• Submitted by: admin
• 12 / 07 / 2006

By Ross Liemer

Ted Sorensen, speechwriter and special counsel to President John F. Kennedy, recounted his role in the Cuban missile crisis and offered a spirited defense of the legacy of the slain president before a rapt audience in Dodds Auditorium yesterday.

Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter '80 introduced Sorensen and thanked him for crafting the now-famous call to government service: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." "That call inspired a whole generation of public servants," Slaughter said.

After taking the podium, Sorensen argued that this month's Atlantic Monthly's list of the 100 most influential Americans erred by including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan but excluding JFK. He listed Kennedy's mission to send a man to the moon, push to end racial discrimination and successful handling of the missile crisis as evidence of his historical influence.Thirteen days

Writing the speech was incredibly challenging, Sorensen said, since it had to appeal to "so many different audiences."

Kennedy wanted to convince the USSR that the United States would not accept nuclear missiles in Cuba, to reassure allies that the United States would act with prudence and to keep the American public as calm as possible.

He declared in the Oct. 22 address that the country would "regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." In a bit of dark humor, Sorensen said that many of the youngest staffers in the White House later expressed their gratitude for the forceful tenor of those words.

"They thanked me for making the speech on the night of 22nd so scary they were able to convince their girlfriends that it was their last night on earth," he said. By the next weekend, the United States had received two separate negotiating messages from the Soviet Union, a personal missive from Khrushchev offering a way out of the crisis and a more bellicose message from the Soviet government.

Kennedy convened ExComm, a select group of trusted advisers that included Sorensen, to determine the U.S. response. When the president chose to acknowledge the first letter and ignore the second, he sent his brother, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, and Sorensen down the hall to hammer out a response to Khrushchev.

"That was the toughest letter I ever wrote in my life," Sorensen said. "If by ignoring the second letter we provoked Khrushchev ... [if] we didn't give him a satisfactory answer, who knows what he would have done with those weapons." No one knew if ignoring the second Soviet letter would anger Khrushchev or if the Soviet leader would be satisfied with the U.S. answer to his personal letter. The threat of full-scale nuclear war loomed.

"We thought Saturday would be the last day on earth," Sorensen recalled. But the sun dawned the next day and Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would withdraw all its missiles from Cuba under a U.N. verification scheme.

Source: The Daily Princetonian