless he believes it deeply himself.”* Nixon’s remark was extreme, but it has in a milder form become common. “Along with so many others, we were thrilled by the inaugural speech, which had mostly been crafted by Ted Sorensen, helped by Ken Galbraith,” the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham wrote in her memoir.
Underlying these sentiments is the notion of the president as—to use Nixon’s word—a puppet, mouthing a script prepared by a speechwriter. But this is an overly simple and onesided view of the speechwriter-speechgiver relationship. It seems safe to assume that forced to operate solo, John F. Kennedy would not have produced his inaugural address—but it is as safe to conclude that the Ted Sorensen who walked into Representative John F. Kennedy’s House office suite in January 1953 would also not have produced that speech. Inasmuch as he wrote the first working draft of the speech, Sorensen was operating from intense and intimate exposure to his boss’s mind over eight years. Indeed, except for Samuel Rosenman and Franklin Roosevelt, Sorensen and Kennedy were a production team unique for their longevity and its attendant familiarity—and that shows through in the quality of the prose.
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 16