The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [202]
Sorensen could have stayed in Lincoln, started a law practice, and run for political office himself, but his ambition was different from Jack’s. There are those with public egos—politicians, talking-head journalists, preachers—whose pleasure is in the appearance, the speech, the sermon, the byline, the applause. And there are those with private egos—aides, editors, directors—who prefer to stand behind watching others reading lines and performing actions of which they consider themselves largely the creator.
That latter kind of ego is so disguised that it is mistaken for humility when it is often the opposite. Sorensen fancied himself a liberal idealist, but that liberal idealism ended when the young Nebraskan chose his employer, a politician to his right on most important issues, but a politician with an eye on the big prize of political life.
Sorensen would temper his ideas and his words so that he would sound perfectly like Jack. The man was so adept at mimicking Jack that he occasionally pretended to be the senator on the phone. Sorensen did this so well that the danger was that he would think that he played Jack better than Jack played the role himself. Bobby spotted this quality in Sorensen, calling him in these early years “far more interested in himself” than in the Jack Kennedy he was supposedly serving.
Sorensen was often called brilliant, but he was more the brilliant mimic, be it of ideas or styles. If he had been an artist, only an expert would have been able to tell that his work came not from the master himself but from someone painting in the same school, copying the master’s brush strokes.
Sorensen and the rest of Jack’s staff wrote the speeches and articles that left the office stamped with Jack’s name, even if on occasion he hardly had time to glance over them. That process began in Jack’s first days in office when Sorensen flew up to Boston to meet with a group of scholars and economists put together by James Landis, who had left the deanship of the Harvard Law School and was now working full-time for Joe.
Jack thought that problems were solved by calling in the premier experts in the field. You heard them out, by word or memo, and then using their wisdom you decided what was best to do politically. In this process, Sorensen was not the originator but the transporter of ideas who translated those ideas into the politically plausible, in language full of sound logic and occasional eloquence.
After this first meeting, Landis addressed a memo not to the senator but to his father. Joe had put together a formidable team of attorneys and accountants who worked out of a family office on Park Avenue in New York City, largely hidden from public view. Their sole purpose was to advance the fortunes of the Kennedy family, the most important Jack and his vision of becoming president of the United States.
In May 1953, Jack presented a series of three speeches in the Senate titled “The Economic Problems of New England: A Program for Congressional Action.” He sketched a portrait of a region proud of its past and its seminal role in so much of American life. But he also described a region whose fishing grounds and forests were becoming depleted while its traditional industries, such as textiles, were moving south to a haven of cheap, nonunion labor and abundant resources. Worse yet, it was a region where “government management and labor have resisted new ideas and local initiative.” Kennedy called for the creation of a Regional Industrial Development Corporation, job retraining, a higher minimum wage, increased business incentives, and the serious investigation of freight rate discrimination.
As Jack stood speaking