White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  The president-elect flew down to Palm Beach on January 10 on board his Convair 240, twin-engine plane, dubbed Caroline after his daughter. Sorensen had given him a six-page typed draft of the inaugural address. It contained the final basic structure and at least rough versions of many of the memorable phrases of the inaugural address. “So let the word go forth to all the world—and suit the action to the word—that this generation of Americans has no intention of becoming soft instead of resolute, smug instead of resourceful, or citizens of a second-rate power,” the draft read, as compared with the final version: “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”

  Several contributors’ work was in this draft. Sorensen liberally borrowed from Stevenson and Galbraith (whose “We shall never negotiate out of fear. But we shall never fear to negotiate,” became the more exhortative: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate”).*

  Using Sorensen’s draft as a starting point, Kennedy dictated to Evelyn Lincoln, his secretary, another version of the speech, which included important new material (a generation “born in this century—tempered by the war,” and a willingness to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardships, support any friend, oppose any foe”). He inserted several pages from the Sorensen draft, encompassing much of the body of the speech. He also added a new opening and a nautical metaphor that were ultimately dropped.

  An early version of the famous “ask not” passage appeared in the six-page Sorensen draft. Like other timeless sentiments, variations of this phrase had been expressed before. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had said in 1884: “It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what your country has done for each of us, and to ask our-selves what we can do for our country in return.” In 1916, Warren Harding, speaking to the Republican National Convention, had said: “we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it, and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.”

  Kennedy had considered the idea at least as early as 1945, when, in a looseleaf notebook he kept, he jotted down Rousseau’s quotation that “As soon as any man says of the affairs of state, What does it matter to me? the state may be given up as lost.” He had tried different riffs on it during the presidential campaign: the New Frontier—the slogan summarizing his get-America-moving program—“sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them,” he said, in accepting his party’s nomination in Los Angeles on July 15. And on September 5, at Detroit’s Cadillac Square, he had ad-libbed: “The new frontier is not what I promise I am going to do for you. The new frontier is what I ask you to do for your country.” Speaking on national television on September 20, he said, “We do not campaign stressing what our country is going to do for us as a people. We stress what we can do for the country, all of us.”

  The inaugural address had other campaign antecedents. In his acceptance speech, Kennedy had noted that man “has taken into his mortal hands the power to exterminate the entire species some seven times over” (The inaugural: “For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life”). And he had repeatedly spoken of how the time had come for “a new generation of Americans” to take charge of the country.

  These rhetorical evolutions have been cited as evidence that Kennedy himself was responsible for “ask not” and other memorable phrases from the inaugural speech. This begs the question, though, of authorship of the campaign trail speeches—which were predominately the product of Sorensen and Richard N. Goodwin, with help from Feldman. But they in turn operated from an intimate knowledge of their boss’s mind derived from discussions and observations and—in Sorensen’s case—years in close quarters on the road.

  Seeking the origin of a specific phrase, then, is akin to straining to find the source of the first noise in an echo chamber. It is unknowable—and while the search makes for interesting historical trivia, the answer is ultimately irrelevant. “It isn’t all that important who wrote which word or which phrase in Kennedy’s inaugural,” Sorensen said in 2006. “What’s important are the themes and the principles that he laid out.”

  He added that, as a pair of recent books on the speech’s composition make clear, several people contributed, including Galbraith, Stevenson, and Walter Lippmann. “And some parts came from John F. Kennedy and some parts came from me,” he said. “In other words, it was a mixture. And that’s a correct verdict so that’s where I would like to leave it.”

  Kennedy spent a week in Palm Beach at La Guerida, his father’s sprawling beachfront Spanish Revival mansion. He relaxed while wrapping up the business of the transition, mixing in tanning and speechwork, rounds of golf with meetings and phone calls. He scribbled on a yellow legal pad while puffing on a small cigar. Some mornings he read selections to his wife, Jacqueline, who later described hearing the address “in bits and pieces” that week. Pages of his revisions and notes covered their bedroom floor and she would straighten them up when he left the room.

  The drafting style was haphazard, with Kennedy in Florida and Sorensen in Washington. On the evening of January 11, for example, Alaska senator Ernest Gruening, a Democrat, sent Kennedy a telegram in Palm Beach asking that he include in his State of the Union message a call to develop Alaska’s natural resources. Kennedy made no such mention, but Sorensen, given the telegram at Kennedy’s written instruction, used it as handy scrap to jot down a revamped, almost finalized paragraph about the trumpet summoning once again.

  Sorensen joined Kennedy in Florida on January 16 before flying back north with him on the Caroline the following day. Others on the plane included Washington senator Warren Magnuson, press secretary Pierre Salinger, Evelyn Lincoln, and Time correspondent Hugh Sidey. Once in the air, Kennedy summoned Sidey to his private compartment and, with the reporter watching, picked up a yellow legal pad, squinted out the compartment’s square window, then started scratching out an apparent first draft of the inaugural. At one point Kennedy tossed the pad into the reporter’s lap and asked his opinion. When Sidey said that he could not decipher the president-elect’s notoriously poor handwriting, JFK, a little impatiently, took the pad back and read selections out loud.

  “It’s tough,” Kennedy told Sidey. “The speech to the Massachusetts legislature went so well. It’s going to be hard to meet that standard.”

  Sidey was stunned that only three days before his swearing-in, Kennedy was still working on a first draft of his speech. But the truth was that the speech was in almost final form: the performance was designed to illustrate to a leading reporter that the new president was his own writer.*

  The ploy was undoubtedly motivated by a desire to establish authorship both for the contemporary audience and, as Roosevelt had done twenty-eight years earlier, for posterity. But unlike FDR, JFK was also driven by questions about what he had written himself. Rumors and accusations had circulated in Washington ever since the publication of his Pulitzer Prize–winning Profiles in Courage, angering Kennedy no end.†

  A few more changes were made to the speech after his return from Florida. Lippmann, lunching with Sorensen, suggested that the word “enemy” in references to the Soviet Union be replaced with “adversary.” Civil rights aides Harris Wofford and Louis Martin suggested that the words “at home and abroad” be inserted at the end of a sentence referring to human rights. An implicit nod to the U.S. civil rights struggle, it was the speech’s only domestic policy reference.*

  Like many presidents, even in their highest profile speeches, Kennedy kept editing a
s he delivered the address, making mostly small cuts and mild interpolations. Calling for the creation of a new world of law, for example, the reading copy contemplated a place in which “the strong are just and the weak are secure and the peace is preserved forever.” Kennedy dropped the “forever.” Asked forty-five years later if he could recall anything of which he was particularly proud that had not made it into a Kennedy speech, Sorensen identified that one word. Establishing such a world for eternity might have been an unrealistic expectation, Sorensen said, but, quoting the poet Robert Browning, he added: “For a man’s reach must exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?”

  Shortly before 1 pm on January 20, 1961, as applause echoed against the marble pillars and walls of the Capitol, Kennedy shook the hands of Chief Justice Earl Warren, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, former Vice President Richard Nixon, and finally Dwight Eisenhower. Kennedy pivoted and took a half-step to his left, and they returned to the background. Alone now at the podium, he opened the binder that contained his address, and waited for the cheers to fade.

  After a few seconds’ pause, and then dispensing with the preliminaries (greeting his vice president; the speaker of the House—“Mr. Speekah,” in his Boston accent—other VIPs; and his fellow citizens), he commenced:

  We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom, symbolizing an end as well as a beginning, signifying renewal as well as change….

  Moving into the White House, Kennedy and Sorensen continued the pattern that they had developed over the previous seven years. They would begin by discussing how Kennedy wanted to approach a topic and what conclusions he wished to reach. He would often have quotations (“Someone—was it Falkland?—gave the classic definition of conservatism which went something like ‘When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.’ Let’s include the exact quotation and author”*), historical allusions, or obscure facts he wished to include.†

  Having gotten Kennedy’s direction, Sorensen would prepare a first draft. Speeches were not to exceed twenty or thirty minutes—when JFK spoke admiringly of Khrushchev’s speechwriters, Schlesinger needled back that Kennedy’s speechwriters “could do as well for him if he would only give two-hour speeches.” “Words were regarded as tools of precision, to be chosen and applied with a craftsman’s care to whatever the situation required,” Sorensen noted. Soft words and phrases—“suggest,” “perhaps,” and “possible alternatives for consideration”—were avoided.

  Short words and clauses were the order, with simplicity and clarity the goal. And while the summoning trumpets of the inaugural address have linked Kennedy in the public mind with flowery prose, he generally shunned rhetorical excess. “The inaugural was a special occasion and there was a special tone in that speech,” Sorensen later explained. “It was more elevated language.” A self-described “idealist without illusions,” JFK preferred a cool, cerebral approach and had little use for florid expression and complex prose. He felt that his voice lacked the range of an Adlai Stevenson, who could give greater tonal inflection to his speeches. “JFK used to tease me about writing for Stevenson, because, he said, ‘Sorensen has my voice and you have Stevenson’s,’” Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who occasionally wrote speeches for him, recalled. “‘You’re too complicated for me.’”

  He “valued pungent expressions,” Schlesinger noted, and, Feldman said, liked “when the form of words was memorable.” (This put JFK in direct contrast with his predecessor, who did not want his words to stand out.) He liked alliteration, “not solely for reasons of rhetoric but to reinforce the audience’s recollection of his reasoning.” His taste for contrapuntal phrasing—never negotiating out of fear but never fearing to negotiate—illustrated his dislike of extreme opinions and options. “He believed in retaining a choice—not a choice between ‘Red and dead’ or ‘holocaust and humiliation,’ but a variety of military options in the event of aggression, an opportunity for time and maneuver in the instruments of diplomacy, and a balanced approach to every crisis which combined both defense and diplomacy,” Sorensen wrote.*

  As an editor, Kennedy had an uncertain sense of structure, spelling, or grammar. But he had a knack for tightening phraseology and sharpening thoughts. Schlesinger gave him a draft for brief remarks for an April 29, 1962, dinner of Western Hemisphere Nobel Prize winners that started by doubting whether the White House had ever before seen such a concentration of genius and achievement. JFK scribbled on his copy, “except when Jefferson was here who combined all,” and then told the gathering: “This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

  In March 1961, Schlesinger received complaints from friendly columnists and reporters about Kennedy’s failure to use his speeches and other public statements to educate and sway the voters. “They all have a point,” he wrote in his diary on March 16. “Everyone has been so busy finding his office and learning his job that they have not paid much attention to the public instruction needs. JFK himself in his press conferences speaks a kind of shorthand to the reporters, where FDR would have seized the opportunity to spell things out in words of one syllable, even if they were already amply evident to the immediate audience of reporters.”

  Schlesinger wrote a three-page memorandum to JFK that same day arguing in favor of not only the president but also his aides making a more concerted effort at public education. “Active government requires an active policy of presenting facts, alternatives and policies to the press and the people,” Schlesinger noted, approvingly citing Roosevelt. The FDR comparison was on JFK’s mind as well. In the fall, he asked Schlesinger for information on how often Roosevelt had in fact given his fireside chats. The answer was a handful—no more than four—per year. “All this shows the unreliability of memory,” Schlesinger wrote the president. “Many of your critics seem to suppose that FDR took to the microphone every couple of weeks.”

  On Saturday, April, 15, 1961, eight B-26s bombed Cuban air fields in an attempt to disable Fidel Castro’s air force. A land invasion by just under 1,500 men started on Monday, April 17. But a surprising Cuban air response and successive waves of ground troops quickly sent the plan awry. By Tuesday morning it was clear how the landing at the Bay of Pigs was going to end.

  The operation had quietly been U.S.-sponsored, but Kennedy, who had inherited the plan from Eisenhower, had refused to openly commit U.S. troops. In his sole discussion with Kennedy about the invasion beforehand, Sorensen, who was not yet attending National Security Council meetings and did not know the details, had worried about rumors that the United States was going to participate in an invasion. “I know that everyone is worrying about” getting hurt, Kennedy had replied with irritation—using a more vulgar term than “hurt.”

  The bungled plan prompted domestic and international outrage. “In one stroke, it has dissipated the sense of wild and romantic expectation which greeted JFK everywhere in the world,” Schlesinger recorded in his diary. “Cuba did not cause many people to turn against Kennedy; it induced rather a feeling of disenchantment, anticlimax and alienation. Kennedy still seemed better than any alternative, but the magic had gone.”

  JFK decided to use his scheduled speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors to address the situation on Thursday, April 20. He spoke briefly with Sorensen about the speech on April 19. Sorensen then consulted with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s closest adviser. The U.S. Attorney General and Sorensen then conferred with CIA chief Allen Dulles and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before Sorensen wrote a draft of the speech, with contributions from Dean Rusk as Secretary of State and Charles “Chip” Bohlen, who was the Special Assistant Secretary of State for Soviet Affairs. That group, Sorensen, and the two Kennedys then went over Sorensen’s draft before he retired to revise it.

  Finding the president still in his office late that night, Sorensen went o
ver it with him again, before going back to his office and working on it through the night.

  JFK told the newspaper editors, among other things, that while unilateral intervention in the Bay of Pigs would have run counter to both U.S. interest and traditions, his government would not fail to act in the face of “outside Communist penetration.” (The day before the speech, Robert Kennedy had sent a letter to his brother warning that “If we don’t want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it.”)

  The bureaucracy was absent from the speechwriting process. Sorensen and Kennedy worked with assistance from top officials, but drafts were not circulated for broad comment—a process that would develop in later administrations. This was not uncommon for major speeches: Kennedy and Sorensen wrote his June 1961 speech reporting on his Vienna summit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev on the plane ride back to the United States, for example, with little bureaucratic input.

  Sorensen was a territorial writer, believing that while consultation might be widespread, a single man must ultimately wield the pen. It was, he once explained to Schlesinger, his practice to steep himself in all available drafts but then go away and write a fresh one of his own. “The boldness and strength of a statement is in inverse proportion to the number of people who have to clear it,” Sorensen later remarked. With Sorensen, the number of people who had to clear a speech was one: the president.

  Sorensen, as part of his duties as JFK’s chief domestic aide, was the principal speechwriter in the Kennedy White House, but Kennedy would on occasion supplement his efforts or use someone else entirely. Contributors included Myer Feldman, who in the White House continued working as Sorensen’s deputy. A Philadelphia native, he had been on the law review and later faculty at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the Army Air Forces in 1942. He met Kennedy in the mid-1950s through Sorensen when Feldman was counsel to the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, and joined the senator’s staff at Sorensen’s invitation in 1958.