To say that Theodore Sorensen, who died at 82 this week, was a speech writer is like saying Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer and Dwight Eisenhower a college president. It doesn’t tell you nearly enough.
Known best for having penned John F. Kennedy’s “Ask what you can do for your country” inaugural speech, Sorensen was much more than a master of soaring rhetoric and almighty alliteration in the service of a higher authority. He was also a major collaborator in the heat-depleting missive sent to Nikita Khrushchev that helped pull the world back from the nuclear brink in 1962.
He was loyal. He was a gentleman. He was a symbol of hope. And after JFK’s death, he never became a partisan pundit or polemicist for hire. All Theodore Sorensen did was help save the world with words. And that says it all.