Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy are both revered as inspiring orators. But JFK had one thing MLK didn’t: a brilliant speechwriter.

Ted Sorensen was, by all accounts, an accomplished lawyer. But he was much better known as President John F. Kennedy’s special counsel, adviser, and speechwriter.

Sorensen joined Senator Kennedy’s staff in 1952, helped him win the presidency in 1960, and remained at his side until his tragic death three years later. In addition to the innumerable speeches he wrote over those years, he is also credited with penning the letter to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that historians say averted nuclear annihilation.

“There was no mystery to it. He and I had worked together at the end for 11 years. Starting in the fall of 1956, we spent three, four years traveling the country together, just the two of us, to every one of the 50 states. And you get to know somebody, and his way of thinking, and his way of speaking pretty well when you do it day after day in all 50 states for three years or more. And so the ideas were his. The policies were his. The judgments and decisions were his. And when he expressed those decisions in the White House, it was not difficult for me, having participated in the meeting, to go a few steps down that hall to my office and try to reflect in words on paper the first draft of the decision he wanted to convey to the public.

“I’m happy to say that I usually submitted it to the President’s Chief Domestic Advisor. That was me. And I submitted it to the President’s Senior Policy Advisor and senior staff member, but that also was me. So, being immodest about it, basically, I only had to submit it to John F. Kennedy knowing that the policy expressed in the paper was his policy. And I wanted him to be comfortable with the words. And he changed that paper sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot. Sometimes he would reject an entire paragraph. If I liked it, I might find the speech a couple of weeks later and I would try to sneak it back in. Sometimes he would recognize it when I did.”

Our view

Many great political orators owe a debt to their speechwriters—from Ronald Reagan and Peggy Noonan, to Barack Obama and Jon Favreau. Having a great idea and knowing how to express it well are two different things. As we often see in the world of marketing, great things can happen when experts at each discipline work together.

Top 10 Speeches

These speeches are from an index of the 100 most significant American political speeches of the 20th century based on rankings by 137 leading scholars of American public address.

1. Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have a Dream”
2. John F. Kennedy Inaugural address
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt First inaugural address
4. Franklin D. Roosevelt “Pearl Harbour Address to the Nation”
5. Barbara C. Jordan 1976 DNC Keynote Address
6. Richard M. Nixon “Checkers”
7. Malcolm X “The Ballot or the Bullet”
8. Ronald Reagan Shuttle Challenger disaster address
9. John F. Kennedy Houston Ministerial Association speech
10. Lyndon B. Johnson “We Shall Overcome”