NEW YORK – Ted Sorensen, one of President John F Kennedy’s key advisers and top speech-writers, died on Sunday aged 82. Mr Sorensen suffered a stroke in 2001 and had another just over a week ago.
A retired lawyer and recipient of the National Medal for Humanities in 2009, Mr Sorensen was most closely associated with President Kennedy, and known for liberal leanings which were thought to have doomed efforts to make him head of the CIA under Jimmy Carter. A conservative backlash against his comments about the CIA and his liberal association with the Kennedy White House put paid to efforts to put him in charge of the agency in 1977 even before they got off the ground.
But just 15 years before, Mr Sorensen had been at the seat of power, advising President Kennedy on such matters as the Cuban missile crisis and writing the words spoken by one of the US’s most articulate presidents.
He was credited with composing some of President Kennedy's most famous phrases, despite protesting that he did not. One columnist claimed he had written, not just researched and edited, President Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage. Later, one of President Kennedy's most oft-quoted lines from his inaugural address – "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country" – was also attributed to Mr Sorensen, who worked on the speech but insisted the president wrote those words.
As one of President Kennedy’s closest advisers – he called him his “intellectual blood bank” – Mr Sorensen worked on domestic policy and after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, foreign affairs as well, drafting the president’s correspondence with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis.
After President Kennedy's assassination Mr Sorensen stayed on briefly at the White House but left to write the biography Kennedy, published in 1965.
When President Carter chose him to lead the CIA, his earlier words favouring curtailment of some CIA activities came back to haunt him. And in papers filed for the Pentagon Papers trial, Mr Sorensen admitted taking classified papers from the White House when he left in 1964 to help him write his biography.
In later years he worked with Nelson Mandela on voter education in South Africa and was very active in Barack Obama’s US presidential campaign. – (Reuters)