Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History

Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History
by Ted Sorensen

Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History
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Book Summary Information

Author: Ted Sorensen
Edition: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2008-05-01
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 576
Publisher: Harper

Book Reviews of Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History

Book Review: A Moving and Intimate Account of Poiltical Life with JFK
Summary: 5 Stars

Along with Arthur Schlesinger Jr's on the JFK administration "A Thousand Days", Ted Sorensen's memoir "Counselor" is one of the most beautifully written and deeply touching account of the presidency of John F Kennedy. Ted's latest book, Counselor, is a memoir but largely deals with the author's 11 years with JFK.

Ted, JFK's chief speech writer and confidant, is the man who gave the world JFK's immortal words "Ask not what the country can do for....".

The author has not lost any of his elegant prose and writes with the same immediacy and directness in his narration of the rising optimism, and soaring hopes during JFK's thousand days administration, and in numbing details the unbearable anguish, unrelenting waves of grief, and enveloping emptiness as a result of the assassination of JFK.

With the passing decades since Ted wrote the Kennedy biography in the mid 60's, the author was more open with disclosure of an insider's account without the distasteful and salacious details that seem to have become the selling points of some recent books on JFK.

For example, Ted disclosed that he, on instruction from JFK, did relay a message to cancel an arrangement with the then little known actress, Audrey Hepburn. That is it, no conjecture or speculation on the relationship or nature of the arrangement.

I highly recommend this book to all who love stylish writing and those who has interest in the JFK as a man, and his administration.

Summary of Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History

In this gripping memoir, John F. Kennedy's closest advisor recounts in full for the first time his experience counseling Kennedy through the most dramatic moments in American history.

Sorensen returns to January 1953, when he and the freshman senator from Massachusetts began their extraordinary professional and personal relationship. Rising from legislative assistant to speechwriter and advisor, the young lawyer from Nebraska worked closely with JFK on his most important speeches, as well as his book Profiles in Courage. Sorensen encouraged the junior senator's political ambitions?from a failed bid for the vice presidential nomination in 1956 to the successful presidential campaign in 1960, after which he was named Special Counsel to the President.

Sorensen describes in thrilling detail his experience advising JFK during some of the most crucial days of his presidency, from the decision to go to the moon to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when JFK requested that the thirty-four-year-old Sorensen draft the key letter to Khrushchev at the most critical point of the world's first nuclear confrontation. After Kennedy was assassinated, Sorensen stayed with President Johnson for a few months before leaving to write a biography of JFK. In 1968 he returned to Washington to help run Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign. Through it all, Sorensen never lost sight of the ideals that brought him to Washington and to the White House, working tirelessly to promote and defend free, peaceful societies.

Illuminating, revelatory, and utterly compelling, Counselor is the brilliant, long-awaited memoir from the remarkable man who shaped the presidency and the legacy of one of the greatest leaders America has ever known.

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