Ted Sorensen

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John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology) by John M. Logsdon

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Ted Sorensen

But on April 19, after President Kennedy had in the early hours of the day walked disconsolately with Ted Sorensen and then alone on the south lawn of the White House in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs failure, he met later in the day with Lyndon Johnson and James Webb to discuss the organization of the accelerated review he had decided was needed. Johnson suggested that he would “have hearings, lay a background and create a platform for a recommendation to Congress.” He asked Kennedy to give him a memorandum “that would provide a charter for those hearings” and would be an “outline of what concerned him.”29 Ted Sorensen drafted a one-page memorandum, and President Kennedy signed it and sent it to Johnson the next day, April 20.

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Seamans added that rumors that the report of the Weisner group would contain ideas such “as a merger of NASA and the military or a transfer of manned space flight to the military, along with hints about the incompetence of NASA leadership,” were “quite unnerving.”47 Johnson to Chair Space Council During the transition, Ted Sorensen and David Bell, the Harvard economist whom Kennedy had chosen to be his budget director, met several times with BOB deputy director Elmer Staats. Among the many issues discussed, they agreed that the Space Council was not needed and that legislation abolishing it should be reintroduced in the new Congress.

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While Welsh wanted to put forward a simple amendment that retained the Space Act language that specified the functions of the council, Webb wanted to add a new section to the Act that specified the duties that would remain the president’s responsibility. These differences had been discussed in a March 7 meeting between budget director Bell and special counsel to the president Ted Sorensen, and the decision was made to go forward with the Welsh version of the amendment.12 No change in the name of the National Aeronautics and Space Council was suggested. The secretaries of defense and state, the administrator of NASA, and the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission remained council members; the one additional government member and the three public members of the council were eliminated, and the council was made part of the executive office of the president.

Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Frederick Kempe

Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, index card, Kitchen Debate, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Ted Sorensen, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, zero-sum game

When Kennedy traveled with his wife, Jackie, in their limousine the day before the inauguration, when he sat in the bathtub that evening, and again over breakfast the next morning after four hours of sleep, the president-elect reviewed time and again the latest version of his inaugural address. Whenever he could find a moment, he familiarized himself more deeply with each of its tightly crafted 1,355 words, honed through more drafts and rewrites than any speech he had ever delivered. Back in November, he had told his chief wordsmith, Ted Sorensen, to keep the speech short, nonpartisan, optimistic, uncritical of his predecessor, and focused on foreign policy. However, when they worked through the final draft—a process which got under way only a week before the speech would be delivered—he still found it too long and domestic for his liking.

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The most compelling line was also the one most quoted in Berlin newspapers the following day: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Yet Kennedy’s soaring rhetoric concealed a dearth of policy direction with regard to the Soviets. Kennedy was leaving all options open. Multiple rewrites altered only nuance, putting his indecision in more memorable form and excising language his speechwriter Ted Sorensen had drafted that might appear too soft toward the Soviets. A first version read, for example: “…nor can two great and powerful nations forever continue on this reckless course, both overburdened by the staggering cost of modern weapons.” Kennedy, however, did not want to call the U.S. course either “reckless” or unsustainable.

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He was a gregarious, hard-drinking bon vivant with wisps of black hair, piercing blue eyes, and a central-casting Russian accent. His friends and acquaintances included a number of Kennedy circle insiders: Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee; reporter Charles Bartlett, who had introduced the president to his wife, Jacqueline; the president’s chief of staff, Kenny O’Donnell; his special counsel, Ted Sorensen; and his press secretary, Pierre Salinger. However, Bolshakov’s most important link to Kennedy had been Frank Holeman, a Washington journalist who had been close to Nixon and was now trying to ingratiate himself with the Kennedy administration. With his six-foot-eight frame, Southern accent and manners, deep voice, and ever-present bow tie and cigar, he was known by colleagues as “the Colonel.”

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs

air freight, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, global village, Google Earth, Herman Kahn, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, yellow journalism

Like Bobby, the president was now leaning toward a blockade after initially favoring an air strike. His mind was still not completely made up, however. Blockade seemed the safer course, but it too carried huge risks, including a confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet navies. After the meeting was over, he took Bobby and Ted Sorensen out to the Truman Balcony of the White House, looking over the Washington Monument. "We are very, very close to war," he told them gravely, before deflating the moment with his mordant Irish wit. "And there is not room in the White House shelter for all of us." CHAPTER TWO Russians 3:00 P.M.

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He scanned it quickly, and read it aloud: BULLETIN MOSCOW, OCT. 27 (AP)—PREMIER KHRUSHCHEV TOLD PRESIDENT KENNEDY IN A MESSAGE TODAY HE WOULD WITHDRAW OFFENSIVE WEAPONS FROM CUBA IF THE UNITED STATES WITHDREW ITS ROCKETS FROM TURKEY. 27 OCT 1018A "Hmmm," objected a startled Bundy, the national security adviser." He didn't." "That's how it's read by both of the associations that have put it out so far," said Ted Sorensen. The Reuters bulletin was timed 1015, three minutes earlier. It was worded almost identically. "He didn't . . ." "He didn't really say that, did he?" "No, no." As was often the case, Kennedy was one step ahead of his aides. Khrushchev had made no mention of a possible Cuba-Turkey swap in the private message that he had sent the previous day via the U.S.

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The youngest and least experienced member of the ExComm, Bobby frequently veered between belligerence and inarticulateness. But he also had a knack for occasionally homing in on the essence of a problem. He sensed that the discussion in the ExComm was going around in circles, and that everybody was getting lost in a morass of commas and subordinate clauses. He urged his brother to permit him and Ted Sorensen to go off into another room and draft the reply to Khrushchev. "Why don't we try to work it out for you, without you being there to pick it apart?" The suggestion drew laughter from the rest of the ExComm. Nobody else dared speak so frankly to the president. Bobby broke the tension again a couple of minutes later when Taylor announced that the Joint Chiefs were calling for massive air strikes against Cuba by Monday morning at the latest "unless there is irrefutable evidence in the meantime that offensive weapons are being dismantled."

The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs by Jim Rasenberger

affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Gunnar Myrdal, Kitchen Debate, land reform, Neil Armstrong, Seymour Hersh, Ted Sorensen, Torches of Freedom, William of Occam

“It is one thing for a Special Assistant to talk frankly in private to a President at his request,” Schlesinger explained later, “and another for a college professor, fresh to the government, to interpose his unassisted judgment in open meeting against that of such august figures as the Secretaries of State and Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, each speaking with the full weight of his institution behind him.” Nor would it have helped—to underline the point Ted Sorensen made—that Schlesinger would have been in the unenviable position of arguing, like Senator Fulbright, against a military action. While the advocates of the venture could “strike virile poses and talk of tangible things” such as air strikes and landing craft, the naysayer was left with wimpy-sounding abstractions such as “morality” and “other such odious concepts.”

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He did ask Bissell what the deadline was for killing the operation. Bissell told him he had until noon of Friday, April 14, to halt the first air strikes, and noon of April 16 to cancel the landing. At some point during the day, Kennedy mentioned the Cuban operation for the first time to his speechwriter Ted Sorensen. “I know everybody is grabbing their nuts on this.” Happy Valley, April 13 (D–4) THE BRIGADE PILOTS and air crews woke to another infernal tropical morning on the coast of Central America that Thursday before the invasion. The air base at Happy Valley, on the outskirts of Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua—the launchpad for the air and sea attack on Cuba—was jumping with activity.

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Inside, a funereal miasma wafted through the rooms of the White House. Following his breakfast with the congressional leaders, President Kennedy attempted to carry on with business as usual, meeting the foreign minister of Ecuador, sending a housing bill to Congress, and consulting with speechwriter Ted Sorensen about his tax message, among other matters. By noon, all pretense of normalcy was gone. The cabinet room had been transformed into a crisis center, cluttered with maps of Cuba and boldly headlined newspapers. Staffers came and went bearing more bad news. In the pressroom, reporters nagged Press Secretary Pierre Salinger with a growing list of questions about the invasion.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

So if 1960 had occurred under the old convention system, Kennedy would have had a very hard time getting the Democratic nomination because he would have been rejected by all those people who had worked with him in Washington. Instead, 1960 is one of the first years in which presidential primaries had a very large influence on the nominating process.”8 The Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen tells a slightly different story about the importance of primaries. As he saw it, party leaders would not have picked Kennedy at a convention because they feared that a Catholic could not win in the Protestant South. Sorensen quotes Kennedy as saying, “Could you imagine me, having entered no primaries, trying to tell the leaders that being a Catholic was no handicap?”

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article_id=8f096495b5b5ff31ea2e41abfa7d00a3 5. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/opinion/brooks-why-our-elites-stink.html?_r=2&ref=davidbrooks 6. http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/how_to_understand_the_invisibl.php?page=all 7. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/july-dec99/drew_7-23.html 8. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/convention96/retro/beschloss_history.html 9. Ted Sorensen, Kennedy: The Classic Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 128. 10. Qtd. in Christopher Matthews, Hardball: How Politics is Played—Told by One Who Knows the Game (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 155. 11. John Aldrich, “The Invisible Primary and Its Effects on Democratic Choice.”

Very Bad People: The Inside Story of the Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption by Patrick Alley

airport security, blood diamond, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Donald Trump, energy security, failed state, fake news, Global Witness, lockdown, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, satellite internet, Steve Bannon, Ted Sorensen

Our first battle was to resist a move by some people there to exclude civil society altogether. The charge was led by the man that the diamond industry had chosen to represent them, Ted Sorensen. A former speechwriter for John F Kennedy, known for coining the president’s famous line, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country,’ Sorensen was openly hostile to NGOs. ‘I was really shocked and disappointed,’ Charmian said. ‘The diamond industry was asking, “What right do you, civil society, have to be here?” and Ted Sorensen was saying, “It’s completely undemocratic, having civil society in the room.”’ Charmian gave as good as she got.

First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents by Gary Ginsberg

affirmative action, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, forensic accounting, gentleman farmer, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, SoftBank, Ted Sorensen, traveling salesman, two and twenty, urban planning

I’m going to keep my old friends,” he quipped. Kennedy had what historian and presidential advisor Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the gift of friendship.” His world was filled with friends culled from every aspect of his life—his family, the elite schools he attended, the Navy, and even his extensive travels abroad. His speechwriter Ted Sorensen said the perfect Kennedy friend was someone “cheerful, amusing, energetic, informed and informal.” He gravitated toward those who could make him laugh and, in particular, execute a sophisticated prank. Kennedy himself loved to prank, and he never stopped even when he got to the White House. With his love of quick banter and good jokes, Kennedy also thirsted for gossip, the more salacious the better, especially when it concerned the affairs of politicians, reporters, and friends that he could then mischievously trade for more.

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Next came the “Irish mafia,” most notably Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell, both fiercely loyal men who met Kennedy in the 1940s and would serve him unflinchingly until the last day of his life. There were also his Navy friends, men like Red Fay and James Reed, who experienced the crucible of the Second World War with him and lived to tell, and retell, their heroic exploits. And then there were the intellectuals, men like Schlesinger, Bundy, and speechwriter and aide Ted Sorensen, who quenched the president’s thirst for knowledge. Schlesinger and Bundy managed to straddle the worlds of ideas and glamour, and they typically made the cut of the most sought-after social invitations. Sorensen with rare exceptions didn’t get invited, a rejection that rattled him. Jackie Kennedy later admitted she kept him away because of the persistent rumors—rumors she blamed Sorenson for instigating—that he was the real author of Profiles in Courage, the book that won Kennedy a Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957.

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them by Philip Collins

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, collective bargaining, Copley Medal, Corn Laws, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Great Leap Forward, invention of the printing press, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rosa Parks, stakhanovite, Ted Sorensen, Thomas Malthus, Torches of Freedom, World Values Survey

The first man to be given the title of speechwriter in the White House was Emmet J. Hughes, who wrote for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The turning point, when the speechwriter becomes a shadowy figure of national importance, is often said to be President Kennedy’s relationship with his amanuensis Ted Sorensen, though it was actually Richard Nixon who was the first president to establish a Writing and Research Department in the White House. The supposed promotion to a department of their own concealed a change that would have puzzled and irritated Cicero. Before they were separated into a distinct craft, writers took part in policy deliberation.

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We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom – symbolizing an end as well as a beginning – signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago. Before he began writing, Kennedy insisted that his speechwriter Ted Sorensen read all the previous inaugural addresses. Sorensen concluded that the best speech of all was Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and resolved to keep his drafting simple, or at least to prune the finished text of ornamentation. A lot of hard work goes into making a speech sound simple. Sorensen has said that ‘no Kennedy speech ever underwent so many drafts.

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

Needless to say, Vidal’s best man loses.61 At the 1956 Democratic National Convention, the actual Adlai Stevenson arranged for John F. Kennedy, now thirty-nine, his star rising, to deliver the nominating speech. Stevenson’s speechwriters drafted the speech, but Kennedy rejected it and, with help from his aide Ted Sorensen, wrote his own.62 He said, from the festooned rostrum, “The American people saw and heard and admired this man for the first time four years ago, when, out of the usual sea of campaign promises and dreary oratory and catchy slogans, there came something new and different—something great and good—a campaign and a candidate dedicated to telling the truth.”63 Stevenson had been new and different in ’52; in ’56, he was neither.

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The unimpeachable Newton Minow was among the many former Stevenson supporters who did not defect.43 Schlesinger later said that he regretted that the statement had come out so soon after Stevenson had been a guest in his house on Irving Street. “I felt badly that I hadn’t warned him that the statement was coming out,” he said.44 But it was a terrible betrayal. One of Galbraith’s friends accused him of the “worst personal betrayal in American history.”45 Ithiel de Sola Pool jumped ship, too. He sent Kennedy’s aide Ted Sorensen a copy of Simulmatics’ strictly confidential report on black northern voters. “I would be most interested in any comments you might make about it, or in any ways in which future reports could be improved from the point of view of political usefulness,” Pool wrote Sorensen, all but offering Simulmatics’ services to the Kennedy campaign.46 Sorensen, it seems, did not bite.

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

SAC escalated from DefCon-3 (Defense Condition 3) to DefCon-2, the only time this happened in US history; DefCon-1 means nuclear war. LeMay ordered 136 ICBMs readied to launch and added 54 SAC nuclear bombers to the 12 already on around-the-clock alert monitoring the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Arctic . . . anywhere he could detect in advance a Soviet-launched strike. JFK’s special counsel Ted Sorensen remembered of one ExComm session that “Curtis LeMay called [the quarantine] ‘almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich’ and demanded ‘direct military intervention right now,’ while the Marine Corps’ commandant insisted that ‘You’ll have to invade . . . as quick as possible.’ . . . The Joint Chiefs discussed an annihilation bombing run by the 82nd Airborne which would ‘mop up Cuba in seventy-two hours with a loss of only ten thousand Americans, more or less.’ ” LeMay thought Kennedy was a coward, that Cuba was an excellent excuse to teach the Russians their place in the world: “The Russian bear has always been eager to stick his paw in Latin American waters.

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I wonder what our attitude”; “just as if we suddenly put”; “knows we don’t really live”; “an explicit threat to the peace”; “It doesn’t make any difference”; “How gravely does this change”; “I don’t think there is a military”: Sheldon Stern. “We had no desire to start”: Nikita Khrushchev. “There was a fear that if”: Gunther Klein. “During its entire history Russia”: Sergei Khrushchev. “Curtis LeMay called [the quarantine]”: Ted Sorensen. “The Russian bear has always”; “During that very critical time”: LeMay, Mission. “LeMay talked openly about”; “It wasn’t until nearly thirty”: Errol Morris. “Later we learned that the submarine”: Klein, Brauburger, and Knopp. “Everything came to a halt”; “The president said we are prepared”; “Father sensed that he was losing”; “Castro thinks that war will begin”; “That is insane”; “The Soviet government has ordered”: Sergei Khrushchev.

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, framing effect, Free Software Foundation, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, market bubble, market design, minimum wage unemployment, prediction markets, profit motive, rent control, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, slashdot, stem cell, systematic bias, Ted Sorensen, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Wisdom of Crowds, winner-take-all economy

The simplest way to test the aggregation of expert judgments is through use of predictive questions on which unambiguous evidence is available. Chapter 2 / 1. See Reid Hastie, David Schkade, and Cass R. Sunstein, “What Really Happened on Deliberation Day?” (University of Chicago Law School, unpublished manuscript, 2006). 2. I draw here on Janis, Groupthink, 14–47. 3. Ibid., 16. 4. Ted Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: HarperCollins, 1966), 343. 5. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days (New York: Mariner Books, 1965), 258–59. 6. See David Schkade et al., “Deliberating about Dollars: The Severity Shift,” Columbia Law Review 100 (2000): 101. 7. Aristotle, Politics, trans. E. Barker (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 123. 8.

Apollo by Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, cuban missile crisis, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, index card, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, old-boy network, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, Ted Sorensen, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, War on Poverty, white flight

He is omniscient; he swallows and digests whole books in minutes; his eye seizes instantly on the crucial point of a long memorandum; he confounds experts with his superior knowledge of their field. He is omnipresent. ...He is omnipotent. . . . He’s Superman!” Burns disapproved. The buildup was too much, too fast. The drop, when it came, would be all the more precipitous. But Burns’s was a lonely voice. Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s White House counsel, remembered the heady feeling that the new Administration could do no wrong. To Sorensen, just twenty-six years old, it still seemed as if they had “the magic touch.” As that second week of April began, the glow was as bright and warm as ever. On Monday, the tenth, the President had invited the Boys’ Club “Boy of the Year” who was visiting the Oval Office to come with him to the season’s baseball opener at Griffith Stadium.

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Kennedy put funds for Apollo spacecraft on indefinite hold: Memorandum from James Webb to President Kennedy, 23 March 1961; attached memorandum from Robert Seamans to James Webb, 23 March 1961; and Robert Seamans’ notations on results of the meeting with Kennedy. Memoranda provided courtesy of Robert Seamans. 5. “We’re going to the moon” Chapter title: Statement of Ted Sorensen, recounted in authors’ interview with Hugh Sidey. “hour of euphoria”: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965). The phrase is the title of chapter nine. “He is not only the handsomest . . .” James MacGregor Bums, “John Kennedy and His Spectators,” New Republic, 3 April 1961, p. 7.

Winds of Change by Peter Hennessy

anti-communist, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, liberal capitalism, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, oil shock, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment

The Russians picked it up.194 It was not the moment for a US spy plane to violate Soviet air space. News of Maultsby’s wanderings did not reach the Pentagon until early afternoon, causing Kennedy’s Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, to express ‘sharp alarm about the danger of a war’.195 According to his speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, Kennedy reacted by saying ‘There’s always some son of a bitch who doesn’t get the message.’ The President fully appreciated that the straying U-2 might have led Khrushchev to ‘speculate that we were surveying targets for a pre-emptive nuclear strike’.196 It was a menacingly bad day for U-2s.

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., pp. 1–2. 193. Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew with Annette Lawrence Drew, Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of Cold War Submarine Espionage (Arrow, 1998), p. 45. 194. Scott, The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Threat of Nuclear War, p. 85. 195. May and Zelikow (eds.), The Kennedy Tapes, p. 519. 196. Ted Sorensen, Kennedy (Hodder, 1965), p. 789. 197. May and Zelikow (eds.), The Kennedy Tapes, p. 571. 198. Scott, The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Threat of Nuclear War, pp. 91–2. 199. Ibid., p. 101. 200. Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, pp. 478–80. 201. Scott, The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Threat of Nuclear War, p. 104. 202.

Spacewalker: My Journey in Space and Faith as NASA's Record-Setting Frequent Flyer by Jerry Lynn Ross, John Norberg

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, glass ceiling, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, space junk, Ted Sorensen

After our missions were over, both the Shuttle and Mir crews were invited to the United Nations. We met in New York City and returned the flown “Agreement” during a very nice function at the UN. The UN Special Advisor for Public Policy Gillian Martin Sorensen was our gracious hostess. Her husband was Ted Sorensen, the political strategist and speechwriter for President Kennedy. Ted was associated with the speech in which President Kennedy said, “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, independent contractor, information retrieval, Internet Archive, land reform, means of production, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ted Sorensen

If he couldn’t raze Dulles’s mausoleum to the ground, he would at least give it a new name. No stranger to Washington politicking, Schlesinger attempted to rally support for his plan before submitting it to the president, sending copies to Washington power attorney Clark Clifford, veteran diplomat Chip Bohlen, and JFK’s trusted aide and speechwriter Ted Sorensen. By the time the final draft was sent to Kennedy, it was a more complicated and unwieldy document than Schlesinger originally intended. When the Dulles forces, including Taylor himself and the CIA’s congressional allies, immediately mounted a stubborn resistance to the new plan, Kennedy realized that overhauling the U.S. intelligence complex was going to be a much trickier political process than he had hoped.

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The cordial relationship between Schlesinger and Dulles suffered a bit of strain in the summer of 1965 when Life magazine ran an account of the Bay of Pigs that was excerpted from A Thousand Days. In his book, Schlesinger put the onus for the disaster on the CIA, which—he accurately wrote—had maneuvered Kennedy into the sand trap. Dulles found the Life article—along with a similar one that Look magazine excerpted from Ted Sorensen’s memoir, Kennedy—“deeply disturbing and highly misleading.” The Schlesinger and Sorensen broadsides on the Bay of Pigs spurred Dulles into action, but after wrestling with a long, belabored—and unbecomingly bitter—response for Harper’s, he decided it was best to take the high road. President Kennedy had done the honorable thing and taken responsibility for the fiasco, he told journalists calling for comment, and he would leave it at that.

King Richard: Nixon and Watergate--An American Tragedy by Michael Dobbs

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, MITM: man-in-the-middle, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Ted Sorensen, éminence grise

He sensed an opportunity for a public relations campaign that would “give no quarter whatever to the doves.” The results, however, were deeply disappointing. Why was the administration’s “big gun” failing to emphasize the message “peace with honor”? Why was no one building up RN the way that JFK had been built up by acolytes like Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger? Why did Kissinger mention the commander in chief only three times in his most recent press briefing when he mentioned him fourteen times back in December when everything was falling apart? Why no references to the president as a “profile in courage”? “Henry kept saying we’d kill the critics,” Nixon grumbled to Haldeman.

Checkpoint Charlie by Iain MacGregor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, British Empire, index card, Kickstarter, Live Aid, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ted Sorensen

After the motorcade returned him to Tegel Airport, Kennedy informed the waiting press (and crowd) that he would leave a letter for his successor in the White House, which would say, “To be opened at a time of some discouragement.” In it, the note would read, “Go to Germany.” On the plane taking him to his next stop in Dublin, Kennedy further confided to his speechwriter Ted Sorensen, “We’ll never have another day like this one as long as we live.” * * * Khrushchev and Ulbricht attempted to save face by holding their own high-profile meeting in East Berlin a few days later, and uniquely, Michael Howard, having witnessed Kennedy’s historic speech at the Rathaus Schönberg, now watched the Communist response.

Inviting Disaster by James R. Chiles

air gap, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alignment Problem, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, crew resource management, cuban missile crisis, Exxon Valdez, flying shuttle, Gene Kranz, Maui Hawaii, megaproject, Milgram experiment, Neil Armstrong, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ted Sorensen, time dilation

The men did their routine jobs well enough, but no one had much energy for tackling the difficult tasks, which needed protracted troubleshooting. Fortunately our endurance run ended soon afterward when reinforcement workers arrived via helicopter. But some workers don’t have that luxury. Recalling the brutally long days and nights of the Cuban Missile Crisis, presidential adviser Ted Sorensen said one of the most worrisome revelations was how sleeplessness eroded the powers of judgment. THE CAN-DO MAN Early-morning fatigue played a part in a very close call with a British airliner in June 1990. The central actor was a hardworking maintenance manager for British Airways; we don’t know his name, but we’ll call him Jones.

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made by Walter Isaacson, Evan Thomas

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, George Santayana, guns versus butter model, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, uranium enrichment, éminence grise

LOVETT’S INVOLVEMENT IN THE MISSILE CRISIS: Lovett Oral History, Kennedy Library; authors’ interviews with Robert Lovett. HARRIMAN INVOLVEMENT IN MISSILE CRISIS: Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 821–822; Abel, The Missile Crisis, 102. HARRIMAN AND THE LIMITED TEST BAN: Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban, 201–262; Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 893–909; Ted Sorensen Oral History, Kennedy Library; Harriman-Kennedy cables, reprinted in Seaborg; Senate Foreign Relations Committee, August 1963, Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Hearings; Sorensen, Kennedy, 734–745. HARRIMAN AT FE AND EARLY VIEWS ON VIETNAM: Authors’ interviews with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., William Sullivan, Michael Forrestal, Roger Hilsman, Dan Davidson, John Kenneth Galbraith; Sullivan, Obbligato: Notes on a Foreign Service Career, 176–179, 189–190; Sullivan Oral History, 1970, Kennedy Library; Acheson oral history seminar, Truman Library; Galbraith, Ambassadors Journal, 342; memo of Harriman meeting with President Kennedy, Apr. 6, 1962, Kennedy Library; Sulzberger, Seven Continents and 40 Years, 355; Harriman Oral History, 1964, Kennedy Library; Harriman Oral History, 1969, Columbia.

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Paul Nitze interviews for the Air Force Oral History Project, 1977, 1981, and the Truman Library, 1975 (not released to public), Nitze private papers, Arlington, Va. Paul Nitze Oral History, 1971, Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass. Public Broadcasting Service, “The First Fifty Years: U.S.-Soviet Relations, 1934-1984,” television documentary, 1984. Dean Rusk Oral History, 1981, Duke University, Durham, N.C. Ted Sorensen Oral History, Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass. William Sullivan Oral History, 1970, Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass. Cyrus Vance Oral History, 1969-1970, Johnson Library, Austin, Texas. Books Abel, Elie. The Missile Crisis. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966. Acheson, Dean. A Democrat Looks at His Party.

The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, dark matter, El Camino Real, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Simon Singh, Ted Sorensen

The massive boson, which in particle physics is named for Higgs, may be traced to Goldstone’s original paper. Tom Kibble recalled a suggestion that the Higgs Boson “should be called the Goldstone boson, while the Goldstone boson should be called the Nambu boson—though that would be very confusing!” The words on the tomb of President Kennedy will always be attributed to him, though it was Ted Sorensen who wrote them. Their impact and resonance through the years come from the writer and the orator both. So perhaps will be the legacy with this boson. It will be attributed to Higgs, if only because its discovery will be in a particle-physics experiment and that is the name by which that community knows it.

Kissinger: A Biography by Walter Isaacson

Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, belling the cat, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Dr. Strangelove, Great Grain Robbery, haute couture, Herman Kahn, index card, Khyber Pass, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, oil shock, out of africa, Plato's cave, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Socratic dialogue, Ted Sorensen, Yom Kippur War

—OTTO VON BISMARCK, September 29, 1851 CAMELOT’S OUTER CIRCLE Although he was a cold war conservative on retainer to Rockefeller, Kissinger was registered as a Democrat, and he voted that way in the 1960 election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. He had known Kennedy since 1958, when speechwriter Ted Sorensen asked him to join a panel of academic advisers to meet with the young senator now and then in Boston. In addition, Kennedy was on the “Visiting Committee” of Harvard’s Government Department, a largely ceremonial function that brought him into contact with the tenured professors there. And socially, Kissinger was friendly with the Kennedys’ favorite historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

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Necessity for Choice, 32–36, 57, 59, 81–83, 87, 89; Henry Kissinger, Mar. 8, 1989. 24. Kissinger, “The White Revolutionary: Reflections on Bismarck,” Daedalus, Summer 1968, 888, 893, 898, 906, 910. SEVEN: THE FRINGES OF POWER 1. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Feb. 16, 1989; McGeorge Bundy, Feb. 8, 1989; Abram Chayes, July 13, 1989; Ted Sorensen, Feb. 16, 1989; Henry Kissinger, Aug. 28, 1989; WHY, 9. Epigraph from Hugh Sidey, “An International Natural Resource,” Time, Feb. 4, 1974. 2. WHY, 13–14; Henry Kissinger, Mar. 8, 1989. 3. Letter from Kissinger to Bundy, Mar. 1, 1961, national security files, Kissinger folder, Kennedy Library. 4.

Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey Into Space by Stephen Walker

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, fake news, Gene Kranz, lockdown, lost cosmonauts, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, South China Sea, Ted Sorensen

He was, the press secretary wrote, ‘in the most emotional, self-critical state I had ever seen him’. Although he took full responsibility for the operation, Kennedy could not forgive the CIA chiefs who had planned and pushed for it. He called them ‘sons of bitches’. And more than once in the days that followed he would blurt out in the middle of a meeting, ‘How could I have been so stupid?’ Ted Sorensen, one of Kennedy’s intimate circle and his principal speechwriter, wrote that the president ‘was not accustomed to failure in politics or in life’. But now he had failed; moreover his brazen lies about American involvement in the Cuban operation had been brutally exposed. He suffered, as Salinger described it, the ‘scorn’ of the Communist world while, critically, ‘neutral nations were now more receptive to overtures from the Kremlin’.

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, carbon tax, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, guest worker program, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information security, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, South China Sea, stem cell, Ted Sorensen, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working poor, Yom Kippur War

Adam Levine, a press aide, recognized that it would be delivered almost exactly on the fortieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis and suggested harking back to the line John F. Kennedy drew against the threats of his era. One of the speechwriters protested that Kennedy was a Democrat. “Yeah, that’s right,” agreed Karl Rove. “What about that?” “Yeah,” Levine shot back, “the worst you are going to get is Ted Sorensen will write a New York Times op-ed that says exactly why everything you have said President Kennedy would have disagreed with.” But if so, Levine went on, it will mean they had struck a chord. Invoking Kennedy would take some of the partisan sheen off the case and summon a memory associated with strength.