Ted Sorensen on JFK's Legacy | Big Think

Ted Sorensen on JFK's Legacy

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Sorensen says that JFK was loved even during his tenure. How has his legacy changed since his assassination?

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Theodore C. Sorensen:

Theodore C. Sorensen, former special counsel and adviser to President John F. Kennedy and a widely published author on the presidency and foreign affairs, practiced international law for more than 36 years as a senior partner, and now of counsel, at the prominent U.S. law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. The former chairman of the firm’s International Practice Committee, he has represented U.S. and multinational corporations in negotiations with governments all over the world and advised and assisted a large number of foreign governments and government leaders, ranging from the late President Sadat of Egypt to former President Mandela of South Africa.

Mr. Sorensen and his team at Paul, Weiss have advised U.S. corporations on factories in Russia and Africa, pipelines in the Caribbean and Latin America, and disputes in the Middle East and North America, and negotiated on their behalf with government officials at the highest level in dozens of countries. He has advised foreign corporations from five continents on investments in the United States and elsewhere, foreign governments on problems with the World Bank, the United Nations, the U.S. government and foreign investors, and on changes in their respective mining, petroleum, investment and election codes, and constitutions.

In 2002, Mr. Sorensen was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Mr. Sorensen is on the advisory board of the Foreign Policy Leadership Council, a director of the Council on Foreign Relations (until 2004) and the Century Foundation, a member of the advisory board of the Partnership for a Secure America and an honorary co-chair of the ABA Commission on the Renaissance of Idealism in the Legal Profession. Mr. Sorensen is the author of the 1965 international best seller Kennedy, seven other books on the presidency, politics or foreign policy and numerous articles on those subjects in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times and other publications. As an active figure in the Democratic Party, he has participated in 10 of the last 12 Democratic Party National Conventions and served in a number of governmental, political and civic posts. Appointed by President Bill Clinton, he served on the boards of the Central Asian-American Enterprise Fund (covering Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan) and the Commission on White House Fellows. He is experienced in the ways of Washington, the United Nations and the multilateral (World Bank, IFC, etc.) and U.S. (AID, OPIC, etc.) financing institutions.

Mr. Sorensen was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1928. He is father of three sons, one daughter and is married to Gillian Martin Sorensen, a former New York City commissioner, a former United Nations under-secretary general and current senior advisor and national advocate at the United Nations Foundation. Mr. Sorensen's memoirs, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, were published by HarperCollins in May of 2008.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Was JFK considered a great president during his tenure?

Ted Sorsensen: Well I think so. The people loved him. Even those who were suspicious of him at the start because he was a Catholic found that he was not trying to advance the Catholic Church hierarchy’s agenda. He wasn’t trying to put public money into church schools the way that Bush’s so-called Faith Based Initiatives have done. He wasn’t sending an ambassador to the Vatican as though it were a state. He was not blocking reproductive freedom for women. In fact he was the first president . . . Ironic as the first Catholic president, he was the first president to support United Nations world population limitation programs. So people got over those early suspicions, and they found that in one program after another – whether it was the Peace Corps, or the space program aiming to go to the moon, or his peaceful resolution of the crisis in Berlin, and above all his ability to persuade the Soviets to withdraw their nuclear missiles from Cuba without the United States firing a shot – yes, I think people realized that was an unusual presidency, and Kennedy was an unusual man.