"Sounding the Trumpet" (Ivan R. Dee, 214 pages, $25)
President Kennedy's inaugural address is famous. Where did the words come from?
Mr. Judge, a former special assistant to President Reagan, is head of the White House Writers Group in Washington.
Posted on 08/24/2005 5:45:26 AM PDT by OESY
...Few inaugural addresses are as well remembered as John F. Kennedy's. The nearest modern competitor, Franklin Roosevelt's first, produced "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" and "good neighbor" (for FDR's foreign policy). JFK's produced: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country"; "if a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich"; "the trumpet summons us again...to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle." Nearly every paragraph includes a phrase that remains familiar....
It is natural that there has been extraordinary interest in who wrote the speech and how it was written.
Mr. Tofel shows that, instead of being the primary author, Kennedy can solidly be said to have contributed only nine of the address's 51 sentences. Adlai Stevenson was the source of eight. The biblical references were the suggestions of the Rev. Billy Graham and Rabbi Isaac Franck, Mr. Sorensen's go-to man for Old Testament quotations. From a draft submitted by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith Mr. Sorensen took the exhortation, "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate."...
Does it matter? Ever since James Madison helped George Washington with the first presidential inaugural, presidents have had speechwriters. Abraham Lincoln's one-time rival and secretary of state, William Seward, turned out the initial draft of Lincoln's first inaugural. Columbia law professor Raymond Moley did most of the work on FDR's first.
Like Kennedy, Roosevelt apparently thought it a political embarrassment for a speechwriter's role to become known....
None of Mr. Reagan's speechwriters invented his style, and none has written in just that manner since. Speechwriters learn to "hear" the voice of the president, fitting their habits of language and argument within his....
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
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