Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History
By Ted Sorensen
Harper Collins, 2008
If Karl Rove (AKA – Bush’s Brain, Boy Wonder, Turd Blossom) represents the acme/nadir (you choose) of the modern phenomenon known as the celebrity presidential political and policy advisor, Theodore (Ted) Sorensen was a key link (if not the embryonic stage) in the evolutionary process that brought us to Rove. Sorensen spent January 1953 through November 1963 at the side of Senator then President John F. Kennedy. Counselor is most illuminating when discussing the confluence of politics and policy in the modern American democratic system. It is a bit self-congratulatory (the unknown aide getting a moment in the sun?) at times, and certainly hagiographic in tone when it comes to Kennedy, but Counselor is an engaging memoir of the decade in question.
In many ways Sorensen resembled Nick Carraway, an earnest Midwesterner who came East to find his fortune and fell into the orbit of a powerful, charismatic, ultimately doomed man. He was an all-purpose aide without specific portfolio, dispensing advice on everything from campaign strategy to presidential policy making (mostly domestic, some foreign). Counselor examined Sorensen’s role in events ranging from civil rights to the Cuban Missile Crisis; it also took the reader through Sorensen’s post-Kennedy life.
Sorensen’s first great hero was his father C.A; he portrayed C.A.’s unblinking idealism by quoting him directly: “Straddling by candidates on important issues ought to be punishable by political oblivion. A candidate who trims himself to fit the notions of every group will soon whittle himself to nothing” (39). Sage words, and they stuck with Sorensen for about five minutes into his first meeting with his Gatsby; after boldly questioning JFK about his refusal to condemn Joseph McCarthy more strongly, Sorensen accepted JFK’s explanation that, among other things, McCarthy was quite popular with his Irish Catholic voting base in Massachusetts, and then accepted his job offer (99).
The point here is not to label Sorensen an inattentive son, but to introduce how well Counselor illustrates American elected officials factoring, to varying extents, purely political considerations into every policy decision, even to the point when, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon passed a note to Sorensen worrying that American inaction would lead to a Republican majority in the House of Representatives (289). Sorensen implicitly recognizes that such thinking is an inevitable byproduct of a system that mandates regular elections, and yet, perhaps in a belated nod to his father, acknowledges his “shame and regret” when, during the 1960 presidential campaign, he advised against JFK making a condolence call to Coretta Scott King after Martin Luther King was jailed for a traffic violation: “I thought it was a symbolic act that would lose JFK more votes among white Southerners than it could win him among blacks” (272).
Counselor is a memoir and not a history book, so one must look elsewhere for detailed reporting and balanced analysis. By the end one begins to wonder whether Sorensen is a little envious of Rove and the other celebrity advisors of the modern age; after all, he counseled a US president and had great success as an international lawyer, without a whole lot of hoopla or public acclaim. His attempts to get out from under JFK’s shadow, like running for the Senate in 1970 or being nominated to head the CIA in 1977, were unsuccessful. Writing Counselor gave him the chance to strut his stuff, and the book is filled with testimonies to his character and acumen….from sources both expected (JFK, Robert Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy – unless he said something even remotely objective about her late husband) and slightly unexpected (most notably Lyndon Johnson).
From a personal standpoint it’s easy to understand how Sorensen, who spent a major part of his adult life with Kennedy, could not say anything too negative about his hero/friend. About the biggest blockbuster was that JFK had a tough time firing people. He touches lightly on the womanizing, and to his credit refuses to indulge too deeply in the “Kennedy would have gotten us out of Vietnam” school of hagiography. Even so, there were gaps; it’s hard to comprehend, for example, how he could analyze US-Cuban relations under JFK without even mentioning the various Castro assassination plots.
Sorensen wrote his definitive history of JFK, Kennedy, back in 1965. By shifting the focus from Gatsby to Carroway, as it were, he provides a useful supplement to his earlier work. If Sorensen had written Counselor before 2000, Karl Rove might have used it as a textbook, and perhaps future presidential aides-de-camp will study it in preparation for their own White House years.