Who Wrote Kennedy's Speech?

May 10, 2005

Who Wrote Kennedy's Speech?

The New York Times reviews two books about John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address and notes they come to opposite conclusions about the real author of the speech.

In Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America, Thurston Clarke says that "important and heretofore overlooked documentary evidence" proves that Kennedy was "the author of the most immortal and poetic passages of his inaugural address."

However, in Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address, Richard Tofel concludes that "if we must identify" one man as the author of the speech, "that man must surely be not John Kennedy but Theodore Sorensen."

Interestingly, the question of who wrote the speech "was an issue even before it was delivered, at least for Kennedy. Stung by accusations that a ghost writer was the real author of Profiles in Courage, which won Kennedy the Pulitzer Prize in 1957, the president-elect went to great lengths to showcase his own involvement in the speech that has since become his most remembered."
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Taegan D. Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country, including the Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Christian Science Monitor.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

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May 10, 2005