Two new books on President Kennedy’s inaugural address try to answer this question: Did Kennedy or did he not play the central role in writing the speech? Two recent books try to answer this question.

My first response is, “so what?” Unlike, say, books or any work of scholarship, speeches are a different breed. After all, there is a reason why behind most every successful politician is a quasi-celebrity speechwriter. Whether or not Kennedy wrote the brunt of the speech, how little doubt can there be that Theodore Sorenson, maybe the most celebrated of the celebrity speechwriters, has his fingerprints all over what might be the most famous inaugural address ever given?

I have not yet read either of these books, and they are just esoteric enough that I cannot promise that I will give either of them more than a casual perusal. I am not convinced how much more we will know about Kennedy if we discover that only fourteen of the sentences in the address can be directly attributed to him. By most measures I am a political historian, but my first impression is that this is pretty soft as far as political history goes (and again, to be fair to both authors, these books might plumb depths that the Times does not explore -- it might be the Times, and not the authors, that deserves criticism here.). Not that there is anything wrong with soft, I guess, but let us hope that this sort of paparazzi political history never supplants the work of historians such as Robert Dallek, James Patterson, or Robert Caro.

JoAnn Ryan - 5/11/2005

No- doesn't matter. Who wants to hear a president give his own speech? Our current president makes it interesting enough just giving someone else's. And I agree that historians MUST write their own material, but a public speaker? Speech makers are people who are usually infused with emotion and intensity- not particularly innocuous qualities for proper writing techniques.