It’s nearly election day, and Ted Sorensen is dead. Yes, that will be true for every election to come, now, but it won’t ever feel true — at least not in my head, where the words still sometimes circle in the patterns he created. Ted Sorensen, more than any single political staffer, made me want to be a writer.

I read Kennedy over the summer between sixth and seventh grade, mostly while sitting in the stands at slow-pitch softball games. I read it and I savored it and I wanted his job. To think, just with words, a man could place himself next to the president! Well, that was heady stuff. It still is. Sorensen’s Kennedy isn’t the world’s best book about the Kennedy administration — I still prefer Richard Reeves’s presidential biography — but as a tribute, it was lovely. It was the kind of book a brother writes about a brother. More than that, it was the kind of book someone who’s been inside the head of someone else might write — the kind of book that only someone who’s been writing the words that have made a presidency soar could write.

Sorensen made words important because he wrote them at a time, and for a man, who made it seem like anything he said was possible. That’s a beautiful marriage of intent and delivery. It’s why the Kennedy administration is memorable.

The 1961 Inaugural Address is to me what the Bible probably is to some: a statement of the way things should be and a guide for how to live. That it’s so blatantly patriotic doesn’t bother me because it manages to also see a role for America in a world that’s more than a conglomeration of countries elbowing for room. What I really take from that speech is the cadence. Tripled phrases are common, but Sorensen knew this was a bigger speech than that. He blew up the form. He put together strings of fours: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself are our enemies. Let both sides… let both sides… let both sides… let both sides…

The famous lines talk of a New Frontier and asking what we can do for our country. My favorite is in the middle: “So let us begin anew—remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

Compromise doesn’t have to come from weakness. Would that the world still remembered this, as the world should still — should always — remember Ted Sorensen, the writer behind that shining American political legacy.

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