Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History

Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History
By Ted Sorensen

Product Description

In this gripping memoir, John F. Kennedy's closest advisor recounts in full for the first time his experience counseling Kennedy through the most dramatic moments in American history.

Sorensen returns to January 1953, when he and the freshman senator from Massachusetts began their extraordinary professional and personal relationship. Rising from legislative assistant to speechwriter and advisor, the young lawyer from Nebraska worked closely with JFK on his most important speeches, as well as his book Profiles in Courage. Sorensen encouraged the junior senator's political ambitions—from a failed bid for the vice presidential nomination in 1956 to the successful presidential campaign in 1960, after which he was named Special Counsel to the President.

Sorensen describes in thrilling detail his experience advising JFK during some of the most crucial days of his presidency, from the decision to go to the moon to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when JFK requested that the thirty-four-year-old Sorensen draft the key letter to Khrushchev at the most critical point of the world's first nuclear confrontation. After Kennedy was assassinated, Sorensen stayed with President Johnson for a few months before leaving to write a biography of JFK. In 1968 he returned to Washington to help run Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign. Through it all, Sorensen never lost sight of the ideals that brought him to Washington and to the White House, working tirelessly to promote and defend free, peaceful societies.

Illuminating, revelatory, and utterly compelling, Counselor is the brilliant, long-awaited memoir from the remarkable man who shaped the presidency and the legacy of one of the greatest leaders America has ever known.



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Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #96 in Books
Published on: 2008-05-01
Released on: 2008-05-06
Number of items: 1
Binding: Hardcover
576 pages

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Editorial Reviews
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com


Reviewed by Ted Widmer

There will never be another speechwriter like Ted Sorensen, if only because there will never be a relationship like the one between Sorensen and John F. Kennedy. Staffs have mushroomed along with expectations that presidents will speak more or less incessantly, on all subjects, from Earth Days to birthdays. Burnout sets in earlier, and few writers stay with a politician for anything like the length of time Sorensen worked for Kennedy, from January 1953 to Nov. 22, 1963. Arguably, he has never stopped working for him.

From the beginning they were an unlikely couple. JFK was infinitely urbane, cool before the word went mainstream. Sorensen was stress personified, a teetotaling taskmaster, admittedly unlikable in his single-minded dedication. But they shared certain qualities, ranging from impatience with the old order to respect for history and passion for words. If no other speechwriter ever had Sorensen's access, then it is probably also true that no politician ever benefited more from his wordsmith's talents than Kennedy did. Nothing in recent memory compares to the body of work that Sorensen and Kennedy authored collaboratively, from Profiles in Courage through the 1960 Democratic Convention ("We stand at the edge of a New Frontier") to the 1961 inaugural ("Ask not what your country can do for you") and the triad of memorable orations (at American University, to the nation on civil rights, and to a crowd in Berlin) from a single month, June 1963.

Sorensen was one of the youngest of the New Frontiersmen; 45 years later, he is almost the last survivor, nearly blinded by a stroke in 2001 but still bearing witness at 80. Sorensen has written on Kennedy before -- his 1965 opus, Kennedy, was one of the first to etch the legend into stone, and he has been writing ever since on subjects ranging from foreign policy to table tennis. (He even tried to take over this newspaper once, an episode recounted in Katharine Graham's memoir, Personal History.) But this book is different from his previous efforts. It is as much about Sorensen as Kennedy, more personal than anything he has written before. It is full of new information about both men, and in a world saturated with Kennedy stories both over-familiar and apocryphal, that's saying something.

Sorensen was born in 1928, already surrounded by presidents. His father named him after Theodore Roosevelt; he was born on Harry Truman's 44th birthday; and he arrived in the Nebraska city named after Abraham Lincoln. It was a provincial enough place that it called itself "the Hartford of the West." But he grew up in an idealistic home, the son of a crusading state attorney general and a Jewish mother whose family had emigrated from Russia (and whose battle with mental illness he movingly describes). Far from Harvard and all things Kennedy, Sorensen began to discover his facility with language. In one amusing scene from his teenage years, he escaped a beating by dazzling a thug with his oratory. Like Cyrano de Bergerac, he found he had a talent for the peculiar form of not quite self-expression that is speechwriting. (Indeed, he is so naturally alliterative that this sentence appears in the book without irony: "Public officials should be judged primarily not by their puritanism in private, but by their public deeds and public service, by their principles and policies.")

He arrived in Washington in 1951, never having written a check or drunk a cup of coffee. The gleaming capital quickly educated him in those sins and others, but it also handed him the opportunity of a lifetime when he joined the staff of an up-and-coming Massachusetts politician, newly elected to the Senate. From that moment until the last time he saw Kennedy (handing the president a folder on "Texas Humor" as JFK walked to a helicopter to begin his trip to Dallas), the two men were drawn together by fate and a natural symbiosis.

What a time! As Sorensen argues persuasively, the New Frontier was a triumph of literacy as well as glamour. Words and their occasional companions, facts, were essential to it. Even if the Kennedy administration was slow in some areas (such as civil rights), it took a conservative nation quite a bit down the progressive road during its 1,000 days.

This book is instantly essential for any student of the period. It fills gaps in the historical record; it vividly conveys life inside the administration; and it generously dishes anecdotes (at one point, JFK calls for help after lighting a fire in a fake fireplace in the Oval Office). Like all White Houses, Kennedy's had its animosities, and as Sorensen argues, it was no Camelot. Jackie Kennedy disliked Lyndon Johnson enough to call him "Colonel Cornpone." Political adviser Kenny O'Donnell hated Sorensen, a fact that Sorensen learned only by reading materials that came out long after the fact.

The central event of the administration and the book is the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sorensen reminds us how close we came to Armageddon after Soviet missile sites were discovered in Cuba in October 1962, and he remembers asking an underling to research plans for an evacuation of Washington. (Kennedy teased Sorensen that there probably wouldn't be room for him in the White House bomb shelter.) By Sorensen's account, it was a crisis of writing in addition to everything else, for the difficulty of composing an immediate, hard-line note from Kennedy to Khrushchev ("I have no choice but to initiate appropriate military action," Sorensen's first draft said) led the president's inner circle to search for alternatives to an airstrike and invasion that "we now know . . . would have produced a nuclear war." Writer's block may have saved the world.

The book is full of arresting observations, not all complimentary. Sorensen opines, for example, that Robert Kennedy should not have been attorney general because of the impossible predicament he would have faced in bringing any charges against his brother. Sorensen expresses regret that he and JFK were slow to censure Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and reflects candidly on the president's problems with fidelity. Sorensen is also hard on himself at moments. He admits to charges others have leveled at him -- that he was abrasive, arrogant and obsessive about his relationship with Kennedy. He clearly has not shed all of those qualities and defends his president like a Rottweiler refusing to let go of a pant leg. But time has brought perspective and an honesty that can be searing. He talks about the personal problems he endured, including his divorces and parental lapses, and the difficulty he had with underlings who resented his refusal to grant access to JFK. He recounts his fury when Robert Kennedy tackled him roughly in a touch football game, ruining his best "Senate suit." One suspects that it was a very satisfying tackle.

Like the rest of America, Sorensen eventually rebounded from the Kennedy assassination. He worked in a New York law firm that sent him around the world and padded his savings. But it is also clear that he never entirely recovered. His lament for What Might Have Been merges seamlessly with his critique of What Is, and the book is peppered with caustic asides about the current administration. Sorensen even wonders if he erred by composing words that urged Americans to defend freedom abroad, since so many presidents have abused the idea. That is a rather forlorn thought, for Americans should never tire of speaking well in defense of freedom, but all of our idealisms, right and left, have become a bit tarnished with age. Still, the armies of speechwriters that will descend on Washington in the administration-to-come will devour this book, the finest work on their craft ever written. Clearly, Ted Sorensen asked what he could do for his country. The answer was a great deal.



Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Walter Isaacson
"This is an important book, and it's also a poignant one. As Jackie Kennedy once said of a speech that Ted Sorensen gave about her husband, it captures not only the soul of John Kennedy but also the soul of Sorensen. This clear-eyed but loving memoir is fascinating."

Robert A. Caro
"Ted Sorensen's Counselor is that rare gift to history: an account of mighty events by a participant who stood at their heart, and a writer masterful enough to make us understand them as well."


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Customer Reviews
First rate in every way!
I had the distinct pleasure to meet Mr. Sorensen 19 years ago when he very graciously gave me an hour of his time to talk about JFK. I knew that night that I was in the presence of a special person. I loved this compelling book. Get it now!

A Great Storyteller at his Best
I thoroughly enjoyed Counselor and especially appreciate the way Mr. Sorensen chose to organize his storytelling in a topical way (e.g., My Perspective of JFK's Personal Life, President Johnson's 1963 Transition, etc.). The author's prose is tight and well turned, as anyone familiar with his writing would expect, but at over 500 pages this is rather like the magnum opus of his life. I have a first edition of his excellent 1965 book on Kennedy but, for the most part, this latest and perhaps final work is much more candid. There are some exceptions such as his very touch and go treatment of Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick. He well describes the consequences of the incident but then takes the opportunity to sing the praises of the younger Kennedy's political skills, calling him "the most relaxed campaigner of the three..."

Mr. Sorensen has lived an interesting life apart from his work with the Kennedys and inclusion of that material is a plus. The space he devotes to it is about right; the book remains primarily focused on his long association with JFK and that is what the typical reader wants and expects. Of particular interest to me was how Kennedy reached out to Republicans -- described in a Chapter called "President Kennedy's Ministry of Talent." I knew it to be true (he appointed my uncle to the federal bench upon the recommendation of then Deputy Attorney General Byron "Whizzer" White) but didn't realize the full scope.

It would be easy to give this book the five stars it probably deserves but I went with four only because, from my perspective, the loyalty muzzle is still a little too evident. While I can come up with a few other petty critiques there is just much too much to like about this book to make that worthwhile. Some readers may disagree with Sorensen's politics but it would be the rare iconoclast who cannot appreciate his insights and wonderful storytelling.

Out of Nebraska
The well-written memoirs of a man forever to be identified with John F. Kennedy's political career, especially the White House days. While not telling all, this book is the candid product of a bright, honest, but still politically driven man, a 1960s liberal, who writes in the twilight of his life.

Mr. Sorensen is one of the last living central participants of JFK's Administration and his story would have value for this fact alone. Readers wishing to learn about presidential political campaigning, the art of speech writing, and more on such important historical events as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the presidential transition from JFK to LBJ will profit from reading this book.

While material on his later private law practice is not as interesting as the rest of the text, this is only to be expected. In terms of his post White House career, I did find of value his description of his ill-fated nomination by President Carter as DCI and noted the fact there is little mention of President Clinton's years. (A prominent picture of Senator Obama and Ted Sorensen is in this book. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that the author sees the current junior senator from Illinois as his pick for this year's Democratic Party nominee for president--and the direct and true successor to JFK's legacy.)