Reflecting Backwards to Camelot

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Lunch with the FT: Ted Sorenson

By Graham Bowley

Published: December 1 2006 15:07 | Last updated: December 1 2006 15:07

For 11 years, Ted Sorensen was President John F. Kennedy’s speechwriter, special counsel and friend. Today, I am meeting him at his local, O’Neals’, a middle-of-the-road New York restaurant a few hundred yards from Sorensen’s home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It has wooden floors, Halloween pumpkins, painted murals on the wall, and CNN flickering at the bar.

Sorensen, now 78, walks uncertainly through the door, a square-jawed man wearing a grey suit, white check shirt, and yellow tie. He has a pale, open, smiling face. His dark grey hair, slightly damp, is combed neatly back. I help him to his seat. He suffered a stroke five years ago, and is now almost blind. “Losing your eyesight is a terrible thing,” he says. “It is central to everything I want to do.” It stops him from looking at pretty women, he jokes - he doesn’t mind me writing that, his wife knows that much. Despite the disability, as soon as Sorensen begins talking - in his deep, burring voice - it is as if the restaurant closes around us and we are back in an America of half a century ago.

His stories are interspersed with jolting comparisons between Kennedy and the current American leadership. I had seen Sorensen speak a few weeks earlier at the New York Historical Society when he had introduced a documentary about the Iraq war and was lionised by a wealthy Democrat crowd. They saw him as a keeper of the liberal democratic flame and gave him a standing ovation. Now across our small lunchtime table I am treated face-to-face to his bleak assessment of America 2006.

“I think that [Kennedy would be concerned by] the extent to which the US has backed away from the western alliance, backed away from international law, backed away from the UN, backed away from diplomacy, multilateralism,” he says, as he reaches for some bread. “I think he would be extremely disappointed.”

He met J.F.K. in 1953, he tells me. Sorensen studied law in Lincoln, Nebraska, his hometown, and moved to Washington D.C. to find a job in public service. He heard that the newly elected senator from Massachusetts was looking for a legal assistant. “So many politicians try to overwhelm you with their importance, their handshake, their wealth. He was just a good guy. He continued to be a good guy for 11 years.”

During that time, Sorensen and the thrusting politician crossed the country together, growing close, delivering speeches, perfecting them. Eventually, they wrote such memorable lines as Kennedy’s inaugural address (”Ask not what your country can do for you... “), and the president’s landmark speech to the nation on June 11 1963, asking support for his civil rights bill, after a day of conflict in the south.

“The president and I were watching [the events on national television] in the Oval Office,” Sorensen says. “He turned around and said to me, ‘I guess we had better make that speech tonight.’ I said, ‘What speech?’ It was already four or five o’clock in the afternoon. The attorney-general, Robert Kennedy, was there and he said to me, ‘We have got a lot of material over at the Justice Department, so don’t worry.’ [Although in the end] I didn’t need that material.”

Our soup arrives. “I am a big soup man,” he says. Sorensen had wanted New England chowder, but the restaurant offers only a Manhattan variety so he opted for beef lentil instead. French onion soup for me. I help him reach his spoon.

In his career with Kennedy, Sorensen wrote some of America’s greatest political rhetoric. I am interested in what produced such fine prose. Sorensen dips his head modestly and corrects me. In every instance, he says, he merely “helped prepare the draft”. It was always the president who stood up to deliver the actual speech. “He was a bright man,” he says. “He didn’t need me for a voice.”

Still, when I press for influences, he says that when he was growing up he studied Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, which was carved next to a statue of the late president beside the Nebraskan state capitol. “It thrilled me as a kid just to look at that statue.” Later, when he began to write himself, he relied on “the little book” - The Elements of Style - by Strunk and White. “It has one instruction, which is self-illustrating, and that is, rule number one, ‘omit unnecessary words’.”

The most important event of his life, says Sorensen, was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The Soviet Union had installed nuclear warheads on Cuba. It was a moment when the world probably came the closest it has ever been to nuclear war. In the heat of the crisis, Kennedy asked Sorensen to draft a letter to Nikita Khrushchev, in effect an ultimatum to force the Soviet leader to back down.

“I was 34 years old. It was up to me to make sure that my life, and your life, and everybody else’s life on earth would continue.” He relied on his rhetorical skills. “I used phrases such as, ‘As I understand from your letter, you are proposing a, b, c,’ - even if he had proposed c, b, a. So agreement was reached the next morning on a, b, c.” Kennedy lifted the economic blockade of Cuba. Khrushchev withdrew the missiles.

As he recounts this tale looking at me over his soup spoon, Sorensen gives a big smile. The diplomatic victory still delights him.

We move on to our main course. There had been a dispute with the waiters about exactly what chicken dish was on offer. Sorensen did not want his to be parmesan- crusted. When his chicken sandwich arrives, I notice parmesan, but Sorensen eats it good-naturedly. I have mushroom ravioli. We each have a glass of chardonnay.

Where Kennedy was right on Cuba, he says, illuminates where George W. Bush has erred on Iraq. “John F. Kennedy made certain that he gathered to advise him on that crisis people of varying views and backgrounds to make sure he got the best possible recommendation,” he says bitterly. “Mr Bush listened only to Vice- president Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had been neocons for years and did not present any alternative points of view.”

Sorensen intimates that Kennedy would have faced the terrorist threat very differently to George W. Bush. “I compare communism to terrorism. A lot of communists were willing to die for their beliefs just as terrorists are today. We didn’t prevail in the cold war by killing all the communists. On the contrary, we prevailed by being patient, by not compromising our own values and civil liberties, and we outlasted them, and that is what we are going to have to do in the war on terrorism.”

Since Kennedy’s day, however, the US has changed - a fact that Sorensen concedes above the loud chatter in O’Neals’. “Liberal” has become a dirty word. This is partly due, he says, to the civil-rights victories won by Kennedy and his successor Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. They were the right thing to do and helped blacks, but they created a backlash and strengthened the right. The Democrats are also to blame for a failure to persuade. (The interview took place before the recent mid-term election victory for the Democrats.)

“[Republicans] are better at giving very simple, reassuring answers to questions that don’t really have simple, reassuring answers. People want to be reassured in a time of change.”

While Republican leaders such as Bush had been able to engage ordinary people, John Kerry and Al Gore, the past two Democratic presidential contenders, “sounded like they were delivering lectures at MIT, like they were trying to impress the editors of the Financial Times and New York Times, when they should have been trying to reach Joe Sixpack who was sitting in front of his TV wondering what they were talking about”.

But, he says, there is hope in a younger generation of Democratic politicians.

Really? I perk up. Another Kennedy?

“It’s too early to say,” he says, picking delicately at his fries. “Right now, there is a pack of 15 or so [Democrats]. I know many of them. I admire almost all of them. Any one of them would be a vast improvement over what we have today.”

Sorensen refuses to name names. But the night before, he had met Barack Obama, the young, black senator for Illinois who is considering a presidential bid in 2008. Sorensen “was favourably impressed”. “What they said about Kennedy, that he was too young and inexperienced, that is exactly what they say about Obama today.”

We have been talking for a while and O’Neals’ is emptying. I read aloud from the dessert menu. Sorensen listens carefully and surprises me by actually cheering when I mention pecan pie, a favourite of his. He requests extra vanilla ice cream.

After Kennedy’s assassination, Sorensen became an international lawyer. Anwar Sadat was a client. Nelson Mandela became a close friend. In 1976, Jimmy Carter nominated Sorensen for the post of CIA director, but conservative critics opposed the appointment, partly because of his reputation as a liberal.

I ask him where he was when Kennedy was assassinated. His face drops. He seems crestfallen and looks immensely sad.

“That’s what everybody asks,” he says. “I have never talked about that. I don’t like to think about it. I was in Washington. I was having lunch with a newspaper editor, a Republican at that.” With his spoon, he chases a final nut around his plate.

“It makes me feel bad.” He adds: “Sometimes I still dream about him.”

The owner of the restaurant comes across and shakes “Mr Sorensen’s” hand. As we walk out, Sorensen scoops a handful of mints from a side table and puts them in his pocket. He takes my elbow and I lead him slowly down the sidewalk towards Central Park. “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” he says, quoting Tennessee Williams.

At his apartment block, where he lives with his wife Gillian, there is a doorman to help him upstairs. In the afternoon, Sorensen says, he will return to his desk. He is writing a book about his life. He will also be following the New York Mets’ current winning streak. (It would end abruptly that night.) Tomorrow, he says, he flies to Washington to talk about the Cuban missile crisis. I leave him to dream of a different America.