One Degree of Separation Between Obama's Speech and JFK's

DENVER, Aug. 28 A strange bit of personal history links two landmark events in the history of the Democratic Party -- John F. Kennedy's acceptance speech at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1960 and Barack Obama's parallel ceremony Thursday night at Invesco Field.

Kennedy's collaborator in the speech that launched the phrase "New Frontier" was Theodore C. Sorensen, a young Nebraskan who had traveled the country with the senator from Massachusetts on the quest that led to Los Angeles.

Sorensen, now 80 and afflicted with visual agnosia, a condition that has left him nearly blind, said in a phone interview from his New York law office Thursday he had not had any input into Obama's speech. But he said he would listen "with immense interest" because one of Obama's speechwriters, Adam Frankel, "served as my eyes for six years while I was working on my memoir."

Frankel was a Princeton sophomore when Sorensen recruited him to work on "Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History," published earlier this year.

The remarkable thing about Kennedy's speech, which drew praise at the time, is that it was almost devoid of the programmatic detail many Democrats have urged Obama to include in his speech. Sorensen said he agrees that Obama needed to flesh out his biography and agenda. But Kennedy, he said, "did not want [his speech] to sound like a reading of the platform," and feared that a recital of Democratic domestic programs would give it "too partisan a tone. He thought the appeal to the country should not be partisan."

After saluting his defeated rivals for the nomination, Kennedy addressed the religious issue that shadowed his campaign, much as race has shadowed Obama's. Only the second Roman Catholic to run for president, Kennedy said to the Los Angeles rally, "I hope that no American, considering the really crucial issues facing this country, will waste his franchise by voting either for me or against me solely on account of my religious affiliation. It is not relevant."

Kennedy took a few rhetorical swipes at his opponent, Richard Nixon, saying that "before he deals, somebody better cut the cards." But he dealt gingerly with the popular Republican incumbent, Dwight D. Eisenhower, saying that Nixon "did not measure to the footsteps" of the general.

Like Obama, he cast his appeal on a generational basis, with a declaration that "the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do. . . . It is a time, in short, for a new generation of leadership -- new men to cope with new problems and new opportunities.

There was no generation gap between Kennedy and Nixon, unlike the wide age difference between Obama and John McCain. But Kennedy argued that the GOP platform was "a pledge to the status quo -- and today there can be no status quo."

He used his outdoor setting -- "facing west on what was once the last frontier" -- to set up the metaphor that came to identify his administration (the New Frontier) and to call on voters to summon up the courage to join him on that frontier.

"My call," Kennedy said, "is to the young in heart, regardless of age."

When Sorensen was asked how much Obama might be able to borrow from that address, delivered the year before the candidate was born, he said, "There are obvious parallels, with Kennedy facing a religious test and Obama, a racial test. And both then and now, we had a Republican administration that for eight years had allowed problems to accumulate and people to lose heart."

Across the miles, you could almost hear the old speechwriter contemplating how he would address the new challenge. When I called him moments after Obama had finished speaking, he gave the speech an A-plus.

Sorensen said he liked the "aggressive" tone, thought the biographical parts worked and said Obama had "clearly defined" his differences with McCain. The absence of any phrase as memorable as "New Frontier," he said, did not mar the performance.