RFK’s Cuba papers, a new glimpse of power and pitfalls

 

Robert F. Kennedy’s handwritten notes about the missile crisis were released Thursday.

Boston.com/ Bryan Bender*
WASHINGTON — Hours earlier an American U-2 spy plane had been shot down while snapping photos of nuclear missiles secretly placed by the Soviet Union in Cuba, just 90 miles from US shores. Despite a US naval blockade, Soviet cargo ships carrying more military supplies were steaming toward the Caribbean island.

It was Oct. 27, 1962, “the most difficult and tense time” of the Cuban missile crisis, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy scribbled on a legal pad after huddling with his brother, President John F. Kennedy, and his closest advisers.

“This was the moment we had prepared for which we hoped would never come,” he continued. “We had to either intercept [the Soviet ships] or announce we were bluffing.”

The sense of impending danger “hung like a cloud over us all. And no one more than the president.”

The attorney general’s handwritten notes from these around-the-clock meetings 50 years ago this month are part of more than 2,700 pages of his personal and confidential files made public Thursday by the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Dorchester with the approval of his family.

Although they do not appear to contain any blockbuster revelations, the documents spotlight the central role — a highly unusual one — that the attorney general played in foreign policy, including helping the United States and Soviet Union step back from the brink of nuclear holocaust.

The files contain several early drafts of his memos to the president as he served as a go-between with Soviet diplomats. The efforts ultimately defused the crisis with a public US pledge not to invade Cuba if the Soviets removed their missiles, and with a private pledge to dismantle American missiles in Europe.

The seven boxes of newly released files are among the 62 covering Kennedy’s three-year tenure as attorney general that researchers have been angling to see for decades. The Kennedy family, which was granted unusual purview over the collection by the National Archives after Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, pledged in a statement Wednesday to work with the government to declassify and release the remaining 55.

Many of the newly declassified files on Cuba, which cover 1961 to 1963, are marked “top secret” or “ultrasensitive” or “eyes only.” They provide insight into how Robert Kennedy presided over a maze of US-sponsored efforts to overthrow the regime of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, from the failed CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion to renewed efforts after the missile crisis.

His handwritten notes hint at how the Bay of Pigs fiasco staggered the young administration. One dated May 11, 1961, days after the failure, contains doodles of triangles, a reference to the CIA, and the line: “If we do not get back to a position where nations have some respect, and even fear [illegible], we shall never beat these bastards.”

At one point in May 1963, after he met with a leader of the Bay of Pigs operation and other Cuban exiles, an aide warned him about the potential implications of his continued role. A CIA report had recounted that exiles were dropping his name while building support for plans to remove Castro.

“It seems to me the CIA report presents the question of whether your name should be circulated in general like this,” the aide wrote.

Historians called the newly available documents invaluable to understanding the full role of Robert Kennedy in Cuba policy and the wider Cold War.

“The anomaly of Robert Kennedy was that the attorney general of the United States was moonlighting as director of covert operations against Cuba,” said Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive, a research center at George Washington University, and an expert on Cuba and the Cold War.

Kornbluh said the initial covert efforts Kennedy oversaw to remove Castro — collectively called Operation Mongoose — were halted after the missile crisis but were revived in 1963. “The Cuban exiles are in some way reporting to Robert Kennedy,” he said.

For example, the documents show that months after the United States vowed publicly it would not try to remove Castro, RFK presided over a secret meeting on May 14, 1963, in the White House Situation Room to discuss potential opportunities to take stronger action in Cuba. One possibility involved exposing US spy planes to enemy fire in an attempt to provoke an incident for political purposes.

Kennedy biographer Larry Tye said “the documents show that long after the Bay of Pigs and missile crisis Bobby continued playing CIA chief, counterinsurgency boss, and chief provocateur.”Continued...

-----------------------------------

*Globe reporter Brian C. Mooney contributed to thisreport. Bryan Bender can be reached at bender­@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeBender

Inside the Oval Office: Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Wall Street Journal/

Popperfoto/Getty Images

President Kennedy with aides during the Cuban missile crisis.

Añadir leyenda

The 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis couldn't have landed at a more appropriate moment—the final days of a race for the presidency of the United States. That crisis now seems part of the distant past, but it takes only a recapitulation of the facts—the photographs, the tape recordings, also the books and documentaries—to drive home, again, how close we came, at the time, to destruction in a nuclear war.

"We were very lucky," a commentator in "Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis" says. And that luck, the film makes clear, had to do with the character of the man Americans had chosen for their president—a view not unique to the filmmakers. It's one shared by most historians of the crisis.

A chapter in the Military Channel's miniseries "Commander in Chief: Inside the Oval Office," the documentary makes potent use of the declassified audiotapes Kennedy had secretly made. Only the president's secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, knew about the device set up to record the meetings with his inner circle and the military brass as they, and he, contemplated the grim choices before them. (For a priceless compendium of the transcripts, along with commentary, see "The Kennedy Tapes," edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow.)

The drama had begun well before the famous 13 days in October 1962. In the summer of that year, the CIA had taken note of a suspicious number of Soviet merchant ships headed to Cuba, where, intelligence flights revealed, missile sites had been set up—all only for defensive purposes, the Kremlin claimed. By the fall of 1962, Kennedy and his national-security advisers knew that the Soviets had, in Cuba, an arsenal of missiles capable of reaching and destroying every sector of the nation except possibly the far Northwest.

How had it all begun? The film provides an intriguing fragment of a home movie and related commentary by Nikita Khrushchev's son, Sergei, who offers an answer. He had, at age 27, filmed his father, who had brought his top advisers to a vacation hideaway near the Black Sea to plan the missile system to be set up in Cuba. It was his father's belief, Sergei Khrushchev says, that Cuba was to the Soviets exactly what West Berlin was to the Americans—"a small useless piece of land, but if you do not defend it you will lose face." The missiles had been designed as a message to the U.S.—do not invade Cuba.

The message the Americans took from those missiles, of course, was that they should prepare themselves for the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviets. There is nothing in the audiotapes quite so chilling as the comments from the president's advisers, military and civilian, as they contemplate—with as much professional poise as they can muster—the outcome of a nuclear exchange with the Soviets. There is certain to be chaos on the East Coast, says one. Another, in whom the possibilities have begun to work their effect, is devoid of hope. Estimating what would would happen to New York, he tells the assemblage, "You'd never be able to put it back together again."  More >>

“The Fourteenth Day: JFK and the Aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis”

Washington Post/ By Jonathan Yardley

The scholarly and journalistic literature on the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 is immense and continues to grow. Though the majority of those now on campuses or in newsrooms are too young to remember it, the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union over Soviet missiles based in Cuba brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and ranks with the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy as the most traumatic single events (as opposed to prolonged ones such as the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement) experienced by this country since the end of World War II. The 50th anniversary of the crisis is about to be observed; that it continues to fascinate us, including those who have no memory of it, should come as no surprise.
As David Coleman points out in the preface to “The Fourteenth Day,” the episode “is famously remembered as a thirteen-day crisis,” in large part because “Robert Kennedy chose ‘Thirteen Days’ for [his] memoir of the crisis” and because “much later, there was a Hollywood movie of the same name.” But contrary to received wisdom, the confrontation did not end in resounding triumph for the United States when, on Oct. 28, Premier Nikita Khrushchev caved and agreed to pull his missiles out of Cuba. Instead, as Coleman demonstrates, “Khrushchev’s capitulation had not brought the finality to the crisis that many had hoped for. A year after the crisis, just days before his assassination, Kennedy was still referring publicly to ‘unfinished business’ from the Cuban missile crisis.”
Coleman, who teaches history at the University of Virginia, adds little to our knowledge of the period following Khrushchev’s decision, but he adds nuances to our understanding of it because, as director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the Miller Center in Charlottesville and Washington, he has intimate knowledge of the tapes that Kennedy made, “most likely in anticipation of one day writing a memoir,” in the Cabinet Room of the White House between July 1962 and November 1963. At Kennedy’s place at the conference table in that room there was, “attached to the table, a discreet button . . . [that] allowed Kennedy to stop and start the reel-to-reel tape recorder that was downstairs in a basement room used for filed storage.” Apparently the only people who knew about this system were his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln; “the Secret Service agents who installed and maintained the system”; aide Kenneth O’Donnell; and Robert Kennedy and his secretary.   More >>

JFK Tapes Reveal New Insight into Tensions During Cuban Missile Crisis

KABC/

 

 

More >>

"Tenia una buena razon" Fidel Castro para matar a Kennedy?

despues de leer  Fidel Castro y el asesinato del presidente Kennedy 

cualquier analista-jefe cia con los resultados de trabajo que logro el dr. latell en su momento, estaria hoy contando alevines de salmon en un rio perdido en norteamerica o ayudando a ninos y ancianos a cruzar una congestionada interseccion en una de nuestras ciudades. pero el dr. latell tiene otro temperamento o misiones que cumplir en esta vida.  como un le carre o un forsyth hubiera sido mas creible y riguroso, pero equivoco el oficio.
entre los tontos e inteligentes utiles que mas han contribuido al fidelismo nadie supera a jfk. envia a la brigada 2506 al peor lugar posible para los propositos de la misma al modificar el plan original de bissel y luego cancela con una orden ejecutiva la cobertura militar norteamericana prevista. poco despues con los acuerdos kennedy-khrushchev le otorgo inmunidad vitalicia. por que fidel castro "tendria una buena razon" para matarlo?

Marilyn Sings to JFK: The 50th Anniversary of an Iconic Photo

TimeMagazine

JFK's Women: The Scandals [Documentary]

JFK assassination deathbed confession - Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura

John F Kennedy bought 1200 Cuban cigars hours before he ordered US trade embargo

Daily Mail/ By Lee Moran

 

President John F Kennedy ordered an aide to buy him as many Cuban cigars as he could just hours before he authorised the U.S. trade embargo - which subsequently made them illegal.

Kennedy asked his head of press and fellow cigar smoker Pierre Salinger to obtain '1,000 Petit Upmanns' on February 6, 1962, so he could have them in his hands before they were deemed contraband.

Then, seconds after he was told the next morning that 1,200 of Cuba's finest export had been bought for him, he signed the decree to ban all of the communist state's products from the U.S.

Order: President John F Kennedy asked an aide to buy him 1,000 Cuban cigars - the day before he authorised the U.S. trade embargo

Accomplices: Pierre Salinger (left) was asked by JFK (right) to buy him 1,000 Cuban cigars the day before he authorised the trade embargo on the communist state

The re-surfacing of the story, initially recounted by Salinger to Cigar Aficionado magazine in 1992, comes with the passing of the 50th anniversary of the embargo yesterday.
JFK, he said, called him into his office and said he needed 'some help' to find 'a lot of cigars'. He wanted '1,000 Petit Upmanns' and needed them by 'tomorrow morning'.
Salinger added: 'I walked out of the office wondering if I would succeed. But since I was a solid Cuban cigar smoker, I knew a lot of stores. I worked on the problem into the evening.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2098064/John-F-Kennedy-bought-1-200-Cuban-cigars-hours-ordered-US-trade-embargo.html#ixzz1lntmIazd

Former White House intern Mimi Alford reveals details of Kennedy affair

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Newsreel: The Red Threat. President Orders Cuban Blockade, 1962/10/22

JFK speaks on Cuban Missile Crisis - "Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba" - "a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment has been initiated" - "clandestine, reckless" - JFK had meeting with Gromyko

JFK’s Widow Blasted Times Over Cuba

New Zeal Blog

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media
While most of the media have focused on the Jackie Kennedy tapes as they pertain to such figures as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Lyndon Baines Johnson, there are fascinating parts of the conversations that demonstrate the anti-communism of President John F. Kennedy. In this context, Jackie singles out The New York Times for criticism for helping bring Castro to power.

One reason for the lack of attention to these excerpts may be that they shed light on one of the worst performances of the liberal media in the history of journalism. Partly as a result of the coverage of the Castro revolution by Herbert Matthews, the Times correspondent in Cuba, the Cuban people have been saddled with the Castro regime, which once hosted Soviet nuclear missiles targeting the U.S., for over 50 years.
National Review had published a caricature of Castro over the caption, “I got my job through the New York Times,” alluding to how the paper tried to promote classified advertising to job-seekers.
A book by Anthony DePalma, described as the dramatic story of “how a New York Times reporter helped Castro come to power,” referred to Matthews as “The man who invented Fidel.”
Humberto Fontova’s book Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant explains how Matthews’ coverage helped Castro. “This is not a Communist revolution in any sense of the word,” Matthews wrote in 1959. “In Cuba there are no Communists in positions of control.” Matthews added, “Fidel Castro is not only not a Communist, he’s decidedly anti-Communist.”
Jackie indicates that the Kennedys accepted the view of one of their family friends, Ambassador Earl E.T. Smith, that The New York Times and the State Department were largely responsible for Castro’s rise to power and the fall of Fulgencio Batista.
Smith said that the U.S. government facilitated Batista’s downfall by withdrawing support for his government. But Smith also said that “Until certain portions of the American press began to write derogatory articles against the Batista government, the Castro revolution never got off first base.”
Smith said that Matthews’ columns “eulogized Fidel Castro, portrayed him as a political Robin Hood, and compared him to Abraham Lincoln.”
While JFK had no sympathy for Batista, he thought it was “awful” that President Eisenhower, a Republican, had permitted Castro to visit the U.S. after his seizure of power in Havana, said Jackie, going on to cite Smith’s book, The Fourth Floor, on how the U.S. State Department had paved the way for Castro’s takeover. The title is a reference to the officials responsible for Cuba policy who were on the fourth floor of the State Department.
Smith wrote that the Fourth Floor had a “close association” with the Times’ Matthews, “who gave the impression by his editorial conduct of advocating Batista’s downfall.”
Smith, ambassador to Cuba when Castro took over, spoke at an Accuracy in Media conference in 1979 when Castro’s communist comrades in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas, were threatening a takeover of that country. Nicaragua was Cuba all over again, Smith said.
He signed a copy of his book to this columnist by saying, “To Cliff Kincaid in memory of ‘Accuracy in Media.’” It was a commentary on the failure of the Times to accurately depict Castro as the communist he was and the continuing failure by the media to factually describe the nature of communism and its adherents.
“We knew Earl Smith then, who’d been Eisenhower’s ambassador at the time,” said Jackie in the tapes featured in the book Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. “When we were in Florida—that’s all Earl could talk about. Yeah, then Jack was really sort of sick that the Eisenhower administration had let him [Castro] come in and then The New York Times—what was his name, Herbert Matthews?” Jackie adds, “I can remember a lot of talk about it and wasn’t—didn’t even Norman Mailer write something?”
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was interviewing Jackie, interjects, “Norman Mailer was very pro-Castro, yeah.”
When Schlesinger noted that Smith had written a book about Castro being a communist and working with the communists, Jackie replied, “Yeah—The Fourth Floor? Well, he was always saying his troubles with the State Department—I remember there was a man named Mr. Rubottom he kept talking about. And how hard it was—warning against Castro and how just it was like, I don’t know, dropping pennies down an endless well. He just never could get through to the State Department. So, I suppose he thought he was a Communist, yeah.”
Roy Rubottom was the Assistant Secretary of State at the time of Castro’s seizure of power.
Smith wrote in his book, “It cannot be maintained that the government of the United States was unaware that Raul Castro and Che Guevara, the top men of the 26th of July movement, are Communists, affiliated with international communism. There was ample evidence to that effect. I have shown in this book that it was impossible for Assistant Secretary of State Roy Rubottom, his associate William Wieland, and the Fourth Floor not to be aware of Fidel Castro’s communist affiliations.”
Wieland, the State Department’s chief of Caribbean affairs and a friend of Herbert Matthews, was accused of being a communist agent. Citing Nathaniel Weyl’s book, Red Star Over Cuba, Fontova says Wieland, who had partly grown up in Cuba, had been active in the Cuban Communist Party in the 1930s and had used the name “Guillermo Arturo Montenegro,” an alias he kept secret when he filled out a national security disclosure form. Wieland resigned in disgrace.
Analyzing U.S. policy, Smith wrote, “To make my point clear, let me say that we helped to overthrow the Batista dictatorship, which was pro-American and anti-communist, only to install the Castro dictatorship which was Communist and anti-American.”
Smith noted that, in a national broadcast on December 2, 1962, Castro declared, “I am a Marxist-Leninist and will be one until the day I die.”
Although JFK authorized an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, Jackie alludes to the failure to follow through with adequate military force. “I mean,” she said, “the invasion in the beginning and then no air strike—half doing it and not doing it all the way…” The result was a slaughter of anti-communist Cubans in the invasion force and a victory for the Castro regime.

#Conspiracy - The Kennedy Assassination: 24 Hours After -Documentary

Top Documentary Films
Uploaded by hottmaiil on Jun 28, 2011
  While the moments and hours after his tragic assassination were some of the most formative and important, that story has rarely, and only partially, been told.
For the first time, using never-before-seen transcripts only recently made public, this film pieces together the 24-hour period after the shots were fired.
The timeline reveals startling new information about the death of the president and the traumatic transfer of power to his successor, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.
From new details about when JFK really died, to the truth behind LBJ’s Oath of Office photo on Air Force One, The Kennedy Assassination: 24 Hours After uncovers an unfamiliar story born out of one of the most crucial days in American history.

Kennedy Detail: Confronting #Conspiracies

Shame on the Kennedys

Jan 24 2011, 10:00 AM ET By James Fallows

by John Tierney
From http://www.theatlantic.com/

In yesterday's Boston Sunday Globe, Bryan Bender reported on the Kennedy family's tight-fisted and iron-willed efforts to keep the official papers of Robert F. Kennedy secret.  Those papers, spanning Kennedy's public career, are housed under close guard at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.  The papers of greatest interest to historians and researchers are those from Kennedy's years of service as Attorney General in the Administration of his brother, John F. Kennedy. In particular, historians say the records presumably contain valuable archival resources -- perhaps diaries, notes, messages and memos, phone logs and recordings, and other documents -- that would reveal details, and answer questions, about Robert Kennedy's role in the early 1960s as the coordinator of Operation Mongoose, a covert effort to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro or to destabilize his regime.

But so far, nobody has been able to see this trove of documentary resources about the foreign-policy intrigues and governmental activities of a half-century ago.  Why not?  Because Robert Kennedy's family controls access to them.  The person in control is Max Kennedy, Robert and Ethel Kennedy's ninth son, and he won't let anyone see them.  His explanation, in a written response to questions from Bender of the Globe, is classic stonewalling -- some blather about scholars with "poorly conceived projects" who fail to follow "correct procedures" to seek permission to consult the papers. (What? They didn't genuflect as they approached Max's office?) Nice legal-speak from Mr. Kennedy.  It's also hogwash.  This is the sort of nonsense that now flows from a family that once was considered, at least in some circles, synonymous with the highest aspirational values of American politics and government -- principles such as a respect for transparency, openness, and the free flow of information. 


Why is this important?  For historians and others who care about the Cold War and events of that period, the stakes are high.  Bender reports that some historians believe the documents may contain evidence that Robert Kennedy's ruthless anticommunism led him to break laws and engage in other abuses of power.  Bender quotes Lamar Waldron, author of two books about the Kennedys and Cuba, as saying, "The main acts of the Kennedy presidency involved Cuba and we still don't have the most important records."  Noting speculation about the peculiarity of John Kennedy's having "handed his attorney general the anti-Cuba portfolio in the first place," Bender quotes Philip Brenner, a professor at American University, who has written extensively about US-Cuba relations: "It is very unusual for an attorney general to be in charge of an international covert operation.  ...[Perhaps] It involved the violation of so many domestic laws you needed the top law enforcement officer to oversee it."

Maybe the documents show wrongdoing; maybe they don't.  The point is we should know.  Let's find out.

For the Kennedy family, the stakes are also high. Maybe the documents show that in addition to being the good guy of mythology (the supporter of civil rights and social programs, and, later, ardent opponent of the Vietnam War), Robert Kennedy was also a thuggish lawbreaker.  Okay.  So be it.  The Kennedy family will not be able to forestall truthful revelations forever.  And by slavishly trying to protect and perpetuate the myth, the family runs the risk of fueling an opposite view -- that the mythology is bunk, or, at least, only partially true.  Yet, the Kennedys continue to stand athwart the door to this secret depository of public records. 

The papers of other Attorneys General are publicly available.  And Bender reports that "the JFK Library itself would like to make the documents available, but that "current law stipulates that it must first get a signed deed from RFK's heirs before the documents can be made widely available."

I don't know anything about the law governing this matter, and I don't have time right now to delve further into it.  But there is something deeply wrong about a policy that lets one person, Max Kennedy, decide whether the public will have access to this important information after the passage of five decades. There are at least two problems here, it seems to me: (1) a public official's family should not have control over public documents; and (2) allowing one person to decide such matters is deeply flawed as a matter of process and policy.  A bedrock principle of American government is the idea of countervailing power or "checks and balances."  In this context, this should mean that, at the very least, there are several people, from different political and institutional contexts and perspectives, who have final authority over the dissemination of this information.  Letting Max Kennedy -- any Kennedy family member -- decide this alone is unconscionable.

If, as noted above, some "current law stipulates" the details of this whole matter, then let's revisit that law.  I am not someone who is generally happy that Republicans now have control over the House of Representatives, but I would be happy to see them use their power to try to change whatever law now governs this.  I suspect such a change would make it through the House.  And wouldn't John Boehner and Mitch McConnell enjoy putting Senate Democrats in the uncomfortable position of having to defend the continued protection of these dark secrets from long ago?  It would sure be fun trying.  In any case, the Kennedy family's desire to protect the myth should not be determinant here.  

I know I sound like some anti-Kennedy zealot.  I am not.  In fact, I've long been an admirer of John and Robert Kennedy.  Here, perhaps, is why Bender's report on the Kennedy family's position on this issue strikes me as so particularly galling right now.  We are just coming off one of our periodic paroxysms of hagiographic hype about the Kennedy family.  (I may have more to say about this in a future post.) Some of what we've seen in recent weeks is perfectly legitimate -- observance of the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's inauguration as president and the passing of Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver.  But in the past month we've also been treated to widespread news reports about the death of Teddy Kennedy's 13-year-old dog, Splash; weepy commentary about how this month marks the first time in sixty years that there hasn't been a Kennedy in Congress; and Camelot-coated ceremonies commemorating the 50th anniversary of Robert Kennedy's swearing-in as Attorney General.  (Really?  The 50th anniverary of a cabinet officer's swearing-in? Please.)  This sort of thing is orchestrated by the Kennedy family and their legion of acolytes and media flacks.

Here's what seems increasingly wrong about all this.  The Kennedys don't deserve this attention and adulation if they're not willing to be open with the truth, if they remain intent on having the public see only the attractive side of Robert Kennedy's legacy.  They don't deserve the unstinting praise and the undying devotion if they're not willing to come clean.  If they were to do so, they might deserve the attention that comes their way now by constant management and manipulation of the family image.  Enough.

Shame on the Kennedys.  Their position on Robert Kennedy's records is inexcusable and indefensible.  The documents should be made public, even at the risk of bringing more shame on the Kennedys.

La unica foto de Marilyn Monroe con JFK

Fotografía inédita donde aparecen Marilyn Monroe, J.F. Kennedy, y el hermano del presidente, Robert F. Kennedy (Cortesía Keya Morgan).

JFK's legacy: 50 years later

Muere Theodore Sorensen el escritor de los discursos de JFK

AFP
Theodore Sorensen, cercano asesor y consejero, que durante 11 años escribió los discursos al presidente John F. Kennedy, falleció hoy a los 82 años.
Sorensen murió en el Presbyterian Hospital de Nueva York a causa de las complicaciones derivadas de un derrame cerebral que sufrió la semana pasada.
En su haber están el discurso de investidura del presidente Kennedy en 1961, en el que afirmó qu con su nombramiento “la antorcha pasa a una nueva generación de estadounidenses”.
También fue artífice de frases para movilizar a la ciudadanía como “no te preguntes qué puede hacer tu país por tí, pregúntate qué puedes hacer tú por tu país”.
Según el New York Times, Sorensen anticipó que el titular de su obituario sería “Theodore Sorenson, el escritor de discursos de Kennedy”, escribiendo mal su nombre y malinterpretando su trabajo.
“Nunca fui sólo un escritor de discursos”, defendió en una entrevista con este diario en 2007.
Sorensen entró en el círculo más cercano de asesores de Kennedy y participó en la redacción de la delicada correspondencia con el líder soviético Nikita Khrushchev durante la crisis de los misiles cubanos, recuerda el Washington Post.
El diario señala que Sorensen tuvo un papel fundamental en ayudar a Kennedy a escribir “Profiles in Courage”, en el que describe actos de valor e integridad realizados por ocho senadores estadounidenses y que le llevó a ganar el premio Pulitzer en 1956.
Tras la muerte de Kennedy, Sorensen se retiró a la actividad privada y en 1965 escribió una biografía sobre Kennedy que fue un éxito de ventas en todo el mundo.
También es autor de “The Kennedy Legacy” (1969), “Watchmen in the Night: Presidential Accountability After Watergate” (1975), “A Different Kind of Presidency: A Proposal for Breaking the Political Deadlock” (1984), “Let the Word Go Forth: The Speeches, Statements and Writings of John F. Kennedy, 1947-1963″ (1988), “Why I Am a Democrat” (1996) y “Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History” (2008).
Estaba casado con Gillian Sorensen y tenía tres hijos, Eric, Stephen y Philip, y una hija, Juliet.

The John F. Kennedy assassination: Four unanswered questions

The John F. Kennedy assassination: Four unanswered questions

La noche que dio luz al mito JFK

La noche que dio luz al mito JFK