The recently released 1964 interviews of Jacqueline Kennedy by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. make for fascinating reading. But if the one subject on which I have some detailed knowledge is any indication, historians will need to be careful about putting too much stock in what Mrs. Kennedy said.
The subject is President John F. Kennedy’s writing partnership with Theodore Sorensen, his close aide and White House special counsel, once referred to by JFK as his “intellectual blood bank.” Mrs. Kennedy portrays her husband as the principal author of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Profiles in Courage,” as well as his inaugural address. Sorensen is depicted as having untruthfully claimed credit for the book, and then having greedily and ungratefully accepted all the proceeds it generated.
But the facts on these matters are known — and vary strikingly from what Mrs. Kennedy concluded. As historian Herbert Parmet demonstrated more than 30 years ago, Sorensen was the principal author of most of “Profiles in Courage.” There is no question that then-Sen. Kennedy read widely for the book as he recovered in Florida from a back operation. He also wrote first drafts of some portions of the book in longhand on legal pads, which accounts for Mrs. Kennedy’s recollections.
Sorensen said in his 2008 memoir that John Kennedy wrote the first draft of the book’s first and last chapters. But as Parmet established, there is no evidence that the senator drafted the case-study chapters that comprise the bulk of the book — and plenty of evidence that Sorensen did so. The book’s preface refers to Sorensen as Kennedy’s “research associate” who provided “assistance in the assembly and preparation of the material upon which [the] book is based.”
Mrs. Kennedy’s interviews add an unpleasant twist by raising the issue of money. Unbeknown to almost everyone (including, presumably, Mrs. Kennedy), JFK and Sorensen agreed in 1953 that Sorensen would receive half of all proceeds of material he wrote in his boss’s name. This agreement, not unusual in Washington at the time, was followed by the two men for four years.
But then came “Profiles in Courage” and the Pulitzer Prize it was awarded in May 1957. That same month, 16 months after the book’s publication, apparently acting on instructions from JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy, the senator’s lawyers drafted a formal agreement giving Sorensen a larger share of the book royalties for a period of years. Mrs. Kennedy recalls this as “Jack gave him all the money . . . because he felt Ted worked so hard.” Sorensen’s account of this deal in his memoir is uncharacteristically elliptical, and the share may have been 100 percent, as Mrs. Kennedy recalls.
Moreover, Sorensen also conceded late in life that he might have boasted in private, before this settlement, that he had written the book. This would have understandably sparked Mrs. Kennedy’s resentment if she believed the boast to be false. Such boasts may have been what led columnist Drew Pearson to claim on ABC, in late 1957, that Sorensen had written “Profiles in Courage.” Both Kennedy and Sorensen denied this, Sorensen in a carefully crafted affidavit, and ABC and Pearson issued a retraction.
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