Living at the edge of history

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BY CHARLES STEPHEN / For the Lincoln Journal Star

(“Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History” by Ted Sorensen, Harper, 556 pages, $27.95). “For eleven years,” Ted Sorensen writes in this introspective and occasionally moving memoir, “I loved him, respected him, and believed in him, and still do.” The youthful Sorensen, not long out of the University of Nebraska College of Law, signed on with the youthful John F. Kennedy in January 1953 after JFK’s election to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. 

Over the next decade and more Sorensen was his adviser, speech writer, confidant and friend.

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Ted Sorensen answers a question during an interview in Lincoln in 2006. (Eric Gregory)

Ted Sorensen answers a question during an interview in Lincoln in 2006. (Eric Gregory)

Of his years with JFK (Sorensen usually uses the initials in the book) he writes, “We never argued, quarreled, shouted or swore at each other. He never bawled me out. He never asked me to lie to anyone. He never misled or lied to me. He never asked me to write or do anything inconsistent with my principles.”

This memoir is a private look at the private and public JFK. But earlier in the book it is a grateful son’s portrait of his two remarkable parents, his liberal Republican father, Christian Abraham Sorensen (the Abraham was given him in honor of Abraham Lincoln) and his talented mother, Annis Chaikin Sorensen. His paternal grandparents were born in Denmark; his maternal grandparents were Jewish refugees from the Ukraine, who came to the U.S. in the 1880s. Both of his parents were born in Nebraska, his father in a sod house (perhaps, writes Sorensen) in central Nebraska and his mother in Omaha. His father was elected attorney general of Nebraska in 1928.

As a young man, his father, known as C.A., shocked some clergy and others in Grand Island when he, as a college sophomore at a Baptist College, represented the college at the Nebraska State Oratory Contest and won with a speech he called “The Dead Hand of the Past.” He was dismissed from the college because of his mildly heretical views, but the editor of The Nebraska State Journal, Walter Locke, upon reading of the expulsion, wrote to him and said he belonged in Lincoln  at the University of Nebraska and at the Unitarian Church. Thus he became a Unitarian and a student at the university.

Years later Ted Sorensen would marvel at how a Unitarian from Nebraska and Kennedy, a Roman Catholic from Massachusetts, could develop such strong intellectual and ethical bonds. But a bond it was and when it was broken at the death of JFK, and broken further five years later when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, he writes that “it robbed me of my future.”

In fact, though not without years of pain, he constructed a new future for himself.

The memoir is in large measure a long look back at his years with JFK.

It is all there, the politics and the idealism, the failures and the successes. Here are his views of the Bay of Pigs disaster, which JFK blamed mostly on himself, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the beginnings of our involvement in Vietnam, and the developing civil rights struggle, of which Sorensen writes that both JFK and his brother, the attorney general, were “slow to recognize the moral imperative underlying the need for change.”

There are no remarkable revelations in this highly readable memoir, no behind- the-scenes tales of scandals and hidden deeds. And to the perennial questions about who “really” wrote JFK’s memorable speeches, Sorensen refers to “our collaborative writing process.” He writes, “My assignment was to help JFK write his speeches.” He quotes from two books, both published in 2005, which sought to discover the central author of JFK’s inaugural speech. One concludes that JFK was, and the other that Sorensen was. “The question of ultimate credit is thus obscure, as it should be,” Sorensen writes.

He writes often of Jackie Kennedy (later, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis).

When he gave a speech on JFK at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington in 1980, she wrote to him: “I was so moved. I think it is the only true portrait of him that has ever been done. No one has ever so understood and so expressed all the facets of that unforgettable, elusive man.…”

Sorensen accepts the fact that he himself was not universally loved by other members of the president’s staff. One would later write of Sorensen’s “sharpness of manner, his brusqueness… not the warmest human being.” Sorensen recognizes now that he did not share with his associates “either my access to JFK or the more important assignments he gave me. Hopefully, I’ve learned my lesson. I schmooze more now with friends, and I like it.”

 In later chapters in the book Sorensen writes of his abbreviated stay in President Lyndon Johnson’s White House, his failed attempt to win the 1970 Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate from New York, and his aborted 1977 nomination by President Carter to head the CIA. More satisfying was his life during the late 20th century as an international lawyer. This is an honest, sometimes painfully honest, story of a life well lived, and, as the title says, lived “at the edge of history.”  As I closed the book I remembered what  Walt Whitman wrote of one of his poems, “who touches this touches a man.”

Charles Stephen is co-host of "All About Books," heard weekly on NET Radio.