From: (BUFDRVR)

OK, so how would GWB phrase JFK's famous, "Ask not what your country
can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

Since Kennedy didn't write this, his speech writer did,

Ted Sorenson's book "Kennedy" clearly describes the process of writing that
famous speech and the role he and others played in it. Sorenson states "the
principal architect of the inaugural address was John Fitzgerald Kennedy."

He cites an earlier campaign speech in which Kennedy used similar phrasing.
Kennedy did receive advice and suggestions, some of it solicited and some not,
and advisers reviewed early drafts. Sorenson describes in detail the papers
spread out on Kennedy's coffee table and the entire process of crafting the
speech.

While Kennedy called upon Sorenson's formidable writing skills, it was not a
process in which he gave Sorenson a few policy details and asked him to "gussy
the stuff up with rhetorical fillips." Kennedy had a keen sense of history, and
did not have to have Ted Sorenson ghostwrite his inaugural address.

See Sorenson's book for the full text of that speech. In context, those famous
sentences clearly are a call to public service. Sorenson characterizes it as "a
summons to his fellow citizens to bear with him the burdens of freedom" - a
much larger call than what we think of today as public service or community
service.

Kennedy said the "torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans," and
that we would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any
friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty." And in
calling upon us to reach out to "peoples in huts and villages of half the
globe," he said, "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it
cannot save the few who are rich." Later, he called on Americans to "struggle
against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself"
and asked us to "join a historic effort to assure a more fruitful life for all
mankind."

Reminding his audience that few generations in the history of the world had
been given such a role or responsibility, Kennedy said that our "energy, faith
and devotion . . . will light our country and all who serve it . . . and the
glow from that fire can truly light the world."

Those words inspired a generation of baby boomers to change the world.
They shed blood in Vietnam in an effort to save it from communism, and some
shed bled in the streets of America to change the government's policy. They
joined the Peace Corps to bring the technology and skills we had to those
people in huts all over the world. They went to Appalachia to help the poorest
Americans.

They marched in the streets in the North and South to end segregation and
secure civil rights for all Americans. Women fought for access to careers
heretofore denied to them. We went to the moon, for God's sake!

John Kennedy also said in that famous speech that this work would not be
finished in the first hundred days, or the first thousand days, "nor even
perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin."

All this and massive tax cuts, too.



Chris Mark