AMERICA:Ted Sorensen worked with Kennedy on many of his speeches. Ahead of a ceremony next month, he recalls their campaign to win votes
Fifty years ago this month, America focused on another election battle, between John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Richard Milhous Nixon.
On November 8th, the Kennedy Library in Boston will hold a party for 2,000 people to mark the 50th anniversary of JFK’s election, as part of three years of commemorations celebrating the 1,000 days of Kennedy’s presidency.
In Washington, the Kennedy Centre will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the inauguration with a gala concert by the National Symphony Orchestra, which will play an original composition with narration from Kennedy’s best speeches.
Many of those words were written by Ted Sorensen, who has been called JFK's "alter ego" and "intellectual blood bank". Sorensen, now 82, was JFK's lawyer, special counsel, adviser and speechwriter, and co-authored the Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Couragewith the future president in 1956.
Mr Sorensen told me his most vivid memory of October and early November 1960 was one of exhaustion.
“The candidate at least got to sleep at night. While he slept, I prepared what he was going to say and strategy memos. During the day, when he was on the platform, I was looking for the back seat of a car where I could sleep.”
The 1960 campaign was the first in which both candidates were born in the 20th century, and it was the first in which television played an essential role.
Kennedy “was a natural on television” and gained an advantage over Nixon in the first of four televised debates, on September 26th, 1960.
“We knew he had done well,” Sorensen says. “But we didn’t think he had clinched it, because no Irish Catholic, no non-Anglo-Saxon Protestant, no one 43 years old, had ever been elected.”
Kennedy owed his victory in part to strategy. While Nixon wasted time visiting all 50 states, even those he had no hope of winning, Kennedy concentrated on the big states he needed most. “While Nixon was off in Alaska, we made another key visit to Texas,” Sorensen recalls.
On the evening of November 8th, election day, Sorensen watched the results coming in on a television set with then senator Kennedy at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, while Bobby Kennedy worked the telephones.
Early returns from the east were favourable, but as the closing hours for polling stations moved west, Nixon began picking up more states. Nixon made a premature, late-night concession speech, with his wife Pat crying beside him. The end result – Kennedy won by just 0.1 per cent of the popular vote – was not confirmed until the afternoon of the 9th.
Sorensen stayed up all night, alone, in front of the television. In the morning, convinced that Kennedy had won, he walked to the house where Kennedy slept and saw secret service agents for the first time.
“I went upstairs and said, ‘Good morning, Mr President. It looks like you won.’ Of course he was thrilled. He and I had been on the road for four years in this quest.”
For Sorensen, Kennedy’s legacy is one of hope “that the White House was no longer restricted to Wasps, that people at the bottom of the economic ladder could have the opportunity to get to the top, and hope for people on the bottom rung around the world”.
Though Kennedy increased the number of military advisers in Vietnam to 16,000, America did not become mired in that war until the Johnson administration. Sorensen sees Kennedy’s legacy as one of peace, because after avoiding nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis, he reappraised relations with the Soviet Union and took the first steps in arms control.
In his civil rights address on June 11th, 1963, Kennedy “completely turned around this country’s mistreatment of its black citizens”, Sorensen notes.
“For centuries they were slaves or second-class citizens. Governments had required discrimination and segregation by law. He gave hope to black Americans.”
Sorensen accompanied Kennedy to Ireland in the summer of 1962. “He loved every minute of it,” he recalls. Had he not been assassinated on November 22nd, 1963, Kennedy intended to return to Ireland in the spring of 1964.
Sorensen declared his support for then presidential candidate Barack Obama early, in March 2007. “He had to overcome a demographic obstacle – his skin colour – whereas for Kennedy it was his Catholic faith. Both faced claims that they were too young and inexperienced.
“Both were top Harvard graduates, and both had lived abroad, which is very important, because it gives you a much better perspective on the role of the US in world affairs.”
Nobody is perfect, Sorensen says, when asked whether he has been disappointed by Obama.
“I give him a grade of A-minus, which is substantially better than the F-minus I gave his predecessor. Obama’s problem is that he raised expectations too high.
“People thought he was a miracle man, that in two years he could get rid of the problems loaded upon the White House over eight years.
“Of course that’s not possible.”
