Our chief criterion was always audience comprehension and comfort. This meant

1. Short sentences, short clauses and short words, wherever possible
2. A series of points or propositions in numbered or logical sequence wherever appropriate; and
3. The construction of sentences, phrases and paragraphs in such a manner as to simplify, clarify and emphasize.

The test of a text was not how it appeared to the eye, but how it sounded to the ear.

The secret to Ted Sorensen’s legend was not his command of sentences but the trust of his President: he was a confidante, not merely a wordsmith.  He entered Jack Kennedy’s circle early on, after writing a St Patrick’s Day speech for the young Boston senator.   As a test it was akin in its political significance to a young Labour MP’s first Durham Miners’ Gala, and Sorensen passed with aplomb.

He joined the chaotic senatorial staff of Massachussetts’s famous son soon afterwards, an early member of the expanding collection of the brightest and best that became the supporting cast of Camelot. His title, Special Counsel to the President, reflected a decade of riding shotgun with John F Kennedy from campaign to Senate and to campaign again.  On many occasions, particularly in the early years, he drove Kennedy.

It was a relationship formed by young men, both idealists in the pursuit of power and influence.Unlike his idol, Ted Sorensen was a modest, abstemious man.  He fitted ill with the party atmosphere of the Kennedy White House, famously described as “a travelling frat party.”

Sorensen’s personal moral compass came from his Protestant roots in Nebraska, and his prose reflected that more austere upbringing.  Although equally heartfelt, his framing of the Democratic argument for equality and progessive realisation of America’s potential was a drier, more intellectual call to reason than the wonderful mighty stream of Martin Luther King’s Baptist oratory.  In that, it fitted perfectly the wry Bostonian reserve of his President.

In 1998, when working at the bottom rung of a Democratic congressional staff in the eye of impeachment storm, I had the privilege to interview Ted Sorensen.  By then a busy New York attorney, his acceptance of my request was immediate, a rare and unexpected courtesy to a Welsh Oxford undergraduate on foreign shores.  In our lengthy discussions he was gracious, passionate and intellectually rigorous.  His recollections of the early days of H.R.7151, the mundane name of an embryonic bill that would become the great 1964 Civil Rights Act, were sharp and incisive.  His pain at recounting the appalling news from Dallas and the brutal transfer of power to Lyndon Johnson was as raw four decades later as it was in November 1963, when America’s national trauma was multiplied a hundredfold in the close brotherhood of those who knew and loved John Kennedy.

Ted Sorensen was part of history, not just present when it was being made.  He advised John Kennedy on Civil Rights, the decision to go to the moon, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Yet it is for his words rather than his advice that he will be remembered.  He wrote with characteristic humour in his 2008 autobiography, Counselor, that:

I have little doubt that, when my times comes, my obituary in the New York Times (misspelling my last name once again) will be captioned ‘Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy Speechwriter.’  I accept the inevitability of that description and, on reflection, I do not object.

I count it as my great privilege to have had a fleeting contact with an unusual political hero.  When asked why I choose to spend so much of my time researching the power of speeches, I reach for Ted Sorensen’s words.   He wrote that:

I do not dismiss the potential of the right speech on the right topic delivered by the right speaker in the right way at the right moment.  It can ignite a fire, change men’s minds, open their eyes, alter their votes, bring hope to their lives, and, in all those ways, change the world.  I know.  I saw it happen.

Any speechwriter, and any progressive who believes in the power of words to make a difference, will feel his loss.