Find Famous People Fast!

Browse Bios:

News and Notes

Commentary From the Editors

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Thanks for Nothing, Ted Sorensen

Here's a belated book review of my most frustrating read of 2009: Ted Sorensen's book Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History.

The book came out in 2008 and it's billed as Sorensen's frank personal memoir of his 11 years as John Kennedy's speechwriter and right-hand advisor.

Sorensen says in the preface that he was still in shock from JFK's assassination when he wrote his 1965 memoir Kennedy, plus Jackie and family were still alive and he didn't want to insult anyone and etc, etc. This time he's going to tell the truth, as well as he can remember it, for history. Great!

(Incidentally, you could call me a Sorensen fan.  I'm certainly a Kennedy fan, and Sorensen had the kind of brainy, working-for-the-good career I have always thought was admirable. )

The first 100 (large-print) pages or so of the book are recollections of Sorensen's childhood in Nebraska, then there are another 80 pages of his early years in Washington and early working years with JFK.

(Sorensen almost hired on with Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, incidentally -- another high-minded liberal and later one of only two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964. Sorensen then turned down a job offer with Washington's Scoop Jackson to take the job with JFK. Jackson was more of the Democratic rising star at the time, it seems. Sorensen asked both Jackson and JFK what he'd be doing for them. Kennedy told him he wanted him to research and write up detailed analysis of, and offer solutions for, the fading economic industries of New England. Jackson said, "I need a smart lawyer to get my name in the paper more.")

On to page 180, where we get a chapter titled: "My Perspective on JFK's Personal Life." Great! Finally, finally, I'm going to get the straight dope, from someone who knows, about exactly what shenanigans there were and how we can resolve the adultery-happy horndog side of JFK with the smart, idealistic statesman we also believe he was. Right?

Well, wrong. Instead I get 13 pages of Ted Sorensen wagging his finger at me for wondering about it and admonishing me not to believe everything I read in the paper. Well, 10 pages of him finger-wagging, and 3 pages of oblique references that seem to admit that JFK fooled around but really don't tell me a thing. (Sample: "To paraphrase E.B. White, 'He awoke every morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy it.'" And: "JFK had many virtues, and would probably have been a less interesting men if he had no vices.")

Sorensen admits that Kennedy has affairs ("After 1956 I was aware of a few flings and fancies along the campaign trail") but insists that most women who say they slept with him are untrustworthy, and who would ever trust a Secret Service agent who was breaking his oath to remain silent anyway? He even offers this remarkable quote from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr: "Questions which no one has a right to ask are not entitled to a truthful answer." Wha--?

Sorensen never met Marilyn Monroe and doesn't know if she and JFK had a romantic relationship. "Nor did I ever arrange a date for him... He never asked me to lie to the press or to his wife." And of course, "I do believe JFK loved his wife dearly, enough to take pains not to confront, humiliate, hurt, or anger her with public misconduct."

Then he rushes to wrap up with a denunciation of our salacious media age.

Well, heck.  As a fan, a Democrat, a student of history, and a citizen, I just don't think it's really wrong to puzzle over that part of JFK's life.  Most of the rest of his career has been revealed fairly clearly, from several angles.  I feel like I have a handle on it.  This, I still can't quite make sense of.

We're not talking about a few "flings and fancies" (what an artful phrase) with sweet young things on the campaign trail. That seems to happen to nearly every politician out there. (Except surely not George W. Bush or Barack Obama!)

We're talking about nutty stuff, and a lot of it: claims that Kennedy had naked women in the White House pool, had women sent in when Jackie was away, made it with Marlene Dietrich upstairs at the White House, etc, etc. God knows how much of it is true -- surely some of it is not -- but any part of it makes you think "Wait, how?"

Sorensen plays dumb. Oh, he does mention the pool: "Even hijinks in the White House swimming pool, long alleged, were perhaps inappropriate but not illegal." Yes, long alleged indeed. Alas, he just can't tell us if "hijinks" occurred or not. I'm sorry, but it's very, very hard to believe that the president was having it on with naked women in the pool and Sorensen never heard a word. Because, you know, in the White House nobody gossips.

It's just strange. It's very unsatisfying (and I imagine that this one chapter is the entire reason that Harper Collins agreed to publish the book in the first place. They must have been BEGGING Sorensen to address it frankly).

So we're still in the dark. We can believe biographers like Kitty Kelly and Thomas Reeves, with Kennedy making it with women in the upstairs bath while loyal Secret Service agents stand by to assist, or we can believe Ted Sorensen, who worked side by side with Kennedy for 11 years and barely heard a whisper about it.

But whatever the truth was, I'm a bad guy for wondering about it. Phagh.

It's too bad, because the rest of the memoir is quite lively.  Sorensen does get off a good little speechwriting story about Lyndon Johnson, too:

"I was told that, when LBJ received a speech draft containing a quotation from Socrates, he scratched out the philosopher's name and replaced it with 'my granddaddy.'"

Thus endeth the review.

Labels: , , ,

Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 11:33 AM0 comments  

Monday, December 28, 2009

The Weekend of the Naked Kennedys

Today's flap over the JFK naked-women-yacht photo -- the one that turned out to be a fake -- came at an odd time for our family.

36 hours earlier we had been confronted with a naked photo of JACKIE Kennedy, at a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. The hotel, 21c, is a groovy boutique hotel with modern art galleries in its lobby and basement. Tucked back in one corner was a grainy black-and-white shot of Jackie Kennedy (then Jackie Onassis), nude, against a white background.

I had no idea such a photo existed (or that it was art) but a quick trip around the Internet told the story: a paparazzo nabbed the shot 1972 on Skorpios in Greece, it was published in Hustler in 1975, and just recently the photographer gave a little tell-all chat about how he got the shot.

At 21c the artist had pasted a dagger in the middle of the photo, along with a nonsensical side statement declaring that the photo was no longer a nudie shot but now a meditation on iconography, intrusion, the modern world, etc, etc. It still looked a lot like a nude photo of Jackie Kennedy to me. Turning a corner in a lobby museum, after cocktails but before dinner, and seeing a shot of a naked, pale, and rather skinny Jackie Onassis, and then finding out it really is an actual naked photo of Jackie Onassis, is enough strangeness for any weekend.

(I'm a bit too modest to link to the photo here, with or without the artistic dagger. The shot is surprisingly scarce online anyway, though I found it by searching Google Images for "Jackie Kennedy nude.")

Our hometown of Cincinnati is also the site of the first Hustler store, and of Larry Flynt's infamous obscenity trial back in 1976. And just this month his brother sued Flynt in some kind of complicated fraternity-of-adult-bookstores wrangle. Between that, the museum, and today's JFK photo, the whole holiday season was starting to seem like a psychedelic whirlwind of naked Kennedys and yachts, with the unwelcome visage of Larry Flynt looming in the background.

So thank heavens the JFK photo turned out to be a phony.

See non-nude photos of Jackie Kennedy >>

Labels: , ,

Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 5:13 PM0 comments  

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Happy 80th Birthday, Jackie Kennedy

First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis would have turned 80 years old today.

She was born on 28 July 1929, and was only 64 when she died in May of 1994. (By comparision, actress Dakota Fanning was born in 1994.)

We've just added new photos of Mrs. Kennedy for the birthday -- including this swell 1963 shot with the family dogs.


Happy 80th, Mrs. Kennedy, wherever you are.

Labels:

Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 9:04 AM0 comments  

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Jackie and Bobby's 'Doomed' Love

The New York Post reports a few juicy details from an upcoming biography by C. David Heymann called Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story. The book says Jackie Kennedy had a four-year love affair with her brother-in-law, Robert Kennedy.

Heymann has written about Jackie and Bobby before, in 1989's A Woman Named Jackie: An Intimate Biography of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and in 1998's R.F.K.: A Candid Biography of Robert F. Kennedy.

We don't stand by Heymann's claims, but the Post story has some interesting anecdotes. Read it here.

Labels: ,

Posted by Mr. Hehn at 11:22 AM2 comments  

See all blog posts from: