01 November 2010, 13:02 Politics

President Kennedy's speechwriter dies

"Gazeta.Ru"

Ted Sorensen, one of US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's closest associates, died Sunday in New York of heart failure at the age of 82.

Sorensen is believed to have been the author of Kennedy's most famous dictum: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask yourself what you can do for her." Despite the fact that the president's ally himself never claimed such a thing, there was an opinion that he was the real author of Kennedy's book “Profiles in Courage,” which won the Pulitzer Prize. Sorensen received particular praise from the president for his work during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the head of the American state was required to weigh every word in order to reassure the public and talk on equal terms with Nikita Khrushchev. This is what Sorensen was most proud of: “Never has this country, this world, faced such great danger. Neither you nor I would be sitting here if things had turned out badly then.”

“The image of the Kennedy administration as an American Camelot, led by a wise, merciful and just (president), was largely due to Sorensen's seductive language through which the administration presented itself,” The Denver Post notes.

Sorensen was a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party , and the first question he asked his nephew Adam when he announced his engagement was “Is she a Democrat?”, a relative recalls in the pages of Time magazine .

Kennedy called Sorensen “his intellectual blood bank,” but proximity to the assassinated president in 1963 did not help the speechwriter with a solo political career. He lost the primary in the 1970 New York Senate race. President Jimmy Carter seriously considered offering Sorensen the post of director of the CIA , but, as BBC News notes , natural liberalism and a number of caustic comments made by the candidate about the agency made him an unattainable figure.

Condolences were expressed to Sorensen's family by President Barack Obama , who noted that "Sorensen's legacy will live on in the words he authored, the ideas he championed, and the hearts he inspired with his promise to transcend new frontiers."