Tuesday, May 10, 2005
United Press International
President John F. Kennedy in 1961 delivering his inaugural address, whose memorable phrases are still the subject of conjecture
May 10, 2005
Two Authors Ask About 'Ask Not'
By EDWARD WYATT
In an age when even a walk across the White House lawn can feel scripted, it is hard to imagine making a fuss over whether a speechwriter helped a president-elect compose his inaugural address. But when the president in question is John F. Kennedy, such questions never cease.
Recently two scholars examined the evidence around the authorship of Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address - poring over documents, interviewing still-living advisers - and came to opposite conclusions.
In "Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America," Thurston Clarke wrote last year that "important and heretofore overlooked documentary evidence" proves that Kennedy was "the author of the most immortal and poetic passages of his inaugural address," including the famous line that gives the book its title, "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."
But in "Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address" (Ivan R. Dee), to be published in July, Richard J. Tofel, a lawyer and a former assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal, concludes that "if we must identify" one man as the author of the speech, "that man must surely be not John Kennedy but Theodore Sorensen."
The question of whose hand held sway over the Kennedy inaugural address was an issue even before it was delivered, at least for Kennedy. Stung by accusations that a ghost writer was the real author of "Profiles in Courage," which won Kennedy the Pulitzer Prize in 1957, the president-elect went to great lengths to showcase his own involvement in the speech that has since become his most remembered.
The speech, which can be listened to at www.jfklibrary.org, is thought by many scholars to be among the finest inaugural addresses in the nation's history. With its declaration that "the torch has passed to a new generation of Americans," the speech also holds particular relevance for baby boomers, whose adulthoods were forged in the crucible of the 1960's.
For years, Mr. Sorensen, one of the men closest to Kennedy - he was a policy adviser, legal counsel and chief speechwriter - has steadfastly maintained that Kennedy was the driving force behind the speech.
"I'm of the very old school," Mr. Sorensen said in a telephone interview. "I've just simply refused to take credit when I didn't deserve the credit. That is not a philosophy that speechwriters of the last generation have necessarily followed."
Mr. Clarke, whose book was published by Henry Holt & Company, bases much of his conclusion around a key event in the preparation of the speech. On Jan. 10, 1961, during a flight from Washington to Palm Beach, Fla., Kennedy dictated portions of the speech to his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. Both Mr. Clarke and Mr. Tofel note that in doing so, Kennedy consulted a draft of the address previously prepared by Mr. Sorensen.
Mr. Clarke states that "the Sorensen material that Kennedy incorporated into his speech turns out to be largely a compilation of ideas and themes that Kennedy had been voicing throughout his adult life." In Mr. Clarke's account, that makes Kennedy not only the architect of the speech, but "its stonecutter and mason, too."
Mr. Tofel's research - which, like Mr. Clarke's, painstakingly details the evolution of nearly every word in the address - causes him to conclude differently. "It is simply not correct to say, as a recent book did, that with the Kennedy dictation, the speech became 'in every important respect' Kennedy's own handiwork," he writes. While Kennedy certainly had ample input into the speech, he said, others, particularly Mr. Sorensen, had more.
"Of the 51 sentences in the inaugural address, John Kennedy might be said to have been the principal original author of no more than 14," Mr. Tofel writes. "And this number credits Kennedy with every sentence the origin of which is unclear.
"On direct evidence," he adds, including impromptu changes made during the delivery of the speech and a transcription of dictation taken by Kennedy's secretary on Jan. 10, "only nine sentences were principally originally Kennedy's. This compares with eight sentences from Adlai Stevenson."
The two authors do not disagree on everything, however. Both take note of the contributions of Mr. Stevenson (who they say had angled to be appointed secretary of state but who wound up as Kennedy's ambassador to the United Nations), as well as those of the economist John Kenneth Galbraith.
And neither disputes evidence unearthed by other Kennedy scholars long ago: that the provenance of the speech's most famous words, the "ask not" portion, has a less inspiring history.
The words hark back at least to Kennedy's years at Choate, the Connecticut prep school, where the headmaster regularly reminded his charges that what mattered most was "not what Choate does for you, but what you can do for Choate."
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