"Hello, Mr. President,” she said, a phrase she hadn’t uttered in fifty years."

[Clio the Leo]

AUTHOR, AUTHOR
by Adam Frankel
FEBRUARY 28, 2011

On January 20th, the fiftieth anniversary of President Kennedy’s Inauguration, a group of fifteen staffers who had worked in the Kennedy White House held a reunion at a local D.C. steak house. One of them was a secretary named Gloria Sitrin, whose boss had been Kennedy’s aide and speechwriter, Ted Sorensen. Sorensen had been my boss, too, when I helped him with his memoir, “Counselor,” in the years before I became a speechwriter for Barack Obama. So I tracked down Sitrin and invited her and her husband, Dave, to lunch at the White House mess.

In anticipation of the lunch, Sitrin, who is eighty-one and lives in Springfield, Virginia, had decided to poke through the box in her garage where she had stashed her Kennedy mementos, back in 1964. She brought along a couple of manila folders, the first of which contained crumbling news clips and old photographs: one of Sorensen at Sitrin’s wedding, one of Sitrin and J.F.K.

The second folder contained six yellowing sheets of typescript, held together by a rusted staple, and covered with Sorensen’s unmistakable handwriting. At the top of the first page were the words “The Inaugural—Draft 2” and, in the corner, the initials “TCS” and the date “January 14, 1961”—six days before Kennedy was sworn in. It appeared to be the earliest surviving draft of Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, a speech that inspired generations to take up public service and that set the standard for every inaugural since. Its authorship is still debated.

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Most scholars believe that Kennedy and Sorensen each worked on the speech separately, talking occasionally by phone, until Sorensen joined the President-elect in Palm Beach on January 15th, the day after the draft found in Gloria Sitrin’s garage was produced. This, then, may be the copy that Sorensen took to Florida.

The draft allows us to see, in a new way, the evolution of the speech. In “Kennedy,” Sorensen wrote that J.F.K. thought his early drafts focussed too heavily on domestic issues: “We must begin by facing the fact that history’s most abundant economy has slackened its growth to a virtual halt. That the world’s most productive farmers have only suffered for their success. . . . That too many of our cities are sinking into squalor.” This and other passages from the January 14th version also give the impression that Kennedy and Sorensen were still writing in the language of the campaign.

<snip>

It is unclear whether this draft contained a version of the inaugural’s best-known line. Its concluding paragraphs, where “ask not” would be, are missing. We may never know the answer, at least not until another former Kennedy staffer discovers a box of treasures in the garage.

After lunch, I asked the Sitrins if I could make a copy of the draft. I took it upstairs, thinking that the President might be interested in seeing it. He was standing in the outer Oval Office when I entered. I handed him the draft, explaining how Sorensen had torn up the first one, and how Sitrin had kept this one in a box for fifty years.

“This is unbelievable,” he said, sitting down with it in a chair by his secretary’s desk. He then went downstairs to meet Gloria Sitrin. “Hello, Mr. President,” she said, a phrase she hadn’t uttered in fifty years.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/02/28/110228ta_talk_frankel

[dionysus]

1. kick