“Ask not.”

That’s the way Ted Sorensen answers when people ask him if he wrote the most famous line John F. Kennedy ever spoke.

It’s a cute way of deflecting the question. And a smashingly effective one to boot.

People also wonder if he wrote Profiles In Courage, JFK’s most famous book. Here, however, Sorensen admits having done much of the research and at least some of the writing.

He spent so many years as Kennedy’s closest aide that it became impossible to separate out the ownership of every phrase. Their travels around the country in the days when JFK was laying the groundwork for his presidential campaign meant that Ted, while in his twenties and early thirties, came to grasp how Kennedy thought about things.

This mentality Ted expressed in the speeches he wrote for his boss at that early stage and later during JFK’s presidency.

In any event, Sorensen prefers to be known, not as speechwriter, but rather as counselor─a word he has chosen for the title of his memoir. Research and writing for “Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History” took six years of work by him and his collaborator.

A recent forum at the Kennedy Library showed off Sorensen to excellent advantage. Though rendered almost completely blind by a stroke, he remains intellectually sharp at age 80. At the speaker’s podium he proved remarkably effective, relaxed and full of good humor.

Tall, genial, and a skilled speaker, Sorensen knows how to deal with an audience he cannot see clearly. Displaying a lively sense of humor, he handled adroitly several questions from a group of highly sympathetic people who were in attendance.

Asked to identify the most significant advice he gave to Kennedy, he called up what Whitey Herzog said when manager of the Kansas City Royals. Someone had wondered what advice Herzog gave to his third baseman George Brett, one of the best hitters in baseball history.

“Look ‘em over carefully, George,” he said, and “Get a hit, George.” What else could anyone say to such a talented batter?

Despite his problems with physical vision, Sorensen continues to display inner farsightedness. For him, the main qualities needed in our nation’s leaders are four that JFK himself like to cite: courage, judgment, integrity, and dedication.

Not surprisingly, he finds the current leadership in the White House severely lacking in these virtues. And he feels free at this stage of his life to show himself strongly critical of what has been done to us over the recent past.

From experience of government at the highest levels, he holds that “military solutions never solve political problems.”

Connected with this conviction, Sorensen favors direct contact with leaders of nations not well disposed toward our own. In fact, he lays down a law: “To have no communication with the enemy is the worst kind of folly.”

He thus agrees with Barack Obama whose candidacy he continues to support enthusiastically.

When asked whether the last letter that JFK wrote to Nikita Khruschev should be made public, he endorses the idea strongly. Letting Americans read that document would enable them to see a form of effective negotiation with a threatening foe.

Some historians do not rate the Kennedy presidency highly. In fact, they give it low marks, in contrast to the feeling of the American public in polls.

You will not be surprised to hear that Ted Sorensen claims an outstanding legacy for the JFK regime. Making up that legacy, in his view, is a series of lasting achievements.

The peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile crisis deserves first mention, of course. But Sorensen adds several other actions to which the Kennedy administration can lay claim.

Among them are the campaign against racial segregation launched by JFK; the arms control agreement; the space program with the moon exploration as the highlight; the Peace Corps; and greater services for the mentally ill and the retarded.

In summing up, Sorensen points to a different atmosphere achieved by the administration of which he was such a central part. “Under Kennedy, this was a great and generous country that offered help and hope to all kinds of people, all kinds of religions, and races in all parts of the world.”

If this latter sentiment seems excessively grandiose to be a statement of fact, it can at least be taken as an expression of Sorensen’s idealism. He obviously feels distress at what has happened to this country in recent years and wants to contrast it with a time when leadership aspired to something better.

I don’t myself subscribe entirely to Sorensen’s appraisal of the administration in which he served. But I do welcome his vision of a time when I felt inspired with a new spirit in Washington.

He was indeed an important part of a sea change in American political and cultural life, one that I hope will happen again.

Richard Griffin