JFK's Alter Ego

Just half a century after an election that put him into the White House with John F. Kennedy for a memorable thousand days, Ted Sorensen has died, the last living link to a time that, in today's political world, seems a distant dream.

They would say in those days, "When Jack is hurt, Ted bleeds," and loyalty was certainly a Sorensen trait, but there was so much more.

He stubbornly refused to admit he had ghost-written "Profiles in Courage," the Pulitzer Prize book about political courage that first brought JFK to prominence, admitting only he had helped with research and editing.

As for the famous line in the inaugural, "Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country," Sorensen would only say with a smile about its origin, "Ask not."

Theodore Chaikin Sorensen provided Kennedy not only with words but with the heartland ideals that came from his own heritage as a Nebraska-born "Danish Russian Jewish Unitarian" born to a staunch Republican and a feminist mother.

When they met, Kennedy had proclaimed, "I am not a liberal," and he wasn't but, over the years with Sorensen's influence, grew beyond the confines of his own background of great wealth and privilege into the man the world remembers now.

Over time, I was privileged to know and work with Ted on many projects, including Robert Kennedy's memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and became enough of a friend to be invited to the wedding reception when he married his beloved Gillian.

He was a soft-spoken, gentle man but a fierce idealist who did not let age and infirmity slow him down. Two years ago, nearly blind, he was out campaigning for Barack Obama, in whom he saw many of the qualities of his alter ego, John F. Kennedy.

Ted Sorensen leaves this world and the country he loved in a much more troubled state than it was half a century ago, but it is infinitely better for his having been a part of it.

A Brief History of Presidential Snitches

Scott McClellan has stirred a hornet's nest, not only among former Bush colleagues but journalists and political observers as well.

"Turncoat Time" is the head for Washington Post media critic's roundup of reactions including his own:

"Now he tells us? McClellan had deep qualms about Bush using propaganda to sell the Iraq war, about being misled on Valerie Plame, about the president being in denial on Hurricane Katrina, and he utters not a peep of public protest until he's ready to sell his book?...

"What's fascinating is that the conservative commentators who always sided with McClellan against the media mob are now denouncing him as a second-rate Benedict Arnold, while the liberal pundits who always ridiculed McClellan are hailing his belated truth-telling (while still ripping him as a sellout)."

Not fascinating, just predictable, but how much do we have a right to know about the inner workings of a White House and, perhaps more important, when?

In 1962, when Ike's former speech writer Emmet Hughes wrote a tell-all book about his Eisenhower days, John F. Kennedy was appalled.

According to Ted Sorensen, Kennedy thought Hughes "had betrayed the trust of Republican officials by quoting their private conversations against them" and told his White House staff, "I hope no one around here is writing that kind of book."

Sorensen didn't and was scolded by some reviewers for his reticence, but others did and made headlines. This month, almost 50 years later, in a 556-page memoir, Sorensen still isn't dishing any dirt.

No Scott McClellan, he. But Kennedy's counselor was not working for a president who consistently lied in public and took his country into an unnecessary war with those lies.

If he had been, as someone who knows Sorensen's character first-hand, I am sure he would have resigned and gone public with what he knew, as McClellan and so many others who knew more, like Colin Powell, did not.

Loyalty is a virtue in a public man, but the question McClellan raises is loyalty to whom--the occupant of the Oval Office or the people who put him there. If he had spoken out three years sooner, they might be putting up statues of Bush's former press secretary. As it is, he'll have only his reviews and royalties to warm him on the long winter nights ahead.

Lieberman, Leper-to-Be

The former Democrat, then Independent, now Republican sheep dog for John McCain refuses to go gentle in that good night, today barking lies about Barack Obama in the Wall Street Journal.

Obama, Joe Lieberman says, proposes "a blanket policy of meeting personally as president, without preconditions, in his first year in office, with the leaders of the most vicious, anti-American regimes on the planet."

The Democratic nominee-to-be has proposed no such "without preconditions" thing, but that doesn't stop Lieberman from indicting his former party as having gone gutless, in contrast to the good old days of the Cold War when Kennedy was misled by hawks into the Bay of Pigs disaster and then, as Ted Sorensen tells it in his new memoirs, had to use an exquisite combination of brains, toughness and diplomacy to keep the world from blowing up during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But as Gilda Radner used to say, never mind. When Obama is in the Oval Office next January and Democrats have a solid majority in the Senate, Chairman Joe of the Homeland Security Committee may find himself a very lonely former Democrat, former McCain advisor and former Chairman.

The LBJing of Hillary Clinton

Now that the question is coming front and center, Barack Obama may want to turn to his backer Ted Sorensen for advice about putting Hillary Clinton on the ticket with him, as John F. Kennedy did with his chief rival for the nomination, Lyndon Johnson.

Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, reports today that she "is probably going to fight to be the vice presidential nominee on an Obama-for-president ticket."

After a bitter campaign, it won't be easy. Obama supporters, notably his wife Michelle, are reportedly opposed, but as Sorensen notes in his new memoirs, so was JFK's brother Robert. Yet Kennedy offered Johnson a place on the ticket, mostly to help win Texas and other Southern states in what would turn out to be a close election.

Moreover, Sorensen could also enlighten Obama about the virtues of converting a former enemy into an ally or at least neutralizing possible opposition. If Johnson remained as Senate Majority Leader, JFK told him in 1960, he "would be just impossible...Lyndon would screw me all the time."

Unpalatable as the idea may be to Obama's most fervent supporters--ironically, even Ted Kennedy has publicly opposed it--this could be another time when the Democratic Party needs unity more than a balanced ticket.

True believers in both camps will offer fervent arguments about why it wouldn't work but, in a year when so much is at stake, neatness may not count.

Testing the Power of "Just Words"

Until the ugliness started this month, race and gender were benign issues, at least on the surface, of the Democratic contest as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama congratulated themselves and each other for breaking through barriers of prejudice in American life.

But centuries of oppression, hatred and anger are not so easily wiped out by symbolic candidacies, and Obama is making the speech of his political life today to repair the damage to his campaign by the furor over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who wears dashikis and does not speak softly.

In his first response last week, Obama invoked Robert Kennedy's plea for racial unity after the murder of Martin Luther King, as he no doubt will again today, under the influence of Ted Sorensen, who saw first-hand the violence of the 1960s and emerged as a soft-spoken liberal corporate lawyer.

But Wright and Sorensen reflect more than Obama's mixed racial heritage and the generational gap between their lives and his own. Below the surface of race (and gender) are internal strains of economic class and culture that are not easily resolved.

In the 1960s, Black Power advocates and the Black Panthers were pitted against Dr. King's message of non-violence and reconciliation, just as the Women's Movement was riven by a divide between radical Feminists, college-educated and privileged, and working women who resented "Women's Lib," even as they benefited from the political consciousness it raised. The victims of prejudice are no more monolithic than those who practice and profit from it.

Obama will try to bridge those gaps and more as he is put to the severe test of reaching beyond rhetoric into the hearts of voters with both hopes and fears about the change he represents. At the very least, the results will show how much "just words" matter in American life.

Obama's Kennedy Connection

There were echoes in his Iowa victory speech Thursday night that may come from the influence on Barack Obama of the man who worked with JFK on "Profiles in Courage" and his Inaugural Address in 1960.

At 79, Ted Sorensen has been out on the campaign trail, introducing Obama and comparing him to the President he served almost half a century ago.

"Obama is older than Kennedy was when Kennedy ran for president," Sorensen has been pointing out. "He's had the same experience in the Senate as Kennedy had when he ran for president, and he's had the same opportunity to view the country from abroad as Kennedy did when he ran for president."

Sorensen, who doesn't see well now and needs help getting up to speak, tells crowds, "Don't worry about my eyesight. I have more vision than the President of the United States."

Taking the oath of office, John F. Kennedy said "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.'

In Des Moines, Obama said, "The time has come for a president who will be honest about the choices and the challenges we face, who will listen to you and learn from you, even when we disagree, who won't just tell you what you want to hear, but what you need to know...who restores our moral standing, who understands that 9/11 is not a way to scare up votes but a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the 21st century."

Sorensen was at Robert Kennedy's side when he campaigned for President in 1968 and would say, "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not." Now Obama is telling Americans "our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be."

In last night's debate, Hillary Clinton observed that "words are not actions, as beautifully presented and passionately felt as they are." But Obama insisted that "words do inspire. Words do help people get involved...Don't discount that power."

With Ted Sorensen at his side, Barack Obama is not likely to forget that.