Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [66]
The result was a five-minute meeting in the hallway outside the office of the Massachusetts senator. Of the encounter, Sorensen would write, “In that brief exchange, I was struck by this unpretentious, even ordinary man with his extraordinary background, a wealthy family, a Harvard education, and a heroic war record. He did not try to impress me with his importance; he just seemed like a good guy.”
Sorensen was surprised even to have been summoned for an interview. He’d sent in his application despite hearing that Jack hired only staffers his father himself might choose. Meaning Irish Catholics, and with few exceptions to this rule. Yet it took only five minutes for Kennedy to make the decision to hire the young stranger. It was another example, one of the most important in its consequence, of Jack not being his father’s son.
Ted Reardon, tapped to run the Kennedy senate office just as he had the House operation, understood what was happening. Jack was starting to reach beyond his old regulars and past the Massachusetts Irish. He was upgrading his team. He wasn’t picking new pals; he had different criteria now. “Jack had the ability to have guys around him whom, personally, he didn’t give a damn about as a buddy . . . but he was able to get what he needed from them.”
Ted Sorensen was the ideal Kennedy staffer. Not only would he go on to help draft some of Kennedy’s most glorious words, ones that stirred the world and resonated down through the decades, but he knew his role. In time it became hard for either man to say who had written what. Ted offered many of the lyrics, but it was always Jack’s music. If they were never social intimates, theirs was a collaboration of the heart. Indispensable as he was, Ted Sorensen would write extraordinary prose under the spell of Jack Kennedy.
However, there were issues Sorensen wanted to resolve before coming on board. Although anti-Communist, he was also anti-McCarthy, and so requested a second interview with the senator-elect. It was then he voiced to him his concerns that “he was soft on Senator Joe McCarthy and his witch-hunting tactics. JFK must have thought I was a bit odd, as well as headstrong and presumptuous, a new job applicant asking questions about his political positions. But he did not resent it, calmly explaining that McCarthy was a friend of his father and family, as well as enormously popular among the Irish Catholics of Massachusetts.”
Kennedy went on to tell Sorensen he didn’t “agree with McCarthy’s tactics or find merit in all his accusations.” Hearing it all, Sorensen accepted. Now, for the first time, Jack had someone at hand whom neither his father—nor his late brother—would have hired. For Jack Kennedy, Ted Sorensen would be his “intellectual blood bank,” providing him the Churchill-like phrase-making we now associate with him. “I never had anyone who could write for me until Ted came along,” Kennedy would later tell Tip O’Neill. There was cruelty in the comment, and it bothered O’Neill. Before Sorensen arrived, Jack had gotten speechwriting help from his former Harvard tutor, Joe Healey, who was also a good friend of O’Neill’s.
As for Sorensen, he understood the boundaries. “I never wanted to be JFK’s drinking buddy; I wanted to be his trusted advisor.” It was enough for him—or, at least, he protested as much to the end—to be “totally involved in the substantive side of his life, and totally