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

In the midst of the Calgary-Glenmore by-election and election-day madness, I have been listening to the audio version of the book Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History written and read by Ted Sorensen. This audio book is very enjoyable and highly recommended.

Quoting Wikipedia, Sorensen is

best known as President John F. Kennedy’s special counsel and adviser, legendary speechwriter, and alter ego. President Kennedy once called him his “intellectual blood bank.”

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Ted Widmer (excerpted from Amazon.com, emphasis and links added)

“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.”