Ralph Williams, hired as the assistant to the naval aide, followed in the tradition of Clark Clifford and George Elsey: his real job was speechwriting. A Texas native, Williams had joined the navy in June 1941 and was stationed at Pearl Harbor on December 7 of that year. He was hired as the president’s speechwriter around the same time that Moos was made chief speechwriter, in the late summer of 1958. After ten days on the job, Williams started hearing about “the other speech-writer.” He sought Moos out, and calculating that the professor had more political pull, offered his services as an assistant.
Moos handled the speechwriting duties like a university professor with grad students. When a speech came up, he called in Williams and Hess to brainstorm. If he liked an idea, he would ask for a memo on it. “We’re carpenters, not architects,” Moos would say—hammering and nailing together bits of speech until it was ready for the president.
By the end of October 1960, Moos was thinking about something for Eisenhower to say before departing the White House. Data points had been rattling around his head: aerospace journals had caught his eye listing the thousands upon thousands of companies related to the new and burgeoning U.S. defense industry; a former student of Moos’s had done some research into the number of officers who had left the military midcareer and gone to work for the defense industry.
On the morning of October 31, Moos and Williams had a brainstorming session for the 1961 State of the Union address, which would be given just days before either Vice President Richard Nixon or Senator John F. Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower in the White House. Moos liked a couple of Williams’s ideas and asked for a memo outlining them. One was what Williams called “the problem of militarism.” He noted that “for the first time in its history, the United States has a permanent war-based industry. Not only that but flag and general officers retiring at an early age take positions in a war based industrial complex shaping its decisions and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust.”*
Concerns about militaristic influence were not new to Eisenhower. As early as his April 1953 “Chance for Peace” speech, he had talked about the costs of the Cold War, not simply in dollars spent but in what they were not spent on. In May 1953, he warned that “it is fact that there is no such thing as maximum military security short of total mobilization of all our national resources. Such security would compel us to imitate the methods of the dictator. It would compel us to put every able-bodied man in uniform—to regiment the worker, the farmer, the businessman—to allocate materials and to control prices and wages—in short, to devote our whole nation to the grim purposes of the garrison state.” Later that same summer, after signing the Korean armistice, Eisenhower had written to a friend that “there must be a balance between minimum requirements in the costly implements of war and the health of our economy.”
Eisenhower had spent his two terms struggling—sometimes within his own administration—to keep defense spending from either spiking up and down or rising too quickly. Those efforts, combined with the detonation of the hydrogen bomb and the launch of Sputnik in 1957, led to rising criticism for letting the U.S. military fall behind the Soviets. The 1960 presidential election had turned in no small part on Kennedy’s allegations that a “missile gap” had grown between the So-viet forces and the American—though in reality U.S. estimates were wildly overblown.
During the first week of December, Moos gave Eisenhower a draft of the speech. It warned against a “military-industrial-scientific complex,” a formulation that was later shortened at the suggestion of scientific adviser James Killian. A later draft discussed a “military-industrial-congressional” complex, but Eisenhower decided it was inappropriate to lecture Congress and dropped the legislative reference. “I think you’ve got something here,” Eisenhower told Moos, slipping it into his desk. On December 14, Ike received a call from Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review, urging him to “give a ‘farewell address’ to the country…reviewing your administration, telling of your hopes for the future. A great, sweeping document.”
Addressing the nation at 8:30 pm three days before John F. Kennedy’s inaugural, Eisenhower delivered his famous warning:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Eisenhower had told Moos that he was not interested in capturing headlines, and in that regard the speech was a success. While Walter Lippmann noted that Ike’s speech “will be remembered and quoted in the days to come,” it in fact went largely unremarked.
Things began to change months later. “There is an interesting development, Mr. President, involving your ‘Farewell Address,’” Harlow wrote to Eisenhower on March 17, 1961. “At least two vigorous young Republicans in the House (Bob Michel of Illinois and Brad Morse of Massachusetts) have interested themselves in your warning to America against excessive power being accumulated by the military-industrial complex and are girding their loins to raise a rumpus though the Congressional investigation route…. The point is, this part of the Address turns out to be curiously yeasty, and one can expect some fall-out from it in the Congressional-political area over the coming months.”
Little appreciated at the time, Eisenhower’s farewell warning about the dangers of such military-industrial concentrations is now ranked with George Washington’s Farewell Address, warning against foreign alliances, as a classic in terms of valedictory remarks. It was a notable meeting of man and moment: As a lifelong military man and certified, venerated war hero, Eisenhower had special credibility regarding national security matters. And he spoke at a moment of transition: a new generation—“born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace,”* as its most visible representative would say three days later—was about to assume its leadership role.
When Eisenhower entered the White House, the Cold War and the incipient U.S. defense industry were still new developments; by the time he departed, both had existed for almost a full generation and had become apparently permanent parts of the geopolitical scene. This combination helped give the speech its enduring resonance. Almost fifty years later, Eisenhower’s final words as president remain his best known.
The Age of Sorensen
JANUARY 1953
The two quiet, serious young men huddled amid the bustle of a U.S. House office in transition. The congressman had been elected to the U.S. Senate, but his new suite of offices was not yet ready, and another legislator and staff were moving into his old digs.
In two five-minute sessions the new senator, occasionally tapping his fingers on his teeth and knee, sized up and accepted the prospective aide. The younger man, impressed by the Massachusetts scion’s “‘ordinary’ demeanor,” satisfied himself about the congressman’s politics (anti-McCarthy) and the nature of the position. Those ten minutes in January 1953 would change the lives of thirty-five-year-old John F. Kennedy and twenty-four-year-old Ted Sorensen.
Sorensen, of Lincoln, Nebraska, was not an obvious match for John F. Kennedy of Brookline and Hyannisport, Massachusetts, Palm Beach, Florida, and Washington, D.C. JFK was best known for his good looks and the amount of his family’s money that had gone into his Senate race, and his liberal credentials were questionable. Sorensen was “not a Harvard man or an Easterner or a Catholic or an Irishman or a hereditary Democrat, or a political middler or culturally sophisticated or rich or an aristocrat or an urbanite or an intellectual dilettante or widely traveled or weak on the civil-liberties side or primarily interested in Why England Slept type of foreign affairs or a master of the Ivy League casual style or anything at all of a playboy,” William Lee Miller, a home-state friend, wrote. “He was instead, insofar as these things have opposites, somewhere near the opposite of all of them.”
Theodore Chaikin Sorensen came from a politically active Nebraska family whose Republicanism was in the mold of Senator George N
orris, a Progressive who had fought for reform in the U.S. House of Representatives, against arming U.S. merchant ships during World War I, and against Herbert Hoover in 1928 (stands that later earned him a chapter in Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage).
Sorensen’s father, C. A. Sorensen, had managed one of Norris’s campaigns, and from 1929 to 1933 was Nebraska’s attorney general. His mother, Annis Chaikin, the child of Russian Jews, was also a committed social activist, working for, among other things, women’s suffrage. The couple had met when Sorensen defended Chaikin and other pacifists during World War I. (Young Ted himself registered as a conscientious objector during World War II.) The Sorensens were Unitarian, “that mid-western Unitarianism that is marked by its self-conscious rejection, in the name of Reason and Freedom, of orthodoxy.”
C. A. Sorensen raised Ted in a serious-minded, public affairs–oriented household that was filled with national newsmagazines. Ted’s older brother, Tom, who would serve in Kennedy’s U.S. Information Agency, quizzed him about Attorneys General and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. C. A. Sorensen offered his son a silver dollar if he achieved his twenty-first birthday without taking a drink or a smoke, a bet that he won. (Joseph P. Kennedy offered his son John $1,000 for the same feat—JFK did not collect.)
Ted attended Lincoln public schools and then the University of Nebraska, where he earned his undergraduate diploma and a law degree. He had a fierce commitment to racial justice, helping to found the Lincoln, Nebraska, chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality—they got the municipal swimming pool integrated, but their “skate-in” at the local roller rink faired less well. He testified in front of the state legislature in favor of a Fair Employment Practices Committee. And when the dean of the University of Nebraska opposed integrating the dorms, Sorensen and his friends wrote letters of protest. Ted’s was the most persuasive: shorter, more analytical, clearer.
“I arrived in Washington unbelievably green,” he said later. “I knew not a soul. I had no legislative experience, no political experience. I’d never written a speech. I’d hardly been out of Nebraska. Whatever I was, it was Lincoln. Lincoln and Nebraska, that was me.”
He worked briefly at the Federal Security Agency, and then at the Temporary Committee of the Congress on Railroad Retirement Legislation, before he found himself meeting with Senator-elect John Kennedy.
“Jack wouldn’t hire anyone Joe Kennedy wouldn’t tell him to hire—and, with the exception of Jim Landis, Joe Kennedy hasn’t hired a non-Catholic in fifty years!” a friend warned Sorensen. Though the friend proved incorrect on both counts, Kennedy’s father did tell Sorensen on their first meeting, “You couldn’t write speeches for me. You’re too much of a liberal. But writing for Jack is different.” By 1954, Sorensen was one of Kennedy’s top aides, and when the senator approved a speech draft for a St. Patrick’s Day dinner, a speechwriting team was set.
When Kennedy was considered for the vice-presidential spot on former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 Democratic ticket, Sorensen was in the thick of the effort. After Eisenhower’s reelection, Sorensen became his boss’s chief political strategist and main traveling companion. For the next three and a half years, the two men traveled through all fifty states, collecting delegates and other political IOUs. Sorensen built up a card file of political contacts that reached 30,000 names. Asked in 2006 how a middle-class Nebraska Unitarian could so fully understand a monied New England Catholic, Sorensen pointed to the days spent in airplanes, hotel rooms, and cars, traversing the nation.
“Those three and a half years of traveling the country together made an enormous difference,” he said. “There were all kinds of press stories—some of them exaggerations—about how I was inside his mind, could finish his sentences, knew what he was thinking before he said it. Well, I think maybe there is something to that. That’s a tremendous advantage for a speechwriter to know his boss’s mind as well as I did.”
Their bond was well known around town. “When Jack is wounded, Ted bleeds,” one observer told The New York Times in 1960. Kennedy himself used a different blood metaphor, calling Sorensen “my intellectual blood bank.”
The journalist Theodore White described Sorensen as “self-sufficient, taut, purposeful, a man of brilliant intellectual gifts, jealously devoted to the President and rather indifferent to personal relations.” Indeed, this indifference and his intense demeanor rubbed some of his colleagues the wrong way. “Even to this day he is unaware of the extent to which [other senior members of the White House staff] disliked him,” Richard Goodwin, who wrote speeches for Kennedy in the campaign and for a little while in the White House, said in 2007. “That’s an insensitivity he has.”
Sorensen concedes that he may not have been the most pleasant person to work with. “Abrupt, cold, short,” he told one interviewer. “That’s probably true. From the day I went to work for the president, I was overcommitted, overscheduled, overprogrammed and sleep-deprived.”
He was not without appeal. “Underneath the appearance of bluntness, taciturnity and, at times, sheer weariness, he was capable of great charm and a frolicsome satiric humor,” Kennedy aide Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote. “His flow of comic verse always enlivened festive occasions at the White House.”
The abstemious Sorensen developed the habit of drinking an occasional Heineken or pre-dinner daiquiri—Kennedy’s quaffs of choice. Sorensen even picked up JFK’s verbal mannerisms and gestures—the senator sometimes had Sorensen impersonate him on the telephone.
The intellectual communion did not perfectly translate personally. “Of Sorensen and Kennedy themselves, two men could hardly have been more intimate and, at the same time, more separate,” Schlesinger wrote. “They shared so much—the same quick tempo, detached intelligence, deflationary wit, realistic judgment, candor in speech, coolness in crisis—that, when it came to policy and speeches, they operated nearly as one. But there were other ranges of Kennedy’s life, and of these Sorensen partook very little.”
On November 8, 1960, Kennedy edged Vice President Richard M. Nixon, achieving a 120,000-vote plurality out of more then 68 million cast. Kennedy and Sorensen commenced work on his inaugural address in the weeks after this hairbreadth victory. They first spoke about the speech in November. Solicit suggestions, Kennedy said, and keep it short—“Make it the shortest since T.R. (except for FDR’s abbreviated wartime ceremony in 1945),” Sorensen scrawled in a note to himself; make it forward-looking, JFK said, marking the generational change for which he had campaigned.
Read previous inaugurals, he instructed Sorensen, who concluded that they were an “undistinguished” body of work, with much eloquence coming from some of the nation’s least accomplished presidents. Kennedy also assigned the Gettysburg Address, tasking Sorensen with ferreting out the secret of its genius. “My conclusion, which [Kennedy’s] Inaugural applied, was that Lincoln never used a two-or three-syllable word where a one-syllable word would do, and never used three words where one word would do,” Sorensen later wrote.
Once the election results were certain, John Kennedy had seventy-two days to construct his administration. As JFK’s closest adviser and top aide, newly minted White House special counsel Ted Sorensen—the first appointee announced—was busy with that transition. Nevertheless, he pondered his inaugural assignment. On Thanksgiving, 1960, a little over two weeks after the election, Sorensen dined at the Ellicott Street NW home of his friend and deputy, Myer “Mike” Feldman. They chatted after dinner about the upcoming speech. Sorensen had gone over Library of Congress–assembled materials on previous inaugurals as well as other great speeches, such as Pericles’ Funeral Oration. Retiring to Feldman’s study, he made a first pass at the inaugural, emerging after three hours around two o’clock in the morning. Thirty-five years later, neither Feldman nor Sorensen could recall with any precision the content of that first product, and there is no known surviving copy.
Feldman read it—or a version of it—when they flew together down to Palm Beach to meet with
Kennedy shortly before Christmas. Feldman later described it as a “stream of thoughts” that was “more than notes” and “more than an outline,” but was “not a finished speech.” In 2006, Feldman recalled how different that early document was from the speech Kennedy eventually gave in January. It did not have the “ask not” passage, for example.
“What was in it sounded like selections from—well, he liked Lincoln’s second inaugural and he liked Pericles, and so you could see some of that in it,” he said. “But not a lot of that was left in” the final version. It’s pretty good, Feldman told his boss, but not good enough for an inaugural. Privately, he thought it too flowery.
Over the next month and a half, Sorensen worked on it in odd snatches of time. On December 23, he sent a Western Union telegram to ten people, including former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, who had been the Democratic standard-bearer in 1952 and 1956; economist John Kenneth Galbraith;* and three future Kennedy cabinet secretaries—Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg, and Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon—soliciting their advice.
“The President-Elect has asked me to collect any suggestions you may have for the Inaugural Address,” Sorensen wrote, asking for responses before year’s end. “We are particularly interested in specific themes and in language to articulate these themes whether it takes one page or ten pages. Many many thanks.”
He got at least five replies, and countless other drafts as suggestions poured in to Kennedy and to Sorensen from around the country. On the down side, Sorensen had had to dip into JFK’s inaugural file for his farewell address to the Massachusetts legislature on January 9, which had been an elegant, eloquent success. Kennedy fretted that they were “using up some of our best lines.”
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 12
