Ted Sorensen was John F. Kennedy’s legendary right-hand man – special counsel, speechwriter, close adviser. As special counsel to the President, he had an intimate professional and personal relationship with JFK unlike any of his colleagues and he takes audiences back to the era when some of the most important decisions in American history were made. He casts new light on JFK, his presidency and its legacy, and the prominent historical players.
With the publication of his intimate and deeply revealing memoir, the New York Times best-seller Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History (Harper), Sorensen’s decades of silence about his professional and personal relationship with JFK was finally broken. He recounts in thrilling detail his experience advising JFK through some of the most dramatic moments in American history, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the civil rights movement, the decision to go to the moon, and his significant input into JFK’s most important speeches. He shares marvelous stories about first going to work for the Massachusetts senator, the writing of JFK’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Profiles in Courage, traveling the country for the 1960 campaign, the first televised presidential debates, the triumphal visit to Berlin, and many initimate stories about Kennedy.
Sorensen was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and after law school, moved to Washington D.C., where he would ultimately work for John F. Kennedy. He left the White House soon after JFK’s death, and in 1966 joined a New York City law firm, where, as a prominent international lawyer, he advised governments, multinational organizations, and major corporations around the world. He has also been a prominent television commentator.
Sorensen remains active in political and international issues, and lives in New York City.
Praise for Ted Sorensen and Counselor:
“Ted Sorensen’s words inspired a generation, and his counsel and judgment helped steer our nation through some of its most difficult hours. At a time when Americans are cynical about politics, this gripping, candid memoir illuminates a revered era in American history, stoking our idealism and rekindling our imagination about what this country can achieve when we’re summoned to a common purpose. Sorensen has written a book that will be cherished for generations.”
—Senator Barack Obama
“In his matchless prose and with a historian’s eye, Ted Sorensen has given us a very welcome up close and personal view of life and politics at the side of John F. Kennedy. There are fresh insights and enduring lessons for this and future generations to study and embrace. And painful memories of what we lost.”
—Tom Brokaw
“For all of us who write history, and are condemned, for this sin, to read a thousand self-serving and boring ‘insider’ memoirs, here, at last, is a glowing exception. Fascinating in anecdote, fascinating in insight, Ted Sorensen’s Counselor is that rare gift to history: an account of mighty events by a participant who stood not at their edge as he modestly says but at their heart, and who is also an observer perceptive enough to have understood the subtleties of what he was seeing, and a writer masterful enough to make us understand them as well.”
—Robert A. Caro
“This is an important book, and it’s also a poignant one. As Jackie Kennedy once said of a speech that Ted Sorensen gave about her husband, it captures not only the soul of John Kennedy but also the soul of Sorensen. This clear-eyed but loving memoir is fascinating as history and totally compelling as a narrative.”
—Walter Isaacson
“Ted Sorensen has led a fascinating and consequential life, and he has now written a fascinating and consequential memoir. With eloquence and honesty, Sorensen takes us on a tour of many of the most important moments of the second half of the American Century, from who wrote Profiles in Courage to the Cuban Missile Crisis to Dallas and its terrible aftermath. This is an illuminating and engaging book.”
—Jon Meacham
“A touching book. . . Sorensen, much more than a speechwriter, grew so close that some came to call him the deputy president. . . Much of it is inescapably about JFK, but it includes some discreet disclosures and funny historical footnotes. . . Sorensen looks back on the Kennedy years with perspective.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Full of new information [and] arresting observations. . . Instantly essential for any student of the period... The armies of speechwriters that will descend on Washington in the administration-to-come will devour this book, the finest work on their craft ever written. Clearly, Ted Sorensen asked what he could do for his country. The answer was a great deal.”
—Ted Widmer, Washington Post Book World
“Candid. . . Unsparing. . . We are still left with the inescapable sense that the words that the two men crafted together – however one divides the credit – will live on.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Utterly engrossing. . . Counselor is not only a fascinating memoir but also this election year’s most important political book. . . What truly elevates Sorensen’s account above other political memoirs, however, is not so much its candor but its spirit: Counselor is at bottom a love story – the author’s expression of his deep and abiding love for American ideals, for their expression in American politics, for his remarkable mother and father (and his anything-but-prosaic Nebraskan roots) and, perhaps most of all, for Jack Kennedy. . . Sorensen’s willingness to draw lessons concerning the current political situation from his experience is one of the several things that make Counselor such remarkably pleasurable and instructive reading.”
—Los Angeles Times
“In Counselor, Sorensen’s extraordinarily lucid memoir, he lets his hair down, revealing poignant moments of his Kennedy White House years that he didn’t feel appropriate to reveal while Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was alive. . . Without question Counselor is the most up-close memoir ever written by somebody deeply involved with JFK’s political and personal life. . . Sorensen displays a knack for lively storytelling.”
—Douglas Brinkley, Boston Globe
“In this modest, elegant, appealing, and introspective autobiography, Ted Sorensen writes about his service to John Kennedy with a candor that, he confesses, would have been inconceivable while writing his glowing 1965 reminiscence, Kennedy, or while Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was alive. . . Sorensen does not spare the man who remains his old hero.”
—Michael Beschloss, Publishers Weekly
“An engaging and fast-paced account of both the inner workings of the Kennedy White House and the story of an American life. . . A poignant look back at that era. Its timing couldn’t be better.”
—Washington Times
“Fascinating. . . Ted’s book is generous, highly intelligent, and his chapter on JFK’s ‘moral failings’ when it came to sex is masterful.”
—Liz Smith, New York Post
“Fascinating. . . Even when he’s nearly single-handedly avoiding war with the U.S.S.R. Mr. Sorensen tells his story with a sense of detached awe, humility, even incredulity. . . One is entirely convinced by Counselor that J.F.K. was a great man and a great president. And who better to burnish his legacy and cherish memories of him as a leader than his loyal servant, Ted Sorensen?”
—New York Observer
“A colleague once praised Sorensen’s ability to use words that everybody can understand – intellectuals, milkmen, diplomats, politicians. The author does just that in this absorbing memoir.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Terrific. . . Counselor is rich with stories and memories. . . Moving. . . A private look at the private and public JFK. . . An honest, sometimes painfully honest, story of a life well lived. . . The book is Sorensen’s life, including the adventurous law practice he pursued following his years with Kennedy. But it is never possible to separate Ted Sorensen from John F. Kennedy, and those years are the heart of the book.”
—Lincoln Journal Star
“Looking back on his 80 years of a life marked by responsibility, loyalty and circumspection, the former aide to President John F. Kennedy has written a memoir reflecting those traits.”
—Pittsburgh Post Gazette
“A fascinating figure. . . Sorensen, perhaps even more than his hero, proves that one can be idealistic without being naive, courageous without being rash. He has earned his optimism, fighting through multiple tragedies.”
—Buffalo News