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 starts in 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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Background Information
John F. Kennedy was a hero in World War II, a Senator from Massachusetts, and became the first Catholic President in 1960. The election of 1960 matched two World War II veterans and resulted in Democrat John F. Kennedy defeating Republican Richard M. Nixon to become the first Catholic president. The Apollo program was designed to put an American on the moon, and was successful in that objective in 1969. When the Soviet Union was caught trying to bring nuclear missiles into Cuba in 1961, the world was brought to the brink of World War III. Robert F. Kennedy belonged to the cabinet of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, and later ran for president only to be himself assassinated in 1968.
