what you can do for your country. [Those sorts of statements] lend themselves to easy
 memorization.

M: It does not hurt you either; you have protected yourself on both counts. I think that was
 part of Kennedy's technique of politics and of language or of some of his speech writing.
 His speeches were irregular. I think they reflected the fact that he did use speech writers
 or took the style of [different] people, and then used different styles so his speeches were
 irregular. But there were those elements of style, such as you described. He got into the
 balanced sentence a little bit too. That was usually attributed to Sorensen [Theodore
 Chaikin "Ted" Sorensen, lawyer and speech writer for Kennedy]. It was one of the
 legacies of Stevenson which has not been very well honored by later practitioners.

G: Just recently I got out Sorensen's book on Kennedy and re-read the chapter in which Ted
 Sorensen describes the making of the inaugural address which was a very short speech,
 one of the shortest delivered in this century, but very powerful. After the inauguration,
 Life Magazine, which had no special sympathy for Kennedy, published the entire text of
 the speech calling it a great inaugural address.

M: I thought it was a very bad speech. I was there, heard it, and said, this does not sound
 good to me. It was too aggressive, and I thought Kennedy seemed to be on the defensive
 too much. He was [trying] to prove himself more than I thought that he had to, especially
 the militancy.

G: "Let the word go forth from this time and place..."

M: That is right.

G: "We'll bear any burden, undertake any hardship..."

M: That is right. It was sort of a declaration of war on the world [which] in effect said, if you
 behave yourselves, we will tolerate you, but you had better be careful because we are
 ready. Supposedly McNamara [Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense under
 Kennedy] developed a contingency plan for every possible confrontation around the
 world. This [speech] was the declaration or the base for the contingency plan which they
 proceeded to do. I do not know whether I could really prove it, and I do not know
 whether you allow loose historical judgements on this program.

G: My program is known for loose judgements of every subject.

M: I have watched candidates, and I have served under five presidents while I was there [in
 Washington D.C.], and this is also true of members of Congress. After they are elected,
 they want to do something to prove that the charge made against them in their campaign
 that most worried them was invalid. For Kennedy, I think it was the Nixon charge that he
 was inexperienced, that he was not prepared to make hard decisions, that he was soft and
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