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A Life at the Edge of History
Harper
May 2008
On Sale: May 6, 2008
576 pages ISBN: 0060798718 EAN: 9780060798710 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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 returns to 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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