Ted sorensen biography

Name at birth: Theodore Chaiken Sorensen

Ted Sorensen was the longtime advisor and counselor to President John F.

Kennedy who wrote Kennedy’s most memorable speeches — including his inaugural address with its famous passage, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

Ted Sorensen grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, got his undergraduate (1949) and law degrees (1951) from the University of Nebraska, and moved to Washington, DC in 1951.

Two years later he was hired as an aide by Kennedy, then a newly-elected U.S. Senator. Sorensen became an indispensible Kennedy aide over the next eight years, even helping Kennedy write his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage, published in 1955.

(Sorensen drafted much of the book in collaboration with Kennedy, although JFK’s critics later claimed Sorensen was the primary writer.) When Kennedy was elected president in 1960, Sorensen b