Free Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) by David Talbot Page B

enthused. “I was there [at the inauguration] along with the other [Joint] Chiefs [of Staff], and I have never heard a better speech,” Burke later recalled. “I thought, ‘This is a magnificent speech. It’s the best statement of the policies in which I believe that I have ever heard.’…I was extremely proud on that day.”
    As Kennedy neared his trumpet blast of a conclusion that inaugural day—hatless and coatless in the biting, bright winter air, warmed only by the passion of his soon to be famous words (“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you…”)—he took a sweeping part of the nation “with him through a membrane in time, entering the next decade, and a new era,” in author Thurston Clarke’s words. Electrified by the bold poetry of JFK’s vision that day, many more Americans were willing to follow him through that membrane into the future than had voted for him in November.
    Looking back, Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s essential collaborator, saw nothing contradictory about the inaugural address. It embodied, he said, Kennedy’s fundamental philosophy of peace through strength. “The line in the inaugural address that is the most important is not ‘Ask not what your country can do for you.’ It’s ‘For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.’ That was the Kennedy policy in a nutshell. He wasn’t for unilateral disarmament—on the contrary, he wanted to build an overwhelming nuclear advantage, so we’d never have to use them, the Soviets would never dare challenge us.”
     
    IT’S ONE THING TO write a speech that artfully weaves together opposing views and unites opposing constituencies in a burst of applause. It’s another to govern consistently based on such a delicately balanced philosophy. The world of power has a way of reducing subtleties and complexities to their lowest common denominator. Ted Sorensen’s experience in the first year of the Kennedy White House is revealing in this regard.
    Sorensen was more than just John Kennedy’s speechwriter—he was one of the better angels of his nature. He helped Kennedy stay in touch with the liberal conscience that underlay the president’s carefully manufactured political enterprise. He knew how to tap into the soaring vision in JFK and how to give it wing in Kennedy’s speeches. Hired at the age of twenty-five to be a writer and advisor for Kennedy as the rising politician entered the Senate in 1953, Sorensen quickly learned how to crawl inside his employer and channel his thoughts. “Ted Sorensen is getting to be a mirror image of me, reflecting even what I am thinking,” Kennedy told his old Navy crony Paul “Red” Fay. During the decade they spent together, Sorensen would later say, John F. Kennedy “was the only human being who mattered to me.” Sorensen’s first marriage would become a victim of his devotion to Kennedy. He separated from his wife Camellia during the 1960 presidential campaign and divorced her in July 1963 after fourteen years of marriage.
    Still bitter from his loss, Nixon lashed into the two men’s eloquent political partnership in an interview with Redbook magazine in June 1962, charging Kennedy was a “puppet who echoed his speechmaker” during the 1960 campaign. “It’s easier for Kennedy to get up and read Sorensen’s speeches, but I don’t think it’s responsible unless he believes it deeply himself.”
    Jackie Kennedy—forced to yield much of her husband to Sorensen, especially during the 1960 race—had a better grasp of the dynamic between JFK and the man nearly a decade his junior. Far from a puppet master, the devoted Sorensen was “a little boy in so many ways” who “almost puffs himself up when he talks to Jack,” Jackie told a reporter during the campaign with ill-concealed spite. Nixon himself was more generous in his appraisal of Sorensen, telling Redbook that Sorensen “has