THEODORE SRENSEN:THEODORE SORENSEN, universally known as Ted, was one of those men whose brilliant career and great talents were partially clouded by anonymity. Even before his boss, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, became president of the US, Sorensen, who has died aged 82, had to handle tricky questions about how much credit he deserved for a book for which Kennedy won a Pulitzer prize.
His share in his master's success was even more acutely raised by the question of his precise role in writing Kennedy's resonant inaugural address of January 1961.
The speech is now acclaimed as one of the classics of American political rhetoric. Almost every schoolchild of the 1960s was brought up on that speech, with its key invocation, "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."
In 1957 the well-known Washington journalist Drew Pearson, known as a muckraker, pronounced of Kennedy's book, Profiles in Courage, published the previous year: "Jack Kennedy is . . . the only man in history that I know who won a Pulitzer prize on a book which was ghostwritten for him."
Kennedy fiercely denied it, and Sorensen signed an affidavit confirming Kennedy's story that the book was all his own work. Later Kennedy offered, and Sorensen accepted, a substantial sum as his share in the proceeds of the book. It is generally accepted that Sorensen did in fact contribute very substantial drafts to the writing of Profiles.
The same questions hang over the authorship of Kennedy's inaugural address. It is agreed that several gifted hands, including that of Adlai Stevenson, contributed to it.
In 2005, two rival scholars, after poring over the speech, came to two opposite conclusions. Thurston Clarke proclaimed that new evidence showed that Kennedy was indeed the author. Richard J Tofel, on the other hand, an executive at the Wall Street Journal, found that Kennedy was responsible for no more than 14 of the speech's 51 sentences, and that "if we must identify" one man as the author of the speech, "that man must surely be not John Kennedy but Theodore Sorensen".
It seems the famous "ask not" trope itself had its origin in Kennedy's years at the Choate school, a boarding establishment in Connecticut, whose headteacher liked to urge his pupils to ask "not what Choate does for you, but what you can do for Choate".
Sorensen was born in Lincoln, the capital of Nebraska. The son of a Danish father, who went on to be attorney general of the state, and a Russian-Jewish mother, he was brought up a Unitarian. He graduated with a law degree from the University of Nebraska and became Kennedy's chief speech-writer in 1960. Sorensen's role went well beyond that of a speech-writer. His official title in the White House was special counsel, and that entailed a certain amount of legal work. But he was also an important counsellor on domestic policies and politics.
Sorensen was utterly devastated by Kennedy's death. It was, he said, "the most deeply traumatic experience of my life". He drafted Lyndon Johnson's stylish early speeches, but at the end of February 1964 he resigned.
In 1970, Sorensen ran for the Senate but was defeated in an acrimonious New York state primary. He later become a partner in the prominent New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
More recently, he was interviewed for Ryan Tubridy's book and TV documentary on President Kennedy's visit to Ireland in 1963.
His third wife, Gillian, a former under-secretary of the UN, their daughter, and three sons from his first marriage survive him. His first two marriages ended in divorce.
Theodore Chaikin Sorensen: born May 28th, 1928; died October 31st, 2010