Remembering an American Idealist and Regretting a Wasted Year

The natural idealism of youth is an idealism, alas, for which we do not always provide as many outlets as we should. --Robert Sargent Shriver (1915 - 2011)

He embodied everything good and decent and optimistic about America. Sargent Shriver, who died this month at the age of 95, was a genuine American idealist. He believed in the power of individuals to make a difference and the power of youth to transform the world. He devoted much of his life attempting to inspire a culture of service and community activism. Few Americans today really know much about Sargent Shriver. Although his intellect and political skills were formidable, he was overshadowed by his connection to the Kennedy’s; the husband of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, he was perpetually relegated to status of brother-in-law.

In the early 1960’s, when the United States resonated with optimism and the nation’s youth felt inspired to serve, Shriver radiated all of the positive energy and spirit of JFK’s New Frontier. When a young and charismatic President Kennedy declared in his inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," it was Shriver who led the way. Shriver created the Peace Corps and was its first director. In its formative years, he inspired an entire generation of Americans to commit 27 months of their life in far off lands; to live among peoples and cultures that had, until then, been alien to them. Now in its fiftieth year, the Peace Corps has sent over 200,000 young people to impoverished and developing countries, building bridges literally and figuratively, teaching, learning, relating, and spreading all that is good and decent about American democracy.

Since his passing, story upon story has been told of how Shriver’s commitment and dedication, his passion for youth, and his unparalleled belief in the power of relationships helped change lives forever. He sent an army of bright, energetic young Americans on a mission of peace, armed only with smiles and a helping hand, and asked them to spread friendship and understanding throughout the world.

The Peace Corps emerged from an unformed idea articulated in a series of speeches in 1960 by presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, who called for the creation of a “Peace Corps of talented young people” to boost America’s attempts to win the hearts and minds of developing nations; an effort, according to Kennedy, that had been hampered by “ill-chosen, ill-equipped, and ill-briefed” ambassadors who were losing influence to the Soviet Union. Kennedy called on Shriver to transform style into substance. No one was better suited to the task. Shriver combined the organizational skills of an experienced and pragmatic businessman (he had spent several years as the manager of Merchandise Mart, part of Joseph Kennedy’s business empire) with compelling salesmanship and sincere idealism to turn Kennedy’s untested concept into a lasting legacy of success.

When the brief reign of Camelot ended and many of Kennedy’s aides and advisors left for home, Shriver stayed behind to lead the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty, a more logistically difficult and politically complex task that required immense discretion and tact. Political enemies and ideological opponents abounded. Once again, Shriver succeeded where others had failed. He built a series of institutions – Head Start, the Job Corps, VISTA, the Legal Services Corporation, and other services for the poor – that thrive to this day, making the United States a better, more compassionate country. In 1972, when George McGovern asked him to be his running mate in a losing presidential election, Shriver was the one bright spot in an otherwise regrettable year. Along the way, Shriver assisted his beloved wife of 56 years in creating the Special Olympics, a cause Eunice championed the rest of her life, and which provided opportunities for young persons with intellectual disabilities to overcome stereotypes and to be recognized for their own incredible talents and abilities.

Shriver always challenged others to work harder, to do more, and to dream bigger. Not surprisingly, the root of Shriver’s concept of service was his faith. A devout Catholic, he tried to model his life after the teachings of Jesus. He admired Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and, starting in high school and throughout his life, asked himself every day, “What have I done to improve the lot of humanity?” As Jonathan Cohn noted recently in The New Republic, “Shriver’s Catholicism was in some ways analogous to Day’s: rooted in the ethics of the Christian Gospels; dedicated to working toward peace, social justice, and redemption of suffering here on earth; and concerned especially with easing the plight of the poor and the disabled.” Always filled with good spirits and good humor, it would be difficult not to be inspired by the life and times of Robert Sargent Shriver.

One of my enduring regrets in life is the lack of vision I demonstrated at the age of 22, the time in life when one’s youthful energy, spirit of adventure, and freedom to set one’s path are at their peak. I graduated from Wittenberg University in May 1981 with plans to attend business school at Indiana University at Bloomington, where I had been accepted as a teacher’s assistant in accounting and could expect an MBA degree two years hence. For the summer, I had a job lined up in the financial accounting department of Dresser Industries in Houston, Texas, where my brother-in-law was employed in oilfield services. He had arranged what seemed at the time a great opportunity, a summer working in a real-life, good paying job at a Fortune 500 corporation. So, off to Houston I went.

It did not take long, however, before I sensed that something was missing and that I had sold myself short. Although my intellectual interests had always pointed in other directions, I was captive to conventional notions of economic security. I could feel myself heading for the life of the “Everyman” and emulating Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, “Before it's all over we're gonna get a little place out in the country, and I'll raise some vegetables, a couple of chickens..." I lacked vision and, worse, the courage of my convictions. I needed more from life and work but did not know how to make it happen. How could I devote my life to something more meaningful than the pursuit of money and profit, necessary perhaps to sustain the economy, but spiritually unfulfilling? I needed more.

Three weeks before leaving for business school, I experienced an existential crisis of sorts. While I did not yet know my direction in life, I was pretty sure it should be more in tune with my passions. Law school, which more closely appealed to my interests in politics, government, and society, had until then seemed out-of-reach. As the son of a minister and a school teacher, two traditionally low paying professions that could not easily support the ever increasing tuition at U.S. law schools, I could not reasonably expect much financial assistance, especially after my parents had just put three children through college over the previous eleven years. Ever the pragmatist, my father pushed me to pursue the practical professions, accounting and business. “You need to make a living,” he would say. When I took a course in Native American Literature in college, he snorted, “What kind of a job will that get you?” Although my father’s advice was well intentioned and influenced in part by his having been raised in the Depression, it glaringly ignored his and my mother’s own paths in life, in which service to others was their calling, their raison d’être. Even then, I felt conflicted by pragmatism and idealism.

When the manager of the accounting department offered to hire me as the full-time replacement for another accountant who was leaving at the end of summer, I mustered the courage to inform my parents that I was withdrawing from business school and staying in Houston. “I want to go to law school,” I said. My parents were accepting, but skeptical, afraid that I would not follow through and would find it difficult to make the transition back to school after a year or more of reality. But this was the first truly independent decision of my young life and, given where I sat in August 1981, it was the right decision. Later that year, I was accepted into a very good law school on a full-tuition scholarship and have been very fortunate in my career opportunities. I have no regrets about the path I eventually took.

When examined from a broader, historical perspective, however, my year in Houston was uninspired. Looking back, it was a wasted year, full of idle, unproductive time in which my most creative thoughts consisted of how to get through the day until happy hour arrived. Now, as I ponder the life of Sargent Shriver and all of the young Americans he inspired to serve; as I think of all the young men and women today who serve in the military, or tutor and teach inner city kids in programs like City Year and Teach for America, or commit to a year of community service in AmeriCorps, I cannot help but wonder why I was not more thoughtful in how I chose to spend that period in my life, before I was tied down with mortgages and children and college tuition. “If a young person has any idealism at all,” Shriver once noted, “it's strongest about the time he finishes college.”

A few years after arriving in Washington, I learned of the Lutheran Volunteer Corps (LVC), a social justice ministry founded by Luther Place Church, at Thomas Circle, when it was led by the Rev. John Steinbruck, a passionate and articulate preacher of the Social Gospel. Based in part on the spirit and model of the Peace Corps, since its founding in 1979, LVC has placed young college graduates (and others) into year-long stints with homeless shelters, HIV-AIDS clinics, low-income housing agencies, immigrant aid services, and public policy advocacy on behalf of poor and low-income people in cities throughout the country. Similar to the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and the Mennonite Voluntary Service, LVC was inspired, consciously or not, by the vision and practical guidance of Sargent Shriver. Although I was fortunate to have later served, in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, on LVC’s Steering Committee and National Advisory Board, I have always felt somewhat cheated for having never been among the more than two thousand LVCers who devoted a year or more of their lives in selfless service to the world, and who learned more from the people and organizations they served than they could ever impart.

I know, of course, that we cannot change the past or travel back in time. Sargent Shriver, as much as anyone, would insist that we look only to the future and commit to it. But if I could have done one thing differently in my life, I would have listened more carefully to the voices of people like Sargent Shriver and his cadre of Peace Corps volunteers. And maybe, just maybe, I would have made better use of my time in the fall of 1981. Everyone I have ever known who spent time in the Peace Corps, or LVC, or many of the other outstanding service organizations, have said the same thing, “It changed my life.” I cannot answer precisely why I was so clueless and unadventurous in 1981. But a touch of the Sarge would have done me some good.

A Reflection on Our Times

It would be easy to blame the tragic shooting in Arizona on the ugly political rhetoric that has dominated our political discourse during the last two years. There can be little dispute, after all, that the majority of the most irresponsible outbursts of late have originated from right-wing elements of American society. It is tempting, therefore, to blame Sarah Palin, as some in the media have, for repeatedly using the phrase “Don’t retreat, reload” and for displaying on her Facebook page the crosshairs of a rifle scope targeting selected members of Congress, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the talented and popular congresswoman shot in the head during Saturday’s mass shooting. It is tempting as well to blame the treasonous statements of Sharron Angle, who talked of “domestic enemies” in the U.S. Congress during her Senate campaign in Nevada and “hope[d]” that “Second Amendment remedies” would not be necessary. It would be easy to blame the anti-government vitriol of such right-wing talk show hosts and commentators as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter, who routinely use heightened and emotionally charged language to fire up their audiences. But although violent rhetoric has become a part of the nation’s political climate, there is no point in laying blame on any political party or commentator for what happened in Arizona.

The fact is that we are a violent country, and a big country, and some of our citizens are mentally and emotionally unstable. America has a long history of political violence that has resulted in the assassinations of four presidents and attempts on the lives of six others. Credible threats are made against President Obama almost daily and extraordinary security measures are an unfortunate fact of life for virtually all modern U.S. presidents. Members of Congress, federal judges, prosecutors – all have experienced a rise in threat levels in recent years. We are a nation that loves its guns and we make it excessively easy for most anyone to obtain one, especially in Arizona. We depict gruesome violence in our movies, in our television shows and video games, and then feign surprise when mentally unhinged people act on those images. We live in a violent country that values individual freedoms – the freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, the freedom of association – even at the expense of public safety.

Whatever demons or voices may have influenced Jared Lee Loughner, it was American democracy that was assaulted by his actions, American civic engagement that suffered the most severe setback. As Speaker of the House John Boehner eloquently stated in canceling this week’s legislative agenda, “An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve.” Indeed, the tragedy in Tucson was an attack on the soul of this nation.

In my lifetime, this country has repeatedly experienced intense political divisions coupled with violence against our leaders. During the 1960’s, with the country angrily divided over Vietnam and civil rights, when civil unrest infested our cities, we lived through the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. The 1970’s brought us Kent State and Watergate, school busing and Roe v. Wade, and the nation remained divided and angry. In 1972, presidential candidate George Wallace was shot in the stomach during a campaign rally. During a seventeen-day stretch in September 1975, two attempts were made on the life of President Gerald Ford. In 1981, John Hinckley stood outside the Washington Hilton and shot President Ronald Reagan and his press secretary, Bob Brady, as they walked to the presidential motorcade waiting curbside. During the cultural wars of the 1990s, when we fought over gun control and abortion rights, right-wing extremists blew up abortion clinics and Timothy McVeigh committed the mass murder of 168 people in Oklahoma City.

That this country is divided on political and philosophical grounds is nothing new. From debates over federalism and state’s rights, slavery and civil rights, women’s suffrage and prohibition, Vietnam and abortion, we have been frequently split at the seams. In the 19th century, we faced secession and civil war; a century later, civil unrest, non-violent protest, and cries of “America, love it or leave it.” When John Kennedy went to Dallas in November 1963, Texas was awash in right-wing anger, fueled by the John Birch Society, over Kennedy’s handling of the Cold War, school desegregation, and federal interference with state’s rights. Leaflets containing the president’s photograph and “WANTED FOR TREASON” circulated throughout the city. When United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson visited Dallas earlier that fall, he was spit on by angry protestors. As ugly and grotesque as much of the political rhetoric has been recently – particularly during debates over health care and immigration – it is, unfortunately, not exceptional. It also is largely disconnected from the troubled miscreants who assassinate our leaders or fire assault weapons on crowds of innocent people.

We may never know precisely what motivated Loughner to shoot a popular and well-liked congresswoman, or why he opened fire on a group of innocent citizens, wounding fourteen people and killing six, including a federal judge, a nine-year-old girl, a congressional staffer, and three elderly citizens. Although he espoused anti-government passions, all we really know is that Loughner was a very troubled soul, a mentally disturbed man with a semi-automatic weapon and an abundance of ammunition. In the days ahead, we likely will learn of numerous red flags and warning signals that went unheeded, clues of his severe emotional instability, actions and words committed long before Saturday morning’s shooting that should have given many people pause.

Much of the commentary I have read so far on this matter has brushed over a principal issue: The refusal of this country to treat mental illness properly, and the lack of adequate mental health counseling in schools and communities. As long as we refuse to deal intelligently with mental illness, including its diagnosis and treatment, tragedies like what occurred in Arizona will continue to be repeated throughout the country.

The events in Arizona should also make us question, once and for all, the foolishness of a gun-culture which allows an apparently mentally unstable young man easy access to a semi-automatic weapon. A sensible and mature society places limits on who may lawfully own and carry such weapons. Yet we are the most armed nation on earth. With nine guns for every ten U.S. citizens, only Yemen, at seven guns per citizen, comes even close. According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, since 1968 more than one million people in the United States have been killed with guns (accidents and suicides included). Is it any wonder that the majority of mass shootings happen in the United States? Is it surprising that we lead the world in gun deaths and homicides?

And yet, there are risks associated with a toxic political culture. Regardless of Loughner’s political influences and motives – his political views appear undisciplined and non-sensical, influenced perhaps by a variety of fringe ideologies – it would do us no harm to tone down our rhetoric, to refrain from speech that blames and accuses, that treats our opponents as not just wrong but evil, and instead discover words of hope and understanding. While ugly political rhetoric and acts of incivility in politics have been a part of the body politic since our early history, the consequences of our words and images are today more far reaching and fall on the rational and irrational, the sane and insane alike. What has changed is technology – cable television, the internet, and a 24-hour news cycle. “What’s different about this moment,” according to Matt Bai of the New York Times, “is the emergence of a political culture — on blogs and Twitter and cable television — that so loudly and readily reinforces the dark visions of political extremists, often for profit or political gain.” Whatever Loughner’s politics, “it’s hard not to think he was at least partly influenced by a debate that often seems to conflate philosophical disagreement with some kind of political Armageddon.”

I do not believe that the tragedy in Tucson was the direct result of irresponsible political rhetoric. But if the horrific events of last Saturday shock the American conscience into more thoughtful and respectful discourse, if it forces our schools and communities to better address mental health issues, if it awakens us to the need for more restrictive gun laws, then it will have left a positive legacy on our nation’s history. Solving our economic, political, and military problems is hard work that requires careful deliberation, compromise and discipline. It cannot be achieved with angry denunciations and the demonization of our opponents. Nor does it serve our nation to lay blame on our opponents for the acts of a disturbed man beyond our control. Anger is easy; empathy, understanding, and compassion requires personal strength and discipline. We must learn, as Jim Wallis writes in Sojourners, “to relate to others with whom we disagree on important issues without calling them evil” and understand that our words “fall upon the balanced and unbalanced, stable and unstable, the well-grounded and the unhinged, alike.”

A Wish for Peace in a Time of Conflict

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.
- John F. Kennedy

As I walked from the train station to work this morning, a cold December wind blew against my face. I pushed ahead, determined to trade the harshness of winter for the synthetically heated warmth of my office building, where I could sip hot coffee and look out over the horizon from my 21st floor window, past the Schuylkill River and the suburbs of western Philadelphia. Securing the scarf around my neck, my eyes focused on the sidewalk beneath my feet, I grabbed the top of my coat to insulate myself from the wind currents gusting violently between the city’s buildings. For three short blocks the cold air stung my face and I desired only to escape the harsh realities of the day’s weather. Meanwhile, a child of a drug addicted mother in Camden went hungry last night, lacking a nutritious meal and, more importantly, the love and support of a loving parent; a homeless man in Philadelphia found warmth on a subway grate and scrounged for food in city trash bins.

Yesterday, 3,500 Africans died of AIDS and 16,000 children died of starvation and malnutrition; another fifty children were killed or maimed by landmines in places like Cambodia, Iraq, and Mozambique; a dozen people were murdered in Ciudad Juarez, as drug cartels and corruption overtake major segments of Mexico. Every thirty minutes, someone in the United States is murdered and 60 more are assaulted.

As millions prepare to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, two people are killed every minute in conflicts around the world. Millions more perish from hunger and disease, malnutrition and extreme poverty. And yet, for most of us, as we sing carols and hymns, drink eggnog, and open presents, we know little about the people struggling and fighting and dying every day.

As a lighted Christmas tree adorns the Blue Room of the White House, the Obama administration escalates the military conflict into Pakistan’s tribal areas and continues to fire drone missiles into villages in northwest Pakistan and Yemen in the hopes of making the world a safer place. Air strikes are clean and precise, like a video game, yet the reality of these bombs are tragic.

Last year at this time, as Christians the world over prepared to celebrate the birth of Christ, a U.S. cruise missile struck an alleged al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen. The strike was a “successful” blow against terrorism, as fourteen al-Qaeda fighters were killed. But as The Nation reports this week, an investigation by the Yemen Parliament found that fourteen women and 21 children were also among the dead. One week later, U.S. missiles fired upon another Yemeni village with similar results. The folly of humankind continues.

The more advanced we become, the further backward we move. In an age when all seemed possible, when we invented the automobile and air travel, cured polio, created the information highway, and landed men on the moon, the 20th Century was the most violent in all human history; the nations of Europe and Asia fought wars of unparalleled magnitude, as death, destruction, and unimaginable carnage were the order of the day. In Normandy in 1915, a young man lay on the ground in eternal peace, one of the millions who perished in the war to end all wars. Found among his possessions was a card inscribed with the words of St. Francis, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. . . .” Maybe he held the card for good luck, or perhaps it was a gift from his mother, who decades after suffered silently as she mourned the loss her only son.

Thirty years later, on the morning of August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, a city of 255,000 people. In one blinding flash of heat and light, the equivalent of fifteen kilotons of explosives was dropped by U.S. forces, indiscriminately incinerating the bodies of 66,000 men, women, and children within a one mile radius. Tens of thousands more died from the bomb’s effects over the next few months. Two days after the bomb dropped, a survivor recorded this account in his diary:

Towards evening, a light, southerly wind blowing across the city wafted to us an odour suggestive of burning sardines. I wondered what could cause such a smell until somebody, noticing it too, informed that sanitation teams were cremating the remains of people who had been killed. Looking out, I could discern numerous fires scattered about the city. Previously I had assumed the fires were caused by burning rubble. Towards Nigitsu was an especially large fire where the dead were being burned by hundreds. Suddenly to realize that these fires were funeral pyres made me shudder, and I became a little nauseated. 8 Aug 1945.

--From Hiroshima Diary by Michihiko Hachiya.

A second atomic bomb packing even more kilotons of explosives soon befell the 195,000 citizens of Nagasaki, killing 60,000 more. Casualties are difficult to calculate with precision, however, because the great fires that raged in each city totally consumed many bodies and destroyed the city’s hospitals. It is said that the light emanating from an atomic explosion is comparable to that of the sun, the temperatures and pressure comparable to the sun’s interior. The light rays consist of thermal radiation that burns everything in its wake and penetrates the human body. In the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, nearly a third of the population was killed by burns, trauma, or radiation. Those who did not immediately perish developed various forms of cancer; babies born to mothers who had been exposed to the bomb suffered brain damage; the children of survivors experienced harmful genetic effects.

“We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount,” declared General Omar Bradley in 1948. “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”

As we sing carols on Christmas Eve, three dozen countries around the world will remain in a state of perpetual conflict and violence. U.S. troops will celebrate their tenth Christmas in Afghanistan. War will continue to cause untold economic and social damage to large portions of Africa, with civil strife in Nigeria, civil wars in Somalia, Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Burundi, and threats of genocide in Darfur. In many areas of conflict, food production is impossible, resulting in famine, starvation, and human suffering beyond description. Many of Africa’s children will be condemned to lives of misery, despair, and hopelessness.

In the time it takes to open presents on Christmas Day, four more children will be maimed or killed by landmines. Many of the victims will resemble an eight year-old Pakistani boy named Shiraz, who lost his leg when he attempted to walk home after army personnel told him that it was safe to do so. “But on the way I stepped on a bomb and it exploded there. My father tied a cloth around it but it kept bleeding. I was conscious so I could see the blood flowing out of my body. Then I was brought to the hospital.” Though he will never again walk like a normal child, he now wishes to become a doctor, so that he can help others.

“Peace cannot be obtained through violence,” said Albert Einstein, “it can only be attained through understanding.” As we celebrate the spirit of Christmas, sing our favorite carols, enjoy the dazzling displays of lights and ornaments, we can only hope for a day when humankind will put the kindness back into humanity, and the world will take stock of its senses. What can we do? We can start by promoting and supporting dialogue, by encouraging genuine exchanges among peoples and cultures that have otherwise convinced themselves they are at war. “If you want to make peace,” advised Moshe Dayan, “you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.”

Each year as Christmas approaches, I pray that nations and warriors will lay down their armaments and seek understanding and peace. History offers an occasional glimmer of hope. In the winter of 1914, on a battlefield in the Flanders region of Belgium, German forces were engaged in a fierce battle with French and British troops, when a most unusual thing occurred. With both sides dug deeply in their muddy trenches, some German troops placed small Christmas trees, lighted with candles, outside of their secured positions and began singing Stille Nacht (Silent Night). Soon, British and French troops joined in. A German signboard displayed, in broken English, “You No Fight, We No Fight” as British units improvised a sign containing a German version of “Merry Christmas.” A spontaneous truce soon developed, as soldiers from both sides put down their arms and left their trenches, meeting in the middle to shake hands. They helped each other bury their dead; they exchanged gifts – chocolate cake, cognac, postcards, tobacco – and they sang songs. In a few places, soldiers played each other in games of soccer. It didn’t last, of course, but for a few precious moments, there was peace on earth and good will toward men.

Saying Goodbye to Camelot: Ted Sorensen (1928 - 2010)

Overlooked during the hype of the midterm elections was the loss of a great American. Theodore C. Sorensen, a clear-minded and eloquent speechwriter, lawyer, thinker, and speaker, died this past weekend. He was 82 years old. The substance behind John F. Kennedy, Sorensen was the single most important source of JFK’s words and actions during the final eleven years of Kennedy’s life. Unlike his friend and intellectual soul mate, who died at the hands of an assassin’s bullet nearly 47 years ago when the country still possessed an innocence of spirit, Sorensen lived a full and engaging life. Yet by his own account, the world came to a standstill on that dreadful November day, his grief surpassed perhaps only by Kennedy’s closest family members, a grief that would be re-lived five years later in the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968. The Age of Innocence lost, America matured into a more complex, more divisive, more cynical country, which has only grown angrier through the years.

Kennedy called Sorensen his “intellectual blood bank” and, for the nearly half century following that tragic November day, Sorensen remained a loyal advocate of the Kennedy legacy and a vibrant link to the aura of Camelot that defined Kennedy’s term in office. He believed in good government, but not necessarily big government; a government that helps people and serves the national interest. He rejected the politics of pork and the pursuit of narrowly focused special interests. A product of the Great Depression with modest Midwestern roots, Sorensen believed in a compassionate society that embraces enlightened change and rejects the status quo where human ills and injustice go untreated. A proud liberal, Sorensen saw many of JFK’s best attributes in Barack Obama and he remained optimistic to the end that progressive ideals would ultimately triumph in America.

Like Kennedy, Sorensen believed that America must stand firm in its quest for freedom and democracy. But he did not believe that America should go it alone and he was dismayed with the unilateralism of the Bush administration and conservative calls for abolishing the United Nations, an admittedly imperfect institution, but one that remains our best hope for promoting peace and for addressing humanitarian crises in the world’s most troubled regions.

I never met Ted Sorensen, and a letter I wrote to him two years ago, after I read his memoirs, Counselor: Life at the Edge of History (Harper Collins, 2008), went unanswered. But I have always admired that Sorensen’s sharp wit and keen intellect accompanied a poetic embrace of language, and that he was a serious and unassuming man, with none of the Ivy League pedigree enjoyed by most of the Kennedy entourage. A bit of an outsider, he lacked Kennedy’s glamour and sense of style and was excluded from the Kennedy social set, where everyone seemed rich and fashionable. He maintained a permanently bookish air that almost single-handedly fed Kennedy’s appetite for policy memos, speeches, and legislative initiatives. Kennedy and Sorensen made an odd pair – the glamorous, wealthy politician from Massachusetts and the socially reclusive bookworm from Nebraska. But as Sorensen noted in Counselor, their lifestyle differences were offset by the closeness of their minds, for each possessed a lively sense of humor, a love of books, and a high-minded sense of the public interest.

The quintessential counselor, advisor, and confidante, Sorensen helped a young Kennedy develop into the mature leader he would become. From when he joined the new senator’s staff in 1953 as a 24 year-old University of Nebraska law school graduate, until Kennedy’s death in 1963, Sorensen was at the center of it all. The poet of Camelot, he helped write the most inspirational of Kennedy’s speeches. In July 1960, Sorensen drafted Kennedy’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, at which Kennedy declared that the United States was at “a turning point in history” involving a “New Frontier” of “uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.” Six months later, Sorensen and Kennedy collaborated on one of the best inaugural addresses in American history, a masterful, fourteen-minute speech that contained these memorable phrases:

• “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

• “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

• “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

• “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

Sorensen’s greatest contribution to history may have been the calm guidance and counsel he provided during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when for thirteen days, the world stood on the brink of nuclear destruction. At Kennedy’s request, Sorensen drafted the famous letter to Nikita Khrushchev credited with persuading the Soviet Union to withdraw its missiles from Cuba and with averting war between the superpowers. The Khrushchev letter guaranteed, in exchange for immediate withdrawal of all Soviet missiles from Cuba, an end to the U.S. blockade and the withdrawal of American nuclear missiles from Turkey (aimed at the USSR). As Sorensen later explained, “Never had this country, this world, faced such great danger.” Helping to formulate a peaceful resolution was among his proudest lifetime achievements.

For students of speechwriting, however, it was Sorensen’s high-minded, inspirational prose from which Kennedy’s soaring rhetoric was born, and which helped make his presidency a lasting symbol of hope and idealism. Sorensen’s imprint was evident on Kennedy’s calls for self-sacrifice, civic engagement, and international peace. His eternal hope for a better world, his belief that the human race, however flawed, had the capacity to survive and even thrive amidst adversity, are themes that can be discerned from Kennedy’s speeches and statements in the early 1960’s.

My favorite Kennedy speech, for which Sorensen once again deserves much credit, was his commencement address at American University, which remains among the great foreign policy speeches of an American president. On that clear, sunny day in June 1963, Kennedy addressed “the most important topic on earth: peace.” At the height of the Cold War, this anti-Communist president called on Americans to see the humanity of the Soviet people, however repugnant may be the communist system. For only by recognizing that Soviet citizens were, like Americans, also people of substance, virtue, and accomplishment (in science, literature, and technology), could we find common interests and seek true peace.

. . . What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children -- not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time. . . .

. . . Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need them is essential to the keeping of peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles -- which can only destroy and never create -- is not the only . . . means of assuring peace. I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary, rational end of rational men. I realize the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war, and frequently the words of the pursuers fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task. . . .

. . . So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal.

Kennedy’s address laid the groundwork for the Soviet Union to begin talks, six weeks later, on the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a major milestone in U.S.-Soviet relations and in the movement for disarmament. Forty years later, Sorensen was invited to Rome to speak to a local foreign policy group. He asked on what subject and was told, “Tell us about the good America, when Kennedy was president.” Thinking back on the American University speech, Sorensen reflected upon “an America admired for its values, respected for its principles, not feared for its might or resented for its success; an America that led by listening, worked with the rest of the world, and respected international law; an America that stood for peace, not one that started wars. That was America when Kennedy was president.”

Sorensen was a master at his craft. Today, presidents and candidates utilize entire teams of speechwriters, and most speeches are a hodgepodge of policy proposals and appeals to varying demographics and interests. When Sorensen worked for JFK, the effort was more intimate and collaborative, the results unmatched in modern political rhetoric. A speech should inspire, teach, and lead. Kennedy was masterful at this, and he could not have done it without Sorensen, who remained loyal and devoted to his friend and colleague until his dying day. Ted Sorensen having been laid to rest, it is fair to say that they don’t make speechwriters like they used to.

Looking back on Kennedy’s speeches and reflecting upon Sorensen’s life, it is hard not to be pained at what might have been had Kennedy lived to serve a second term. Sorensen lived a distinguished life and continued to provide advice to Kennedy’s younger brothers. He became an accomplished international lawyer, counseling the likes of Nelson Mandela and Anwar Sadat, and he remained always an advocate for peace and progressive ideals. But the pain of November 1963 never healed. “I do not know whether I have ever fully recovered from John F. Kennedy’s death,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Time passed. Love and laughter helped. But the deep sadness of that time remained, only to be reinforced five years later by the murder of his brother Robert. Those two senseless tragedies robbed me of my future.” Decades later, on the twilight of his life, the pain remained. “Deep in my soul, I have not stopped weeping, whenever those events are recalled.”

America lost its soul with the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy. With the death of Ted Sorensen, we have lost part of our idealism. We live now in a less poetic, less graceful time.