James Carroll: Was Ted Sorensen JFK's conscience?
[James Carroll is an author, novelist, and columnist for the Boston Globe.]
'I MAY not be able to see you," the partially blind, stroke-impaired Ted Sorensen told a crowd at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston last week, "but I have more vision than the president of the United States." Over 1,000 people gathered to hear JFK's speechwriter discuss his new book, "Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History." Those who expected a satisfying draught of the old Kennedy mystique were not disappointed. In the conclusion to his book, Sorensen writes, "Today's sorry political leadership, so different from JFK's, spurred me on as I wrote, rekindling my memory and reinvigorating my conscience."
Sorensen draws credit as Kennedy's soaring wordsmith. But perhaps that vigorous conscience was more to the point than rhetorical flair. Coming of age during the unquestioned World War II, the young Nebraskan took for granted that he would serve in the army, but the war ended when he was 17. The next year, registering for the draft, Sorensen applied for noncombatant service as a conscientious objector. He would serve his country in the military, as a medic perhaps, but, he explained to the draft board, "I could kill no man . . . I am what is called a pacifist."
Sorensen's application for conscientious objector status would be used against Kennedy, would feature in Sorensen's secret FBI file, and, eventually, would destroy his chances of becoming Jimmy Carter's CIA director in 1976. An underappreciated fact of history is that Kennedy, remembered as the paradigmatic cold warrior, so intimately depended on a man who boldly renounced any glorification of belligerence. No surprise, then, that the most important Kennedy-Sorensen collaboration is equally unappreciated - the resounding declaration of peace that Kennedy delivered as a commencement address at American University 45 years ago next week.
After staring into the abyss of nuclear war over Berlin and Cuba, Kennedy chose that June as the "time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and truth is too rarely perceived - yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace." That speech went beyond the reviled Neville Chamberlain ("peace for our time") by calling for "not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time." Instead of aiming, with Woodrow Wilson, to "make the world safe for democracy," the speech proposed to "make the world safe for diversity," a step back from triumphalist claims made for American democracy during the Cold War....
Read entire article at Boston Globe
'I MAY not be able to see you," the partially blind, stroke-impaired Ted Sorensen told a crowd at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston last week, "but I have more vision than the president of the United States." Over 1,000 people gathered to hear JFK's speechwriter discuss his new book, "Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History." Those who expected a satisfying draught of the old Kennedy mystique were not disappointed. In the conclusion to his book, Sorensen writes, "Today's sorry political leadership, so different from JFK's, spurred me on as I wrote, rekindling my memory and reinvigorating my conscience."
Sorensen draws credit as Kennedy's soaring wordsmith. But perhaps that vigorous conscience was more to the point than rhetorical flair. Coming of age during the unquestioned World War II, the young Nebraskan took for granted that he would serve in the army, but the war ended when he was 17. The next year, registering for the draft, Sorensen applied for noncombatant service as a conscientious objector. He would serve his country in the military, as a medic perhaps, but, he explained to the draft board, "I could kill no man . . . I am what is called a pacifist."
Sorensen's application for conscientious objector status would be used against Kennedy, would feature in Sorensen's secret FBI file, and, eventually, would destroy his chances of becoming Jimmy Carter's CIA director in 1976. An underappreciated fact of history is that Kennedy, remembered as the paradigmatic cold warrior, so intimately depended on a man who boldly renounced any glorification of belligerence. No surprise, then, that the most important Kennedy-Sorensen collaboration is equally unappreciated - the resounding declaration of peace that Kennedy delivered as a commencement address at American University 45 years ago next week.
After staring into the abyss of nuclear war over Berlin and Cuba, Kennedy chose that June as the "time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and truth is too rarely perceived - yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace." That speech went beyond the reviled Neville Chamberlain ("peace for our time") by calling for "not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time." Instead of aiming, with Woodrow Wilson, to "make the world safe for democracy," the speech proposed to "make the world safe for diversity," a step back from triumphalist claims made for American democracy during the Cold War....