Gratitude for the Life of Ted Sorensen

Gratitude for the Life of Ted Sorensen

By Jeffrey Sachs
Economist and Director of the Earth Institute, Columbia University
Posted: October 31, 2010

The world lost one of its brightest lights today. Ted Sorensen, counselor to John F. Kennedy, has died at the age of 82. His genius as the greatest modern speechwriter is legendary. His role as a man of peace is less widely known but even greater. Together with Kennedy, Sorensen helped to save the world in the harrowing years of the Cold War, and to put into words the ideas that can preserve peace in our time and in the generations that will follow.

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Ted was our vital link to the hope, idealism, and vision of John Kennedy. With Ted's passing, we are cast adrift, and find ourselves even more dangerously at sea in a tempest of cynicism and pessimism. Sorensen stood for something else: the eternal hope for a better world, the belief that humanity, flawed and faltering, could yet find a way to survive and even to thrive. It is a spirit too often absent from our social life today. We must cling to it -- to Ted's great ideas and words -- if we are to survive.

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Sorensen's deepest belief was in the ability of humanity to solve its problems, and especially to find the way to peace. He never wavered in his faith in humanity, and that faith imbued some of the greatest phrases and actions of our age. Ted's belief in peace underpinned the wise counsel he gave during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he expressed skepticism at the calls by the generals to bomb Cuba and risk nuclear Armageddon. We owe our very survival to the wisdom of John and Robert Kennedy, and Ted Sorensen, for their search for a peaceful resolution of the most dangerous crisis in the history of the world.

Kennedy's final year of life, from October 1962 to November 1963, in my estimation, displayed the most astounding leadership for peace in modern times. Sorensen's role was pivotal. The Cuban Missile Crisis had given Kennedy and Sorensen a harrowing glimpse into the ultimate abyss, and had provoked in them a history-bending determination to find a way out of the dance of death with the Soviet Union. Kennedy was determined to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty as the first step away from the brink. Sorensen provided critical ideas and eloquence to bring that historic ambition to a successful end.

The decisive speech was Kennedy's commencement address at American University in June 1963, in which Kennedy and Sorensen took a step of astounding wisdom. This speech, known to history as Kennedy's Peace Speech, was addressed not to the Soviet people, but to Americans. It called on Americans to see the Soviet people as people of virtue, accomplishment, and heroism, even if the communist system itself was repugnant to Americans. By recognizing the humanity of the Soviet people, said Kennedy and Sorensen, we could locate our common interests and thereby find our way to peace.

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