Speechwriter's Last Word: 'Hard to Believe That None of JFK’s Enemies Was Behind His Death'

JFK's close aide Theodore Sorensen mused upon the death of his friend in his memoir 'Counselor'

Theodore Sorensen and JFK at the White House in March 1963. (Credit: Robert Leroy Knudsen)

A month ago, JFK Facts presented the previously unpublished thoughts of JFK’s longtime secretary Evelyn Lincoln, in which she expressed her view that the president’s enemies were behind his assassination — “a deliberate professional political murder.”

Lincoln’s remarks were in an addendum to her unpublished memoir, “I Was There.”

The story opened up the floodgates to a wide-ranging discussion. Some said that it was old news (Lincoln’s addendum had been available in hard copy for public view in the JFK Library; but, as far as JFK Facts could tell, Lincoln’s views had never been presented to the public at such length or in such detail).

The author of the piece, Jefferson Morley, answered these critics by noting that it was the most fundamental common sense to consider Lincoln’s thoughts — after all, she worked side-by-side with the man for more than a decade and was privy to things that neither his aides nor even his wife were aware of. And she was no mere factotum.

Speechwriter from Nebraska

Nebraska-born and educated Theodore “Ted” Sorensen was another similarly close colleague of Kennedy’s. He worked for JFK for 11 years as an advisor and primary speechwriter. He too would offer his thoughts about their late boss’s demise.

Sorensen began his relationship with JFK in 1952 as a legislative aide to the senator from Massachusetts. He later assisted Kennedy in penning the 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Profiles in Courage.”

The duo went on to work on countless speeches together, including JFK’s presidential inaugural address, which chiseled the words, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” into the cultural-historic lexicon.

Sorensen and Kennedy were nearly bound at the hip. As The Guardian wrote,

Kennedy called him “my intellectual blood bank” and the press frequently referred to Sorensen as Kennedy’s ghostwriter. However presidential secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, said: “Ted was really more shadow than ghost, in the sense that he was never really very far from Kennedy.”

‘Imaginative but Grim’

In his 2008 memoir, “Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History,” Sorensen offered his thoughts about his friend’s death and the many theories that continue to swirl in its wake.

To prepare for writing the book, Sorensen brought himself to watch Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “JFK,” which he called “imaginative but grim” and said offered no evidence for its thesis.

Nevertheless, Sorensen also revealed that in the four-plus decades since the assassination he was far from being at peace with the official narrative on his friend’s death:

“I have personally reached the point where, incredible as all the conflicting conspiracy theories are, it is equally hard to believe that none of JFK’s enemies was behind his death and his brother’s less than five years later. I have no new facts to reveal and no new conclusions to add. Yet I remain torn on the question. On the one hand, what good would it do to find out now who killed John Kennedy? It would not bring him back or resurrect his policies and standards. On the other hand, many people all over the world, including me, would feel somewhat better knowing, with a certainty, even now, that John F. Kennedy was killed by ideological adversaries, and thus died a martyr for a cause, and not simply in a senseless killing at the hands of a crazed lucky sharpshooter.”

He went on to say he would not join those who heap opprobrium upon the Warren Commission “whose approach could never satisfy all the critics….”

“However, I no longer regard the repeated doubts about the single bullet or lone assassin theories as unreasonable, nor can I be certain that the Warren Commission report closed the books forever on the question of who killed Kennedy,” he wrote.

Sorensen dismissed out of hand a host of theories about the assassination, which he said possessed “a grain of logic without a shred of proof.” Leading those were suggestions that Cuban leader Fidel Castro was behind the plot.

“Castro was wise enough to know that Kennedy was not a threat to him, and that such a move would risk Cuba’s survival,” he wrote.

Sorensen, who at LBJ’s urging stayed on at the White House for three months after the assassination and wrote the new president’s “Let Us Continue” speech, went on in his memoir to offer a plea for understanding from those with thoughts about the assassination frustrated by his reluctance to hear them out:

“I hope all the conspiracy theorists whose invitations to comment I have declined, or whose theories I have not read, or whose meeting or press conferences I have not attended, understand my inability to do so. I have endorsed none of them, preferred none of them, accepted none of them. When they scoff that I was not informed about the secret operations, findings, and conspiracies that lay behind the murder, they are right; and I doubt anyone else was informed. Many of these theorists have said they had actual documents and revealing photographs to show me, so confidential they could not be published.

While conspiracy theorists cannot prove that any one of their targets of accusation was involved in the assassination of JFK, neither can I prove that none of them was involved. Deep in my heart, I cannot fully and permanently exonerate any of them —pro-Castro Cubans, anti-Castro Cubans, the Soviet KGB, the Mafia, the CIA and militarists, alarmed by Kennedy’s soft American University speech on peace and his announced inclination to draw down American military advisors in Vietnam. All could have had motivations to get rid of JFK and the resources to cover it up. That is not enough for a court of law, but it is enough to leave an entire nation with uneasy feelings. I do agree that, had some of his detractors on the extreme right been able to peer deep into his heart, their worst fears would have been confirmed.”

‘Bemused’

Sorensen recounted how JFK had once remarked to him that there was “no real defense against a lone, unpredictable sniper, if that madman was both determined to succeed and lucky. Exposure to sniper attack is an unavoidable part of every active president’s position.”

And indeed, the president was to later confide in him about a foiled assassination attempt just weeks before Dallas at the family’s Palm Beach estate. The Secret Service kept the matter quiet so as not to inspire copycats. Yet, when JFK shared this information, according to Sorensen, the president did not seem overly concerned.

“He seemed more bemused than frightened.”

‘Deeply Traumatic’

And when, just weeks later, another assassination attempt on JFK was all too successful, Sorensen’s world was shattered: “It was the most deeply traumatic experience of my life,” Sorensen wrote.

“The unreality of it, the unacceptability of it, the sudden desperation of it all, an eloquent voice suddenly stilled, a compassionate heart suddenly stopped, a brilliant brain shattered, that handsome smile gone forever. Of course I could not believe it. ‘They wouldn’t even give him three years,’ I was heard to say—the country, the world, fate.”

Sorensen died in 2010, two years after the release of “Counselor,” at age 82.