Ted Sorensen grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, got his undergraduate (1949) and law degrees (1951) from the University of … The year was 1958 and then-Senator Kennedy was already at the front of the pack for the Democratic presidential nomination two years away. Sorensen heard the line and laughed loudly in approval. I'd never written a speech. I pulled over to chat and he told me he had just returned from a rafting trip with his family. "To learn more about the rhetoric and oratory of John Kennedy and Ted Sorensen, have a look at Thurston Clarke's Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America, published by Henry Holt in 2004 and now available in a Penguin paperback.

Instead, my denied Dukakis dreams were realized four years later when I was appointed to the unlikely job of assisting President Bill Clinton with his speeches to the Gridiron dinners, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and the like. “Ask not,” he said. Ted Sorensen, one of President John F Kennedy's key advisers, discusses the art of writing speeches How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know As he said to Robert Schlesinger, "If a man in a high office speaks words which convey his principles and policies and ideas and he's willing to stand behind them and take whatever blame or therefore credit go with them, the speech is his" (While our own orations may not be quite as momentous as a president's, many of Kennedy's rhetorical strategies are worth emulating, regardless of the occasion or the size of the audience. Pulling a piece of paper from his pocket, he read a telegram he said had been sent by his father regarding the upcoming 1960 presidential election:My professional career as a would-be Sorensen also began on the presidential campaign of another Massachusetts Democrat named Mike Dukakis. Mr. Sorensen, a longtime friend of the Petersons, was recovering from a recent stroke and had all but lost his eyesight. When his assistant informed him a White House scribe was on the line, he took the call without delay and he found time to school me further in an art he had perfected decades earlier. )I came of age in Richard Nixon’s America, so imagine my shock when I learned that a president could be funny!Over the course of eight years and dozens of humor speeches for President Clinton, Vice President Gore and various cabinet members, I had many occasions to reflect upon the brilliance of that other ghostwriter who had provided much of the content found in I have enough similar stories from fellow speechwriters to know that Ted Sorensen treated all scribes as colleagues even as they regarded him as a God. I sat quietly for a moment so Mr. Sorensen could hear what I suspected might be the first line of the speech.“Please forgive me if I speak too long or if I begin to repeat myself,” the guest of honor said. Inside this white-tie ballroom full of everyone who mattered in Washington D.C., the consensus opinion of young Jack Kennedy was that he was both pawn and proxy for his powerful, unscrupulous father Joe. I was a lowly press office staffer who wormed his way into the speechwriting operation and found my first opportunity to pen jokes for our candidate in the preparation for his appearance at New York City’s answer to the Gridiron Dinner—the Al Smith Dinner—also white-tie and attended by the power elite. It gave me the opportunity to ask him about a great line I had recently heard ascribed to him: that when asked if he was the person who did indeed put the best line of President Kennedy’s inaugural speech to paper...Before I could get to the end of my sentence, he put up the broad side of his hand and delivered the very punch-line I was inquiring about.

In his final book, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History (2008), Ted Sorensen offered a prediction: "I have little doubt that, when my time comes, my obituary in the New York Times (misspelling my last name once again) will be captioned: 'Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy Speechwriter.'" Without missing a beat, he connected the dots: “Of course, the difference between my white-water experience and your boss’ white water experience is that I went up that river WITH a paddle.” (Trust me, that was a very good joke circa 1995. A graduate of the University of Nebraska's law school, Sorensen arrived in Washington, D.C. "unbelievably green," as he later admitted.

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