jfk essay harvard kennedy school

JFK's Very Revealing Harvard Application Essay

At 17 years old, the future president seemed to understand that the value of an elite education is in the status it offers.

John F. Kennedy is one of the most mythologized figures in contemporary American history. At age 17, though, he was just a kid trying to get into college (a kid with a wealthy, famous father, of course).

The Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum has a digitized version of Kennedy's 1935 Harvard application, which includes his grades and his response to the essay prompt, "Why do you wish to come to Harvard?" Here's how the future president answered:

The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college , but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a "Harvard man" is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain. April 23, 1935 John F. Kennedy

Business Insider dismisses the essay for being five sentences long (I'm not sure how much more he could have written given the space) and implies that his answer wasn't carefully considered. That's probably true—Kennedy's grades show that he wasn't an especially good student in high school, and there's not much evidence that he took his education seriously at this point in his life. Plus, as Gawker points out , Kennedy wrote nearly exactly the same essay for his Princeton application.

Still, Kennedy's essay shows a profound, if implicit, understanding of the primary value of attending an elite school: status and personal connections, rather than mastery of academic skills and knowledge. Notice that he only makes one mention of the education he'd receive at Harvard—a passing reference to the school's superior "liberal education." The rest of the paragraph focuses on the the non-academic benefits: having a "better background," sharing the same alma mater with his dad, and enjoying the "enviable distinction" of being a Harvard Man.

And it is, indeed, an enviable distinction. Harvard has produced eight United States presidents, more than any other school. The school's website has a whole section devoted to all the alumni who've won Nobel prizes. Two of its dropouts are among the richest people in America. Whether these glories are due to the school's excellent education or its impressive alumni network and name recognition, who knows? But Kennedy clearly thought he knew the answer.

About the Author

Why Is JFK's Harvard Admissions Essay Going Viral?

Social media users are discovering President John F. Kennedy's "underwhelming" Harvard application.

In one tweet from February 7, a UCLA PhD student tweeted JFK's Harvard application essay with a simple screenshot and the text "YALL IM CRYING PLEASE LOOK AT THIS!!!" The tweet has nearly 70,000 likes and 8,000 retweets.

Many users point out how underwhelming the essay is, others suggest that the line that got him accepted was the mention of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who graduated from Harvard in 1912.

It reads the essay full:

The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a "Harvard man" is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain.

It's only five sentences long, and as many pointed out on Twitter, it doesn't really say much. Yet, the essay worked—he got in, started in fall of 1936, and graduated cum laude in 1940 with a Bachelor of Arts in government.

john f kennedy's harvard yearbook photograph and summary of activities

Harvard admissions has become extremely competitive in the years since JFK applied; the acceptance rate fell to 3.43 percent in 2021. Yet, according to the Harvard Crimson , "Between 2014 and 2019, the acceptance rate for legacies, 33 percent, dwarfed Harvard’s overall acceptance rate of only 6 percent."

JFK's own children and grandchildren attended Harvard: his daughter, Caroline Kennedy graduated from undergrad in 1980, and granddaughter, Rose Kennedy Schlossberg, graduated in 2010. Jack Kennedy Schlossberg didn't attend for undergrad, opting to go to Yale University instead, but he recently graduated with dual degrees from Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School.

It's not just Twitter where JFK's essay is going viral; on TikTok, law student Rashid Eldoma analyzes the essay:

Musician Jordan Kahan, who goes by Boxout, also responded to the essay on the platform joking that it "basically boils down to 'Harvard's pretty cool, also my dad went here, so let me in please."

This isn't the first time the essay has gone viral. It surfaces every few years, in part thanks to the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum's digitized version.

preview for 10 Beauty Lessons We Learned From Jackie Kennedy

Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma , a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram .

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new york, ny may 5 lee radziwill and carolyn bessette kennedy at supper club for the party following the performance of the parsons dance companys premiere of composer shelly palmers anthem on may 5, 1998 in new york city photo by patrick mcmullanpatrick mcmullan via getty images

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John f. kennedy’s harvard entrance essay resurfaces online 87 years later.

It’s no “Ask not… ” speech, that’s for sure.

John F. Kennedy’s college admissions letter to Harvard University has resurfaced on social media some 87 years later, and the Twitterati are hardly impressed with the iconic 35th president of the United States.

The note, penned by the young White House hopeful on April 23, 1935, is currently archived at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Museum and Library in Boston, Massachusetts.

His prompt was simple — “Why do you wish to come to Harvard?” — but his answer was even simpler.

In an indisputably underwhelming statement composed of just five sentences, the 17-year-old Bay State native answered the query that would determine his educational future.

He wrote, “The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university.”

He continued: “I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a ‘Harvard man’ is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain.”

Kennedy eventually wound up at Harvard and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in government in 1940.

“ ’Harvard is a whole vibe. And I’m tryna catch the wave. Lemme in.’ — JFK,” one reader joked . The reaction garnered more than 59,000 likes on Twitter.

"Harvard is a whole vibe. And I'm tryna catch the wave. Lemme in." – JFK — C.E. Little, Ph.D. (@ItsDrLittle) February 1, 2022

“If you want to see peak white mediocrity, here’s JFK’s Harvard admission essay,” added another.

Even the Velveeta cheese brand chimed in : “LOL OUR PRODUCT DESCRIPTION FROM OUR WEBSITE IS 28 WORDS LONGER THAN JFK’S HARVARD COLLEGE ESSAY!”

The Democrat’s short but influential term as the nation’s youngest elected president began in 1961. JFK was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963 at the age of 46.

But his family’s academic legacy continues until this day . Jack Schlossberg, Kennedy’s grandson via daughter Caroline Kennedy, recently graduated from Harvard Law and Harvard Business School.

Schlossberg, 29, previously attended Yale University and graduated in 2015 with a degree in history with a concentration in Japanese history.

He also appeared at the 2020 Democratic National Convention where he voiced support of now-president Joe Biden and touched upon JFK’s career.

“Times have changed, but the themes of my grandfather’s speech — courage, unity and patriotism — are as important today as they were in 1960,” he said. “Once again, we need a leader who believes America’s best days are yet to come. We need Joe Biden.”

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November 19, 2021

Harvard Kennedy School MPP and MPA2 Application Essay Tips [2021 – 2022]

The essays discussed below are for the MPP and the two-year MPA applications. (The MPA/ID and the MC/MPA and Mason’s program have different prompts.)

HKS seeks accomplished, well-rounded master’s students – people with proven academic success, strong leadership and career potential, and “commitment to advancing the public interest.” The school also wants the student body to be diverse. Your application overall will address these factors; the essays provide a valuable opportunity to underscore through specific detail how you meet these criteria and will be a significant contributor during the program and later in your career. Most important, use the essays to weave together these elements into a coherent story and presentation – one that clarifies your path to your public interest goals.

Further, HKS seeks students who embrace change. The website notes, “Our programs will change you. They are changing the world through the outstanding leaders and dynamic ideas that come out of HKS.” This “change” theme is echoed in the mandatory essay questions. Keep this emphasis on change on your radar as you work through your essays. Showing you can change and grow strengthens your credibility for goals that involve driving change externally – i.e., you are not just talking the talk, but walking the walk.

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Harvard Kennedy School 2021-2022 MPP & MPA application essay questions

Mpp and mpa mandatory personal history essay.

Diversity of all kinds (race and ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, physical abilities, political philosophy, intellectual focus, socioeconomic status, geographic and many others) is important to enriching the educational experience at the Kennedy School. Please share with us anything in your background or life experience that has shaped your perspectives and how that would contribute to the classroom and community at HKS. (250 word limit)

This essay is a lovely opportunity to round out your profile and to show unique and distinctive aspects of your life experience – approach this essay with pride and passion. It has potential to give deeper color to the whole application.

I’ll start with some don’ts: Don’t write a mini autobiography. Don’t talk about your love of travel. Don’t fear to present topics that are often considered no-no’s, like religion and politics (there is of course a right way and a wrong way to discuss such things). Don’t drench the discussion in buzz words and abstractions (the topic of “diversity” has a tendency to bring these out).

Select your topics – anywhere from one to three, as more than that will be too many for meaningful discussion – and root each one in anecdote and example. Consider topics that will both expand and enhance your profile and support (directly or indirectly) your “case” for admission delivered in the other essays. Add a brief reflection about the contribution, as it’s not the fact that you have a certain type of diversity; it’s the insight and perspective you’ve gained from it that ultimately make it meaningful to the adcom and future classmates.

MPP and MPA expectations essay

Describe a time when you did not meet expectations and elaborate on how the experience changed you. (250 word limit)

The adcom is clearly seeking out people who are able to grow and change – in this case, in response to a failure of some sort. That requires understanding one’s shortcomings related to not meeting expectations. Choose a specific example/story (if well in the past, make sure it’s weighty to justify the distance) and tell the story. And, whose expectations? It could be someone from any realm: a friend, a colleague or work superior, a professor, etc. – or you. “How it changed you” can be part of the story – ideally include some action taken as a result of the change, not just “realized” or “understood” or “broadened perspective.”

MPP and MPA perspectives essay

Describe a time when interactions with others and/or an experience caused you to change your mind or expanded your point of view. (250 Word limit)

There’s that word again – change. This time, it’s about a time you changed in response to an experience or interactions (expanding your point of view is also a form of change). And, again, approach the essay straightforwardly, as a story, narrating what happened and your growth as a result of it. If possible, include some action taken as a result of the change, beyond “merely” increasing your understanding in some way.

MPP and MPA JFK essay

The Harvard Kennedy School motto, echoing the President for whom the School is named, is “Ask what you can do.” Please share with the Admissions Committee your plans to create positive change through your public leadership and service. (500 word limit)

This is essentially a vision-and-goals question. I suggest a professional focus, though in some cases it could also include non-work plans. Three keys to making this essay work:

In describing your plans/goals, clarify what “positive change” means to you – it’s easy to forget that it means different things to different people. (I see a lot of drafts of these and other essays talking about making change without any clear idea of what constructive change means to that person.) And cite specific impacts you intend to deliver through your service. Make it concrete. These results need not be comprehensive, “save the world” level changes – it’s more realistic, more credible, and probably more interesting to the reader to discuss changes to a given corner of the world, or segment of population, or issue. Show your engagement with and knowledge of the region or issue by employing anecdote and detail.
Discuss practical aspects – how you envision executing those plans in real terms, focusing on your anticipated leadership and sense of service. Of course, you needn’t have all the answers – that’s part of what the program will help you with.
Since the question asks you to portray how you’ll do the above “through your public leadership and service,” root the plans in your experience to lend credibility to what you say you will do in the future. Weave in brief examples of public leadership and/or service as a basis for your future efforts.

Essay for MPP applicants

The MPP curriculum is designed to broaden students’ perspective and sharpen skills necessary for a successful career in public service through a rigorous set of courses that draw on the social sciences but are adapted for action. Please describe how the MPP curriculum at HKS would leverage your distinctive abilities and/or fill gaps in your skill set as you equip yourself to achieve your career goals. (500 word limit)

You’ve delineated your career vision and plant in the JFK essay. Based on these goals, what are your relevant distinctive abilities and your skills gaps? Don’t just cite these facts; provide brief examples or anecdotes of at least some and make specific how they relate to your goals. It’s an opportunity to strategically showcase some of your experience. Finally, describe how the MPP program will enhance your existing abilities and fill in the gaps – always in the context of your goals, keeping in mind the practical nature of the program: how it will help you leverage your strengths and gain requisite skills/knowledge to effect desired change.

Essay for two-year MPA applicants

There are many pathways one can pursue in order to make a difference in the world. Why is the MPA Program at HKS an appropriate pathway to achieving your goals? (500 word limit)

Here too, your goals cited in the JFK essay will be the starting point: they create the need to learn certain things and the conditions to benefit from certain opportunities. So, first, identify the gaps in learning that you must fill to realize your goals and also the opportunities that would be helpful in realizing your goals (such as access to certain types of people or challenge to move past reflexive thinking). Then detail how the HKS program meets these needs and offers these opportunities . This “how” can include all manner of things about the program, depending on your needs: curriculum structure and/or content, professors, special programs, classmates, extracurricular clubs/programs, partner groups/programs, etc. The key is to be specific and to link the elements you cite to your goals, learning needs, and/or broader professional growth and development.

Optional essay question (MPP & MPA)

If you have any concerns about your prior academic, professional, or personal background that you would like to share with the Admissions Committee, please provide an explanation. (250 word limit)

This optional essay question specifically instructs you to write the essay only if there are concerns about your background. If you do need to use it, write a succinct, straightforward explanation. If you have evidence that academic under-performance does not reflect your true ability, add a sentence stating that point with the evidence (e.g., maybe you did poorly overall in college, but in your last semester earned straight A’s).

Harvard Kennedy School 2021-2022 MPP & MPA2 application deadline

Application deadline for both programs	December 1, 2021
Financial aid application deadline	Late January

Source: Harvard Kennedy School website

***Disclaimer: Information is subject to change. Please check with individual programs to verify the essay questions, instructions and deadlines.***

From Example to Exemplary - Download your guide today!

Related Resources:

5 Fatal Flaws to Avoid in Your Grad School Statement of Purpose , a free guide
Harvard Kennedy School: An Interview with Admissions Director Matt Clemons , a podcast episode
Different Dimensions of Diversity , a podcast episode

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People are dunking on JFK's half-assed Harvard admission essay in the wake of the Supreme Court axing affirmative action

The Supreme Court ruled to overturn race-based affirmative action on Thursday.
After the ruling, many focused on John F. Kennedy's underwhelming 1935 Harvard admission essay.
People painted Kennedy as a classic legacy admission — a system that exists in some form today.

In the wake of the Supreme Court's decision on affirmative action , the essay John F. Kennedy wrote in 1935 emerged online as a topic of discussion — and derision.

The essay, which was first published by The Washington Post in 2013, reappeared on social media on Thursday after the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action in college admissions was unconstitutional.

Affirmative action — giving additional weight to applicants from disadvantaged demographics — had been upheld for four decades and helped minority groups access elite institutions like Harvard.

When Kennedy applied there, aged 17, the process was nowhere near as rigorous, with an application form just three pages long, per The Post.

Kennedy did not appear to be trying very hard to impress the school, other than name-dropping his rich father.

"The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university," the essay read.

"I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a 'Harvard man' is an enviable distinction and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain," it added. That was it.

—Rebecca Brenner Graham, PhD (@TheOtherRBG) June 29, 2023

The short essay shocked people on social media, who pointed out that the mention of Kennedy's father — a wealthy businessman who graduated from Harvard in 1912 — was most likely what got him into the Ivy League.

One person jokingly tweeted : "Getting into Harvard: 1) be a person of color in the top 20 of every student in America, with SATs and recommendation from a state senator. 2) have Robert Kennedy be your dad, write something about being a Harvard man on a cocktail napkin, and transcribe it to your application."

Although Kennedy's example was extreme and unlikely to cut muster today, US colleges do explicitly favor applicants whose parents went there, via the legacy system.

JFK's Harvard | Harvard's JFK

Just as Harvard shaped “Jack” Kennedy during his time as a student, John Fitzgerald Kennedy influenced Harvard during his political career, first as US senator, then as President of the United States.

This year, a century after the birth of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the nation will reflect on the life and legacy of the man who became the 35th President of the United States. The objects in this exhibition, drawn from the collections of the Harvard University Archives, are presented as evidence of the important relationship between Kennedy and Harvard University. Kennedy, as a young politician, was in some ways shaped by his experience at Harvard before World War II; in turn, the policies he pursued as President would have an influence on Harvard as well.

JFK’s Harvard | Harvard’s JFK is a collaborative effort of the Harvard University Archives, Harvard Library Preservation Services, Harvard Library Communications, and Harvard Public Affairs & Communications.

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cover image showing Kaneisha Grayson and the text Harvard Kennedy School 2022-2023 Essay Advice

Harvard Kennedy School 2022-2023 Essay Advice: MPP, MPA, MPA/MC, MPA-ID

posted on November 16, 2022

Welcome to the ultimate guide to writing outstanding Harvard Kennedy School essays! Below you’ll find advice for every HKS application essay prompt for the 2022-2023 application cycle.

Table of Contents

Introduction

HKS 2022 Application Deadline

Top 10 Mistakes I See in Harvard Kennedy School Essays

Table of Required Essays by Degree

Personal History Essay Advice

Optional statement essay advice, joint or concurrent degree essay advice, reapplication essay advice, jfk essay advice, mpp essay advice, expectations essay advice, perspectives essay advice, two-year mpa essay advice, career goals essay advice, professional contribution essay advice, biographical profile vs. background summary statement, international development essay advice, public policy essay.

Hey there! I’m Kaneisha Grayson, the author of this article and the founder of The Art of Applying®.

I started The Art of Applying® in 2010 while a joint degree student at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. Since then, my team and I have helped hundreds of applicants successfully apply to Harvard Kennedy School through our paid services, blog posts, and Youtube videos.

This blog post has the most up to date advice for the most difficult to write Harvard Kennedy School essays based on what my team and I have seen work for our clients.

If you find a mistake or a needed update in this article, let us know so we can correct it. Our 7000+ loyal email newsletter subscribers and visitors to our website help us keep our advice up to date and helpful for everyone.

If you’d like my team to help you with your Harvard Kennedy School application, contact us for more information.

What is the Harvard Kennedy School 2022 deadline?

The HKS 2022 application deadline is Thursday, December 1, 2022 at 3 pm Eastern Time .

Which essays are required for each HKS degree application?


Optional Statement	250	x	x	x	x
Personal History Essay	250	x	x	x	x
JFK Essay	500	x	x
MPP Essay	500	x
Expectations Essay	250	x	x		x
Perspectives Essay	250	x	x		x
Two-Year MPA Essay	500		x
Career Goals Essay	500				x
Professional Contribution Essay	500				x
International Development Essay	750			x
Leadership Experience Essay	750			x
Public Policy Essay	750			x
English Language Statement (if required)	500		x		x
Reapplication Essay	250	x	x	x	x
MPP Analytical and Quantitative Resume	N/A	x
MPA Quantitative Statement	1 page		x		x

Don’t make these mistakes in your Harvard Kennedy School application

Sometimes, it’s easier to know what NOT to do. Use this checklist to make sure you don’t make these common mistakes in your Harvard Kennedy School application essays.

Do not wait several sentences or paragraphs to clearly answer the question the prompt is asking.

I know it feels creative and whimsical to start your essay with a story. Or to take the reader on a journey with a big reveal at the end of your essay. And I’m not saying you can’t do that. However, if you are not a strong creative writer, I would advise you to be as straightforward with answering the essay prompts as possible.

Imagine that your essays are policy memos that the U.S. President needs to read before an important meeting.

Do not start your personal statements or application essays with a quote.

The one exception would be if your quote is from one of the “characters” in the story you are telling. Then, a quote could be a compelling way to start the essay. However, what my team of consultants and I see most often are essays that start with quotes from a famous person or public figure. Don’t do that.

You have limited words with which to express yourself. Don’t waste even one sentence on a trite, overused phrase as a shortcut for seeming profound, heartfelt or unique.

Do not write essays that are simply your resume accomplishments in prose format.

Your resume is the place where you can succinctly summarize the accomplishments and results you have achieved, using numbers as often as possible to quantify the results of your efforts. Your essays are the place where you tell your story, make your case, and communicate your fit with the school and degree program by directly addressing the prompt(s) you’ve been given.

Do not use trite phrases like “I want to change the world.”

Vague phrases like the one above don’t actually tell the reader anything specific about you as an individual, leader, and team member.

If you think about it, every human that has ever lived changed the world just by having lived here, right? They made their impact on the world, even if it was a teeny tiny impact. Rather than relying on empty platitudes, be as specific as possible about the type of impact you hope to have.

Do not accidentally mention the wrong school name.

Nearly every season, we receive materials for editing, where the applicant mentions the wrong school name. It doesn’t mean that your application will automatically be thrown in the trash if you use the wrong school name. However, it shows a lack of proofreading one’s materials. It can also make you look insincere about your commitment to attending that particular school.

Do not submit materials that are over the word limit.

I know you have a lot you want to share with the HKS admissions committee, but word limits are in place for a reason. When you submit materials that are over the word limit, you annoy the AdCom and make it clear that you disregard directions. By submitting essays that are within the required word limit, you are forced to express yourself in a clear, concise way. This is a skill that you will need as a student at Harvard Kennedy School as well as in your post-HKS career, whether in the public, private, or nonprofit sectors.

But, Kaneisha, can I submit an essay that is just a few words over the word limit? Like…just give me 20 words extra. Pretty please? Nein! You are applying alongside hundreds of other highly qualified applicants. Do not frustrate, annoy, or disrespect the AdCom’s time by not taking the time to edit your essay down to the word count.

Do not wait until the last minute to write and revise your essays.

HKS takes a holistic view of your entire application. I know that sounds like marketing speak from the Admissions Office, but it’s true. It’s not just about your grades or your test score.

In 2021, I had a client who we helped get into Harvard Kennedy School with a GPA below 2.5 . He worked with our team on strengthening his applicant profile and his essays for ten months : from January 2021 until November 2021.

Your essays are the most important part of your application. The earlier you can start on them, the better. Use the previous year’s prompts as your jumping off point.

How likely is it that the Harvard Kennedy School essay prompts from last year will be different this year?

It is highly unlikely that the the prompts you see on the Harvard Kennedy School website for the prior application season will change substantially in this upcoming application season. In the 12+ years I’ve been in business, I’ve only seen the essays change twice. So the essay prompts change about every 4 years or so.

Optional Do Not’s for your Harvard Kennedy School Essays & Resume

The don’ts below are based on my personal preference and aren’t as important as the “do not”s above.

Do not use “justified alignment” for your essays.

It creates strange spacing within your sentences. While it may look more polished to you that all of your lines take up the full line, it is a less pleasant reading experience forr the reader.

Do not include your photo on your resume or CV.

While this is a common practice in some nations outside of the US, it is not common practice in the US.

Do not use “interesting” design elements on your CV.

I prefer a black and white CV with no color, no “interesting” bullet point shapes like diamonds, starts, etc.—just plain filled-in bullets or open bullets. I don’t even really like those horizontal separating lines on CV. I like just words and bullet points on resumes with a good amount of white space, so my eyes can rest and I’m not looking at a wall of text.

This essay may feel overwhelming, especially if you feel like you aren’t “different,” “special,” or “diverse” enough. The key with this essay is to remember that everyone adds diversity to the class—not just people you think of as traditionally underrepresented.

The key here is to not worry about if what makes you “you” is special or different enough. It’s to become aware of the intersecting identities that make up your particular identity, and then to choose which of those aspects would benefit your classmates through the sharing of your experiences and perspectives with your classmates.

One area of diversity that may apply to you is being a member of an underrepresented group within a well-represented racial or ethnic group. For example, while Asian-American students are well represented among top universities, southeast Asians, Pacific Islanders, and low-income Asian-American students are very underrepresented . Similarly, white students are well represented, but low-income white students or white students from rural areas are underrepresented.

Another area gaining traction in the cultural zeitgeist is neurodivergence and/or neurodiversity. In fact, after a decade-plus of suspecting I might have ADHD (and being told by my friends that I have ADHD), I (Kaneisha, the founder of The Art of Applying®), got evaluated and diagnosed with ADHD-Combined Type in April 2022.

Imagine my shock—after getting two Masters from Harvard, paying off $150,000 in student loans in seven years as a writer and entrepreneur, growing a business from scratch to a million dollars in revenue, and starting a podcast—learning that I have a brain condition that is considered a disability!

I’m learning more each day how much my life has been affected by having undiagnosed and untreated ADHD: the challenges I have overcome as well as the benefits of having a brain that works quite differently than most people’s.

If you fall into the category of being neurodivergent (some examples are ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and OCD), you could write about the ways in which navigating your personal, professional, and academic life have been affected by having a “different” kind of brain.

If I were writing this essay, I would write about these areas of diversity that apply to me:

Growing up in a low-income high crime neighborhood with a high teen pregnancy rate
Having undiagnosed ADHD for most of my life, and my experiences being “twice exceptional” (both gifted and challenged)
Being one of few Black students in my college graduating class
Coming from an extended family that is heavily affected by the prison-industrial complex

Don’t let my list intimidate you; just use it as a list to help you reflect on what makes you different and/or special.

Here are examples of areas of diversity and/or adversity you could write about in your diversity statement and/or personal history statement:

Being physically challenged or disabled
Being a queer person
Being trans or having a non-conforming gender identity
Being a person of color
Having experienced homelessness or food insecurity during your lifetime
Growing up low-income
Growing up very wealthy
Growing up closely related to a person of prominence, fame, or a public figure
Having served in public office
Having achieved outstanding business accomplishments
Having competed in athletics, chess, or related activities on a national or global level
Having a neurodivergence such as ADHD, autism, epilepsy, Tourette Syndrome (TS), or OCD—whether diagnosed in childhood, adolescence, or adulthood
Growing up in a single-parent household
Growing up as an adopted child or foster child
Growing up with adopted siblings or foster siblings
Growing up with siblings with special needs
Growing up with a parent who is an addict
Growing up with a parent who has serious mental health issues
Acknowledging and overcoming addiction
Discovering and navigating mental health issues
Growing up across different states and/or countries
Being a conservative person who plans to attend a liberal- and progressive-leaning school—or vice versa
Navigating grief after the loss of a loved one
Being a survivor of trauma (you don’t have to share in detail about your trauma unless you feel comfortable doing so. Be sure to include a content warning.) Table of Contents

If you have any concerns about your prior academic, professional, or personal background that you would like to share with the Admissions Committee, please provide an explanation. (250 word limit)

Who should write the Harvard Kennedy School Optional Statement?

Even though this essay is titled as an optional statement, I recommend that most applicants to Harvard Kennedy School write the optional essay. The optional statement is your opportunity to raise your hand and say, “Well, actually…” when one of the readers is raising doubts about the strength of your applicant profile and whether you should be given one of the seats in the class.

Since HKS doesn’t have interviews, you don’t have a chance to clarify anything that may be confusing or concerning to the AdCom. The optional statement is your opportunity to stand up for yourself, clarify anything that looks confusing, and reassure the admissions committee that any challenges that held you back in the past won’t keep you from being successful at HKS.

You should write the Harvard Kennedy School Optional Statement if:

You have C’s, D’s, F’s, W’s, or I’s on your transcript that you want to explain to the AdCom.
You are applying to the Harvard Kennedy School MC/MPA with 7-9 years of work experience.
You are applying to the MPP, MPA-ID, or MPA2 with fewer than two years of work experience.
You are applying to Harvard Kennedy School without a traditional undergraduate degree.
You are applying to Harvard Kennedy School with a GPA below 3.4.
You have a gap on your resume of longer than six months.
You don’t show a clear demonstrated interest in public service from your work experiences and/or volunteer work.

What should your Harvard Kennedy School Optional Statement include?

Your HKS optional essay should answer the following questions:

What areas of your profile might the admissions committee be concerned about?
Why did those issues occur?
How have you since resolved those issues?
What did you learn about yourself as a result of navigating those issues?
What will you do if those issues arise while you are at Harvard Kennedy School?

Since you only have 250 words, you can aim to answer each of the above questions in one sentence. That will give your optional essay structure and communicate the essential information the HKS admissions committee members need.

Harvard Kennedy School’s mission is to improve public policy and leadership across the United States and around the world, so people can lead safer, freer, and more prosperous lives. How will a joint/concurrent degree enhance your pursuit of this mission? (400 word limit)

Here is the catch with this essay. According to my understanding, this essay will only be read by Harvard Kennedy School admissions committee—not the other school to which you are applying. (Someone contact me and correct me with written proof or a screenshot if I’m mistaken. I want to make sure I’m providing the most accurate information.) So the key to this essay is to focus on how your Harvard Kennedy School degree will complement your other degree .

What do I mean by that? Well, contrary to what you may think, this essay is not supposed to be where you gush about HBS, HLS, Tuck, or Sloan. Don’t spend a lot of time talking about how amazing the non-HKS school is. The joint/concurrent degree essay is where you talk about how you won’t get everything you need from just a degree from Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School, Dartmouth Tuck, or MIT Sloan for your personal and professional goals.

The most effective joint/concurrent degree essays will be written the opposite of how most people will write this essay. Most people will write this essay focusing on how amazing the resources, classes, and clubs are at the other school. But you want to focus on, say, 4-6 specific things you will get from your non-HKS school, and then write in just as much detail how your HKS degree will complement and supplement those 4-6 specific things.

Questions to help you write your Harvard Kennedy School joint / current degree essay:

What will you learn in the classroom at HKS that you won’t learn at all or as much in the other classroom?
What clubs are specific to HKS that you are eager to join that don’t exist at the other school?
What will the HKS alumni network provide you that you can’t get if you only do just the one degree at the other school?
What personal experiences might you have, and what kinds of people might you meet as a joint / concurrent degree student that you wouldn’t meet if you only did the other school’s degree?

Make sure to not write this essay as if going to HKS alone is not enough of an education. This essay is about showing how going to the other school alone would not be enough of an education for your personal, professional, and academic goals.

Okay, y’all for this essay, I’m just going to dump a list of the biggest mistakes I see with this essay, and then give you a bunch of questions that you should make sure your JFK essay answers as specifically as possible.

In general, this is a “career goals” essay. The HKS AdCom wants to know what your ultimate career goal is, and the career journey you could imagine yourself embarking upon to get there.

The biggest mistakes I see with the Harvard Kennedy School JFK essay are:

Do not bury your career goal several paragraphs in or wait until the last paragraph to clearly answer the question. Do not make the AdCom guess what your plans are. Answer the question upfront in the first 1-2 sentences.
Do not state a career goal that is too vague.
Do not state a career goal that is too ambitious with no clear plan to get there. It is not too ambitious to say you want to be the Head of State, but you need to clearly map out the short-term, medium term, and long-term career path to get there.
Do not state a career goal with no explanation of why that career is driven by your values.
Do not overly use words like “hope” when discussing your plans: “I hope to take on a career in management consulting at a firm like BCG, Bain, or McKinsey.” No. Use clear, confident words like “plan,” “will,” and “intend to.” Because you totally got this! You don’t have to hope.

If you answer all of the following questions, you’ll be well on your way to writing this essay better than half of the people applying to HKS (who aren’t our clients or didn’t find this blog post in time).

Sample Outline for the Harvard Kennedy School JFK essay:

Opening sentence: What is your ultimate long-term career goal? Be as specific as possible and state this upfront. Do not make your essay a scavenger hunt where the AdCom has to sift through several paragraphs to figure out the answer to the question they have posed to you.
When it comes to your career goal, what specific 1-3 issues will you work to have a positive impact? On what specific geographic area and/or specific population do you plan to have a positive impact? Access to water in South Asia, equity in education in the Southern US, trans rights in Latin America, voting rights and access in sub-Saharan Africa, the US childcare epidemic, etc. Notice how I’m not just saying vague things like “sustainability,” “microenterprise,” “venture philanthropy,” or “impact investing.” I am listing specific issues, geographies, and populations. This makes your goal realistic, measurable, and ambitious at the same time rather than wishy-washy wishful thinking.
What is your immediate career goal after HKS? What role do you want to have? What will you learn in that role? What will you contribute to the organization in that role?
What is your mid-term career goal after HKS, such as 10 years after graduation? What will you learn in that role? What will you contribute to the organization in that role?
Concluding sentence: Reiterate your enthusiasm to attend HKS and contribute your particular public service and leadership to the world.

The HKS MPP Essay can feel tricky, because it’s asking you to cover so many different elements. I prefer to answer the question directly within the first sentence, and then to provide more details throughout the essay.

Within the first 1-2 sentences of this essay, briefly restate your career goal. Restating your career goal provides a clear context for the reader for the rest of your essay. You can even restate your career goal as a part of a sentence that is mostly about something else.

Here is a sample starting sentence for the HKS MPP Essay that clearly answers the question while restating the career goal and providing clear context for the rest of the essay:

In order to pursue my career goal of being Head of Communications for an equity-focused education nonprofit such as Teach for America, I will need to improve my existing skills in persuasion, public speaking, and written communication. I will also need to gain skills in negotiation, managing and developing team members, budgeting, and quantitative analysis.

Sample Outline for the Harvard Kennedy School MPP Essay:

Briefly remind the HKS Admissions Committee of your career goal.
List 2-3 relevant skills that you already have that you’d like to strengthen at HKS.
List 2-3 relevant skills you’d like to gain as an MPP student at Harvard Kennedy School.
Discuss 2-3 specific classes you would take that would enhance your skills. State the specific skills and/or subject matter learnings you would gain in those classes.
Discuss 2-3 classes in which you would be a strong contributor to your classmates’ learnings and for which you already have strong skills.
Discuss 1-3 student clubs that would play to your strengths and/or fill in gaps.
Discuss 1-3 Resource Centers at HKS that would enhance your strengths and/or help you improve in developmental areas.
Conclude your essay

Additional tips for the HKS MPP Essay:

Make sure that you aren’t only listing classes taught by men. This is a common oversight among applicants.
The classes you mention don’t have to be currently taught or scheduled to be taught in the upcoming year. As long as the class has been offered at some point in the last five years, it’s fine.
When discussing classes that will fill in your skills gaps, list at least one required course and at least one elective.
When discussing classes that will play to your strengths, it is okay to primarily focus on electives.
If you are short on space, you can list fewer classes related to your strengths. Focus more on the specific classes you’ll take that will fill in your gaps.
If you are short on space, you can eliminate discussing student clubs and resource centers.

Describe a time when you did not meet expectations and elaborate on how the experience changed you. (250 word limit)

I love this question! Even though it can be tough to figure out what to write about, if you choose a genuine topic, and write this essay well, you will easily stand out in the applicant pool. The most straightforward way to respond to this prompt is to write about a time when you did not meet someone’s reasonable expectations.

However, you can also write about a time when you did not meet what you believe were unreasonable expectations . It’s much more difficult to successfully tackle the second type of essay without coming off as trying to turn an essay discussing a weakness into a strength. If you write about a time when you did not meet unreasonable expectations, then you will need to discuss why you did not speak up about the expectations being unreasonable; you can’t just simply say that someone burdened you with unreasonable expectations. You have to take some responsibility for those unreasonable expectations existing and for you being accountable for meeting them.

You can write about a time when you did not meet expectations in your personal, professional, or academic life.

Outline for HKS Expectations Essay:

Who had the expectation of you?
(optional) How was the expectation communicated to you?
What were the internal obstacles to meeting the expectation?
What were the external obstacles to meeting the expectation?
What did you learn about how to manage the expectations of the person who you let down?
What did you learn about yourself in not meeting this expectation?
What lessons can you apply to the future when faced with similar expectations?

Examples of what you could write about for the HKS Expectations Essay:

Letting your boss, team, or a direct report down at work
Letting down your partner, family member, or friend in your personal life
Not meeting your own expectations at work, school, or toward a personal goal

Describe a time when interactions with others and/or an experience caused you to change your mind or expanded your point of view. (250 word limit)

This essay shows that you are open to influence, open-minded, able to change your mind in the face of new information, and/or willing to admit when you were wrong.

Sample Outline for HKS Perspectives Essay:

What was your opinion or perspective on the issue at hand at first?
What made you realize that your opinion or perspective might have been limited or outright wrong?
What about the interaction or experience in particular helped you be open to changing your mind or expanding your perspective?
What did your opinion change to or what did it expand to include?
What did you learn about yourself from this experience?
What did you learn about the other person from this experience?
What lessons can you apply to the future when faced with similar experiences, interactions, or opportunities?

There are many pathways one can pursue in order to make a difference in the world. Why is the MPA Program at HKS an appropriate pathway to achieving your goals? (500 word limit)

Sample Outline for the Harvard Kennedy School Two-Year MPA Essay:

Briefly remind the HKS Admissions Committee of your career goals within the first two sentences of your essay.
Discuss 3-4 specific classes you would take that would enhance your skills. State the specific skills and/or subject matter learnings you would gain in those classes that would help you achieve your career goals.
Are there any treks you could attend or help plan that would help you achieve your career goals?
Discuss 1-3 Resource Centers at HKS that would help you achieve your career goals.
What is it about the HKS culture that will help you achieve your career goals?
What elements of the HKS alumni experience and network will help you achieve your career goals?
Conclude your essay restating your enthusiasm to attend HKS for the MPA2.

Additional tips for the HKS Two-Year MPA Essay:

Submit a statement that discusses your career goals, as well as the factors that led you to select the Mid-Career MPA program as a means of furthering your personal and professional goals. Be as specific as possible in describing how your expected course of study will enable you to build on your prior professional experience and achieve those goals. (500 word limit)

Sample Outline for the Harvard Kennedy School Career Goals Essay:

Spend 1-3 sentences discussing each of the factors that led you to HKS.
What kind of organization would you like to work at?
What will you learn here?
What will you contribute here?
State the specific skills and/or subject matter learnings you would gain in those classes that would help you achieve your career goals.

Additional tips for the HKS Career Goals Essay:

The prompts for these two short answer questions are so similar that I think there may have actually been a mistake in the Harvard Kennedy School application to ask them both.

In prior years, the MPP application asked for the Biographical Profile, and the MPA/MC application asked for the Background Summary Statement. This year, the MC/MPA application (and perhaps for other degrees) is asking for both of these extremely similar statements.

I’m here to provide as much clarification as I can. Understand that this is my guidance as an admissions consultant, but I am not a member of the HKS Admissions / Enrollment team. I would suggest some of you write to HKS admissions to clarify this requirement, because it really seems like a mistake to me to require both.

I think that what happened is that one question or the other should show up based on which degree you choose (this is called a “conditional form element”), but that for some reason, the condition wasn’t input into the system correctly, so both questions are showing.

What is the prompt for the Biographical Profile?

In 150 words or fewer, provide a biographical profile. Your résumé will contain detailed information on your academic history, professional/internship/volunteer positions held and specific accomplishments. What we seek here is a concise description of your academic/professional journey, career exploration, and areas of interest. Please type your biographical statement in the paragraph box below .

In this statement, focus on answering the exact things they have asked for:

What was your schooling like from high school, to university, to now? Since they will know where you went to school from your resume, you could focus on what type of school(s) you attended (public, private, elite, prestigious, underfunded, under-resourced, etc.) and how that impacted your career.
Quickly walk the reader through your career from start to mid-point to present day.
State 1-3 areas of career and academic interests.

In the Biographical Profile, spend half the essay discussing your academic and professional past, and half the essay discussing your career and academic future interests you plan to explore at HKS and after HKS.

What is the prompt for the Background Summary Statement?

In 300 words or less, summarize your professional profile/background. Your résumé will contain information on titles, positions held, and specific accomplishments, what we seek here is a concise description of your professional journey, career progression and areas of expertise/experience. Specific information on the level of responsibility and impact/scale of work performed to provide context is encouraged.

Think of the Background Summary Statement as a narration of your resume in an easy-to-understand way for someone who may not be familiar with your industry.

Another way to think of the Background Summary Statement is the short introduction that would be given about you before giving a TED talk or graduation speech. It helps the reader / listener contextualize everything else they are going to learn about you.

You can write the Background Summary Statement in the first person (I have worked…) or the third person (Kaneisha Grayson has worked…)

Once again, walk the reader through your professional journey. Don’t just say where you worked. Tell the reader what you learned and accomplished in your career so far. Think of this as the interview question, “Walk me through your resume.”
HKS also wants to know about your career progression. How does one job lead into the next? How are your responsibilities increasing and building upon one another? This is especially helpful if career progression and promotions aren’t evident from the job titles on your resume.
Discuss your areas of expertise and experience, both academically and professionally. You can focus on hard skills, soft skills, and domain expertise. If you aren’t sure what hard skills are versus soft skills, a quick online search for those phrases will give you lots of examples. If you aren’t sure what I mean by “domain expertise,” think of a domain as a subject area, a topic that one can study or research at HKS or in the real world.

The Background Summary Statement should be completely focused on the past, whereas the Biographical Profile is a blend of the past and the future.

But I still think this is actually an error in the HKS application.

Please explain what has changed since your last application . (250)

What is the Harvard Kennedy School Reapplication Essay supposed to convey?

The HKS Reapplication Essay is supposed to convey that you as an applicant understand that it’s not helpful to simply resubmit the exact sample application as the exact same candidate you were last time. They want you to succinctly tell them what has changed about you personally, professionally, and/or academically since your prior application.

The Harvard Kennedy School Reapplication Essay is your opportunity to help the HKS admissions committee understand that, while you were not previously admitted, you are now even more prepared for the HKS classroom, and even more of a fit for the HKS degree program to which you are applying.

How should I start my Harvard Kennedy School Reapplication Essay?

You only have 250 words for this essay, so you need to get directly to the point. I would start this essay out with a simple sentence that lists the changes in your applicant profile since your prior HKS application. Here is an example:

Since my prior application in 2018, I have taken supplementary coursework, received a higher score on the GRE, gained further clarity on my career goals, and engaged in more volunteer work.

How should I structure the HKS Reapplication Essay? What content should I include?

Here is an outline you can use for your Harvard Kennedy School Reapplication Essay:

Introductory Sentence
Discuss any supplementary coursework you have taken.
Discuss any improved test scores you have to share.
Discuss any accomplishments, promotions, or changes in your professional experience.
Discuss any personal accomplishments and/or updates.
Concluding Sentence

On what note should I end the Harvard Kennedy School Reapplication Essay?

You have so few words for this essay that you can consider not including a concluding sentence. If you have room for a concluding sentence, you can reiterate your enthusiasm for attending Harvard Kennedy School or your hope that the updates you’ve provided are helpful.

Here is a sample concluding sentence for your HKS Reapplication Essay:

I hope that these updates will help the Admissions Committee in the reconsideration of my application.

The Harvard Kennedy School motto, echoing the President for whom the School is named, is “Ask what you can do.” Please share with the Admissions Committee how you have created positive change thus far in your most substantial professional leadership and/or public service role. (500 word limit)

Most applicants will mess up this essay by trying to cram too many stories and roles into this essay. You will write a much stronger essay if you focus on one overarching role in which you were able to create positive change in one big way or multiple smaller, interconnected ways . What I don’t suggest you try and do is write about multiple roles. The prompt is asking for your most substantial professional leadership and/or public service role. That means you should choose one role .

Sample Outline for the Harvard Kennedy School Professional Contribution Essay:

What were the requirements of you in this role?
What were the 1-4 positive impacts you were able to have in this role?
Clearly state the positive impact you were hoping to achieve.
What challenges, obstacles, and limitations did you and your team face when trying to achieve your goals?
How did you and your team overcome the obstacles that you faced?
Clearly state the positive impact you were able to achieve.
Conclude the essay reiterating your enthusiasm to attend HKS and continue creating positive change.

Discuss your decision to choose international development as your professional career. Also, explain how developing your analytic skills relates to your career in development. (750 word limit)

For the MPA-ID International Development Essay, you can use the outline and tips I gave for the Career Goals Essay . However, you need to make sure that you also discuss the importance of having strong analytical skills relates to your career in development.

Examples of how analytical skills relates to a career in development:

Financing
Managing limited resources
Optimizing processes to maximize limited resources
Decreasing costs
Increasing output
Decreasing negative externalities
Increasing positive externalities

Describe a public policy or public management problem related to international development and analyze a range of solutions. (750 word limit)

The Harvard Kennedy School Public Policy Essay is similar to the Princeton SPIA Policy Memo, except that you get 750 words rather than four double-spaced pages (about 1000 words).

Sample Outline for the Harvard Kennedy School Public Policy Essay or Princeton SPIA Policy Memo:

Introductory Paragraph: Tell the reader what specific issue you are going to explore, and 3-4 solutions you will analyze.

Background Information: Provide 2-4 sentences providing background information on the issue at hand. What would the reader need to know about the issue you are going to discuss in order to understand your analysis of the possible solutions?

Discuss 3-4 possible solutions. For each of your 3-4 proposed solutions, answer the following questions:

Clearly state the proposed solution.
Where, if anywhere, is this solution already being implemented? How is it working?
What are the hoped for and actual benefits of this solution?
What are the challenges, obstacles, and limitations of this solution?

Concluding Paragraph: Here is where you can make a recommendation on what should be done now to address the issue (based on your analysis above), and where you can make a recommendation on what could be explored in the future. You should state the solution that has the most potential to address the issue at hand. Propose possible further areas of inquiry.

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JFK’s Harvard essay resurfaces, to mockery, after Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action

President John F. Kennedy outside the White House in 1963.

John F. Kennedy endeavored to be a “Harvard Man,” just like his father.

He wrote as much as a 17-year-old in 1935 in his rather succinct essay to Harvard College, a copy of which resurfaced on social media and quickly became a target of derision after the Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions on Thursday.

In Kennedy’s response to the essay prompt — fewer than 100 words — some saw hypocrisy in the court’s decision to overrule nearly half a century of legal precedent. While the Supreme Court ruled that race can no longer be a factor in college admissions, many on social media noted that at some elite universities, the children of graduates, known as “legacies,” are given preference in admissions.

“A casual reminder of JFK’s college essay,” Rebecca Brenner Graham , who teaches history at the Madeira School in Washington, D.C., tweeted after the ruling.

a casual reminder of JFK’s college essay (this is real https://t.co/VmNgvs4V9n ) pic.twitter.com/IStQDQg6QC — Rebecca Brenner Graham, PhD (@TheOtherRBG) June 29, 2023

“The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several,” Kennedy wrote in the essay. “I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer.”

“To be a ‘Harvard man’ is an enviable distinction,” he added.

With the Supreme Court’s ruling, the nation’s most prestigious schools are likely to see a significant decline in the number of Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous students admitted, according to research and analyses presented to the court last year.

The Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum has a digitized version of Kennedy’s application materials to Harvard, which includes his transcript from The Choate School — his grades were less than spectacular — along with a letter his father, Joseph Kennedy, wrote to the freshman dean explaining that while his son “has a very brilliant mind for the things in which he is interested,” he is “careless and lacks application in those in which he is not interested.”

While the admissions process was far less rigorous when Kennedy was applying, many online noted the surefire advantage the future president had as the son of a well-known and wealthy businessman who had graduated from Harvard himself.

“He’d still get in today. Because donor and legacy,” one person tweeted .

“No one benefits from affirmative action more than <checks notes> Kennedy Americans,” another wrote. “Nepo babies politics version in Ivy,” a commenter chimed in.

Kennedy graduated from Harvard in 1940 and was elected president in 1960.

The bar for admission to Harvard is now incredibly high — just 3.2 percent of undergraduate applicants were accepted to the class of 2026 — and whether Kennedy would be admitted now, even with his wealthy, privileged background, is debatable.

But many said that it’s historically underrepresented students who will be affected by the court’s ruling, while the legacy system — a century-old practice that overwhelmingly benefits white and wealthy students — will remain intact for now.

In the remarks about the decision Thursday, President Biden said the legacy system expands “privilege instead of opportunity.”

On campus, students at Harvard reacted to the decision with shock and disappointment, calling it a “step in the wrong direction.” In a video that incoming president Claudine Gay posted on Thursday, she acknowledged the school lacks “all of the answers about what’s next,” but would “continue opening doors.”

Shannon Larson can be reached at [email protected] . Follow her @shannonlarson98 .

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A subreddit dedicated to asking questions and sharing resources about college application essays in all their many forms. Discussion about common app, UC essays, supplemental, scholarships, extracurricular sections, and more are welcome. Always remember the human!

Have you ever seen JFK's college essay for Harvard? And his high school grades? Here they are.

Jfk’s college application essay to harvard has been floating around the internet for years, but his terrible high school grades have escaped my notice–till now., when i went looking for it tonight, i saw his entire application to harvard –a photocopy that’s in the kennedy library archives. and i was surprised by what i discovered, there is no polite way to say this. his high school grades at the choate school ranged from mediocre to terrible, from average to failing. his uneven grades were consistent, it seems, from year to year., the slender, uninspired essay and the grades are striking evidence of how times have changed — and of how much they needed to change to bring more equity into the college admissions process., if we think of the ivy league as a group of colleges that value the highest academic achievement, let’s not forget that for most of their existence — harvard opened its doors in 1636 — they valued the student’s and his family’s social status just as much, if not more. when jfk applied to harvard, his prominent father (harvard college ’12) was chairman of the recently created security and exchange commission, the federal agency that oversees the stock market., jfk’s slender essay, submitted with his application in may 1935, answers the question, “why do you wish to come to harvard”, “the reasons that i have for wishing to go to harvard are several. i feel that harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. i have always wanted to go there, as i have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer. then too, i would like to go to the same college as my father. to be a ‘harvard man’ is an enviable distinction, and one that i sincerely hope i shall attain.”, no, this is not a joke. not satire. i am not trying to amuse you, in the page below reporting jfk’s high school grades, it’s hard to understand exactly what years the grades refer to. but the numbers themselves took me aback., in one column, his grades were: english 85; french 55; physics 50; history 85., in another area of the page, his grades in algebra were 65 and 71., his grades for june 1933, listed near the bottom of the page, were latin 75; french 60; math 82., another shocker in the application was a letter from jfk’s father in august 1936, as his son was about to begin harvard, explaining his upcoming enrollment., “jack has a very brilliant mind for the things in which he’s interested,” his father wrote, “but is careless and lacks application for those in which he is not interested. this is, of course, a bad fault. however, he is quite ambitious to do the work in three years. i know how the authorities feel about this, and i have my own opinion, but it is a gesture that pleases me very much because it seems to be the beginning of an awakening ambition.”, it’s no secret that the wealthy and prominent have enormous advantages in obtaining education, from nursery school on. but unlike jfk in 1935, and unlike later generations of applicants to elite colleges, schools today put much more emphasis on academic achievement. having two parents who graduated from elite university no longer guarantees admission to their offspring., the history of higher education in the u.s. is the story of the country itself–the good, the bad, the ugly, and the constantly evolving. applicants to college, preoccupied by anxiety and uncertainty, lose sight of all the history here. and that they too are part of the evolving story..

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Will you join us in lighting the way for the leaders of tomorrow?

Presidential speechwriters.

TOM PUTNAM: What better way to celebrate Presidents’ Day than at the nation’s memorial to our 35 th President and in the company of one of his most trusted advisors? I'm Tom Putnam, the Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. And on behalf of John Shattuck, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I want to welcome you to this very special forum. Let me begin by thanking all of you for coming, by acknowledging those watching this program on C-SPAN and listening on public radio, and by expressing appreciation to the sponsors of the Kennedy Library forums, including lead sponsor, Bank of America, Boston Capital, The Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation, Corcoran Jennison Companies, as well as our media sponsors, The Boston Globe, WBUR, and NECN.

As you know, today’s national holiday began first as a tribute to George Washington, then was later wedded to the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. In more recent times, it has become popularly known as Presidents’ Day, continuing the tradition of honoring Washington and Lincoln and highlighting one of the hallmarks of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power between all those who have served in our nation’s highest office. It is a day devoted to history, to harkening back to the famous words of Abraham Lincoln, to the mystic chords of memory, and to learning from those who have preceded us. For just as President Kennedy instructed Theodore Sorensen to study the secret of Lincoln’s rhetoric, many recent presidential speechwriters describe how they in turn spent hours examining the speech craft of Kennedy and Sorensen. For those budding speechwriters in today’s audience, one of Mr. Sorensen’s conclusions was that Abraham Lincoln never used two or three words where one would do, so I promise to try and make my introduction of today’s speakers brief. [laughter]

Theodore Sorensen served for 11 years as policy advisor, legal counsel and speechwriter to Senator and President John F. Kennedy. He was deeply involved in such presidential decisions as the Cuban Missile Crisis, civil rights legislation, and the decision to send a man to the moon. He is the author of numerous books, including his best-selling biography, Kennedy , and Let the Word Go Forth , a selection of the best JFK speeches. He is also an international lawyer, lecturer and writer.

If you’ll allow me one anecdote, I once had the privilege of going through our Museum with Mr. Sorensen, his wife Gillian, who is here with us today and will be a featured speaker at our next Kennedy Library Forum, and their daughter Juliet. After watching the renowned 1961 inaugural address, I asked Mr. Sorensen the following question. Recalling the catechism of my youth, I speculated that some of the religious references in President Kennedy’s speeches were more Unitarian in their world view than Roman Catholic. And I asked Mr. Sorensen, who was raised Unitarian in Lincoln, Nebraska, if that topic had ever come up in conversation with the President. It turns out it had. He recounted to me an exchange in which President Kennedy once asked him, “So, Ted, has my Catholicism begun to rub off on you yet?” Mr. Sorensen’s reply was, “No, I’m sorry, Mr. President. On the contrary, it’s my Unitarianism that's finding its way into your speeches.” [laughter]

We're honored to have three other presidential speechwriters joining in today’s conversation who I’ll introduce chronologically. It was exactly 40 years ago on this very holiday, Washington’s Birthday in 1967, that Raymond K. Price received the phone call that would change his life. It was an invitation to join the campaign staff of Richard Nixon, who was considering mounting a second run for the presidency in 1968. Over time, Mr. Price became a close friend, advisor, speechwriter, and special consultant to the President. He was the President’s collaborator on both inaugural addresses, all of his State of the Union speeches, and President Nixon’s 1974 announcement from the Oval Office that he would resign. Mr. Price had a distinguished career as a journalist, editor and public policy analyst and served for many years as the President of the Economic Club of New York.

Chriss Winston was the first woman to head the White House Office of Speechwriting and she was named Director of Speechwriting for President George H. W. Bush. She was also the Deputy Director of Communications for Bush/Quayle in 1988 and oversaw communications for the Department of Labor under President Reagan. She’s the author of numerous books, including the forthcoming How to Raise an American in which, among other suggestions, she advises parents to bring their children to Boston to learn of this city’s rich history and to visit the Museum at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. We’ll provide a free plug for any book that does the same for our Museum. [laughter] Ms. Winston is currently serving as a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Ted Widmer came to the Kennedy Library six years ago when he was charged by President Clinton to survey the field of presidential libraries in preparation for the design of the Clinton Library in Arkansas. It is no surprise that President Clinton would have charged him with this task, for not only is Mr. Widmer a historian by training, he also served from 1997 to 2001 as a foreign policy speechwriter and senior advisor to President Clinton. He is known for the creative programs he has designed to enliven the teaching of American history and politics to diverse groups, ranging from Muslim college students living in countries that have been historically suspicious of western culture, and to underprivileged children living in our own country with limited access to libraries and history museums. He is currently the Director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Moderating today’s forum is one of the most recognizable and trusted voices in national journalism, Linda Wertheimer. Currently Senior National Correspondent for National Public Radio, for 13 years she was the host of NPR’s flagship news magazine All Things Considered . In her 30 years with NPR, she anchored dozens of nominating conventions and election nights, and has reported on countless presidential addresses. She knows a good speech when she hears one, and we're so fortunate to have her here today to guide today’s conversation, Linda Wertheimer. [applause]

LINDA WERTHEIMER: Thank you very much. Thank you. As perhaps you know, the format of this event will be to hear from the speechwriters, to hear some of the speeches that presidents have given, and to then have an opportunity for you all to ask questions. So I'm going to keep my part of this very brief, since these are all people who have a way with words. I don’t need to do very much. So let me just begin by saying that the first clip you will hear, this is a speech that John Kennedy gave at American University. And it was an important policy speech, because he introduced the idea of a test ban treaty and said that the United States would take the voluntary step of banning atmospheric testing. So it was a very important speech in terms of making news for people like me, but it was also a tremendously important speech because it talked about world peace, as you're just about to hear. We have two clips that have been put together, so this is a somewhat telescoped version of the speech.

PRESIDENT KENNEDY: I have, therefore, chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived – yet it is the most important topic on earth, peace.

What kind of a peace do I mean? What kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children. Not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women. Not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time.

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and a generation yet unborn.

Today, the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to the keeping of peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles, which can only destroy and never create, is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational man. I realize the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war and frequently the words of the pursuers fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.

For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counter weapons.

In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours. And even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interests.

So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s futures, and we are all mortal.

MS. WERTHEIMER: President Kennedy speaking at American University. That speech was … Let’s see, what was the date of that speech?

THEODORE SORENSEN: June 10 th , 1963. [laughter]

MS. WERTHEIMER: And Theodore Sorensen who is, I think, perhaps the best known of all the presidential speechwriters, is here with us to talk about why that speech happened the way it did and tell us about writing speeches for President Kennedy.

MR. SORENSEN: Well, thank you Linda. First, I want to say how honored I am to be back at the Kennedy Library, my favorite institution in the whole world, where I’ve been so often that you're going to get tired of seeing me. But I'm going to be back next year. And to be with you, Linda, whom I’ve been a fan for many years, as I told you during lunch. To be with my longtime friend, Ray Price, and I was glad to meet Ted and Chriss, so this is a terrific group. But Linda, I am not the best known presidential speechwriter. Abraham Lincoln was the best known.

MS. WERTHEIMER: I was going to say unless we count Abraham Lincoln, I should have said that. [laughter]

MR. SORENSEN: I picked that particular speech to be shown here today, and I must say it’s the first time I’ve seen it since June 10, 1963. I was sitting on the platform behind him at American University, and I’m rather touched to see it again and to be reminded how wonderful a human being John F. Kennedy was, how well he spoke. But I picked that particular speech to be shown today because I'm still on a crusade that I’ve been on all my life, to try to make this a better world and nobody is more disheartened than I by what has happened to this country and its foreign policy over these last six years or so. [applause]

And I wanted you in the audience and those who watch this later on television to remember that America had a tradition of peace once, we were a peaceful country. We did have a President who wasn't waging unilateral war and preemptive strikes, but who believed … I hope you’ll weigh carefully the particular words that were in those two excerpts that were shown there, because they are the very opposite of what our policy has been since 2001. So I think it’s very, very important to get that message out.

I like to think that that was John F. Kennedy’s best speech. Certainly his most important speech. I know many people think the inaugural was his best, but this was better and more important, because it said more. In addition to the moratorium on nuclear testing in the atmosphere, Linda, which you mentioned, that speech called for a reexamination of the Cold War. No President had ever done that. It called for a reexamination of our relations with the Soviet Union. No President had ever done that. It called for a reexamination, part of which you heard, of what we mean by peace itself.

So it was an important speech, and I had a lot to do with it, yes. The President had gone out to Hawaii, he made a swing through some western states, and then he spoke to the American Conference of Mayors in Honolulu. Like other young men, I had reasons to go to Hawaii, but I had to stay back and work on the speech. I then flew out with it. He gave his speech on June 9 th , 1963, in Hawaii, in Honolulu, and we then flew back. I brought the draft with me. We then flew back overnight, in those days, from Honolulu to Washington. I went directly to the campus of the American University in Washington, unshaven. He was President, so he went to the White House and changed his shirt and got a shower and then came before … and he had a little time before delivering the speech.

But it was still the height of the Cold War. But the previous October, the President had led the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that had made a tremendous impression on him.

And I will say it made a tremendous impression on Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev as well. And both of them learned from that serious experience and Kennedy wanted to speak about it, and there are words in this speech that talk about the follies of war and the follies of backing your adversary into a corner.

And on the way back, he made the decision and cleared it on the Air Force One telephone with Bob McNamara in Defense and McBundy back in the White House to add to that speech the moratorium on nuclear testing in the atmosphere, which he hoped would help bring the Soviets to the bargaining table. And it did, and later that same summer a treaty was signed in Moscow, the first step toward arms control in the nuclear age, the limited nuclear test ban treaty. So speeches can have consequences, they aren't just empty words, and that speech was selected because it was both his best and his most important.

MS. WERTHEIMER: There are lots of wonderful quotes in this speech. If I were presenting a piece, I would be very torn about which ones to use. He said, “Our problems are manmade, and therefore they can be solved by man, and man can be as big as he wants.”

MR. SORENSEN: Now, that's good Unitarianism. [laughter]

MS. WERTHEIMER: And here's one of those parallel constructions for which Mr. Sorensen is so famous. Talking about seeking peace, the speech says, “So let us persevere, peace need not be impracticable and war need not be inevitable.” And then there's a wonderful … The ending is fabulous. But one of the things that he says in the last paragraph of the speech, which I think resonates today, is “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.”

Now, the next speech is another one of those speeches which just caused shivers to run right down the back of everyone who heard it, because it was such a terribly important speech. And we have Ray Price, who had a hand in drafting it. It was delivered by President Nixon on August 8 th , 1974. You want to talk about the Great Occasion?

RAY PRICE: Yeah, I chose the resignation announcement, partly because it’s significant, partly because there have been fewer of those than there have been inaugurals. And it was quite a wrenching one to do, but I was glad to be the one doing it with him. The part you’ll hear now is just the last concluding portion of it. If we had more time, I would have included what came before. What came immediately before it dealt more with the world, with what we had succeeded in doing, but what was yet left to do in making this a better world. And that section that is before it, before this closing, very personal part, was something that was largely worked out through a series of phone calls from him to me beginning at … It was Thursday night he delivered it, beginning 8:30 p.m. Wednesday and ending at 5:07 a.m. Thursday. That part that we did end leading, about the world, leads into this very personal conclusion.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Let’s hear it.

PRESIDENT NIXON: For more than a quarter of a century of public life, I have shared in the turbulent history of this nation. I have fought for what I believed. I have tried to the best of my ability to discharge those duties and meet those responsibilities that were entrusted to me.

Sometimes I have succeeded and sometimes I have failed, but always I have taken heart from what Theodore Roosevelt once said about the man in the arena, “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is not effort with error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deed, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievements and at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

I pledge to you tonight that as long as I have a breath of light in my body, I shall continue in that spirit. I shall continue to work for the great causes to which I have been dedicated throughout my years as a Congressman, a Senator, Vice President and President, the cause of peace not just for America, but among all nations, prosperity, justice and opportunity for all our people.

There is one cause above all to which I have been devoted and to which I shall always be devoted for as long as I live.

When I first took the oath of office of President 5 ½ years ago, I made this sacred commitment: “to consecrate my office, my energies, and all of the wisdom I can summon to the cause of peace among nations.”

I have done my very best in all the days since to be true to that pledge. As a result of these efforts, I am confident that the world is a safer place today not only for the people of America, but for the people of all nations and that all of our children have a better chance than before of living in peace rather than dying in war.

This, more than anything, is what I hoped to achieve when I sought the Presidency. This, more than anything, is what I hope will be my legacy to you, to our country, as I leave the Presidency.

To have served in this office is to have felt a very personal sense of kinship with each and every American. In leaving it, I do so with this prayer. May God’s grace be with you in all the days ahead.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Ray Price, early in the speech, the President said the thing that I think just was so shocking to hear, even though we knew it was coming, where he talked about the country needed him to leave, basically. And then he said, “Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency, effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour, in this office.” I'm sure that everyone who heard that will never forget those words. This speech had an enormous emotional content, something we were not generally accustomed to hear from President Nixon.

MR. PRICE: Well, he tried not to be emotional in his speeches. But it had been a difficult week for him, too. [laughter] And he had been up and down on whether to resign or not, but figured the resignation finally was having to turn over a bunch of tapes to the court and the prosecutor, having lost the case in the Supreme Court. And they included one which we were pretty sure would be fatal anyway, that we could have handled earlier, easily if we had known about it earlier; we could not at that point. And that week had begun, really, a week earlier.

I’ll tell you a little bit on the lead up to that. On Thursday the 1 st , the speech was Thursday, August 8, 1974. On Thursday, August 1 st , Al Haig was then the Chief of Staff, convened a meeting in his office of a few department heads and so forth, including me, and had a lot of charts and so forth, laying out the strategy for the battle in the Congress over the impeachment. From there on, it was at a crucial point and assigning what people would do and all the patterns for reporting and reconvening and so forth. And then we left. And had chalkboards laying this all out … And then we left and a few of us were talking outside, and his secretary motioned to me to come in, and I came back, and he told me that was all a sham. He wants to go on the air on Monday, he wants a speech for Monday announcing his resignation. So I started then on Thursday, the 1 st . And then on Friday, the next day, Friday the 2 nd , was called back over to Al’s office again, and by then we had an actual transcript of what was called the smoking gun tape, in which he had temporarily, only temporarily, but temporarily approved having the CIA try to head the FBI off in wanting an investigation.

Incidentally, just one parenthetical aside, this, which was a trigger to the resignation, was an investigation into a Mexican connection that could have run into some other things. And so he was told in a meeting, this was a meeting with Bob Haldeman, and Haldeman is reporting to him on what he had learned, what he had been told, and he said that John Dean and John Mitchell -- Bob later told me that not Mitchell had told him this, but Dean had told him this -- that recommended asking the CIA to head the FBI off from the Mexican connection. And he said okay.

And then two weeks later … So he made the call to the director of the FBI. And two weeks later, the President got a call from the CIA saying they no longer had a problem with the Mexican connection. Or, rather, he got a call from the head of the FBI saying that the CIA had told him they no longer had a problem. So the President said, “Go ahead, do a full investigation.” Which they did. The only practical impact of that intervention, which ultimately brought him down, was a two week delay in interviews of two witnesses, nothing more. But things had gotten to a point, at that point, where that was enough.

But anyway, by Friday, he had decided no, he wanted a different speech. He still wanted to make a speech on Monday. But instead of saying he was going to resign, he was going to explain the transcripts which he was turning over, explain the context and so forth, and pledged to fight on in the … To answer questions under oath in the well of the Senate and fight on. I thought that was a mistake. At this point, I thought we could not save it.

Then I saw the transcript, and it looked to me at first glance as though it was something we could not survive. Then Saturday, Al called. The President wanted us to come up to Camp David on Sunday. We did, and meanwhile I’d been working on the draft and so on, but thinking it was probably a mistake. We did meet up there. While up there, he changed his mind and instead of pledging to fight on or resigning, he was going to put out the transcripts with a written statement explaining what they meant and see if the reaction was as bad as we thought it was going to be. I thought that made sense, a lot was at stake, and let’s really see what it is.

We did put out the transcripts on Monday; the reaction was what we expected. Tuesday, I got a call from Al. We're back on the resignation track, but still very secretly. And so Tuesday to Thursday is when we were working on the resignation speech, back and forth.

Linda, as a parenthetical aside, we did not call ours the speechwriting section, we called it the writing and research. And this was accurate because in Nixon’s case, most of his speeches were not written and he never used notes. My educated guess, having only a guess but educated because I did run the writing staff, is that 19 out of 20 speeches were not written, 1 out of 20 was. And he never used notes. He was always more comfortable without a text than with one. But some were, and this of course, was one of those that were. The State of Unions were all written, the inaugurals were written, and some others where he particularly wanted a text for some special reason, but he preferred not to have one. But anyway, so that was the background.

But then on the night before we’d been going back and forth on it. Then the day before, the Thursday, rather, Wednesday, we were sitting in his old executive office building office. I had my office a couple doors down and going over it. And he mentioned to me that the head of the, the Republican leaders of the House and Senate were both going to be coming and together with Barry Goldwater, were going to come in to see him at five. And a lot of notes made a couple of years ago when this story really hit about how they had come in and bearded the lion in his den and persuaded him to resign. We discussed this at 3:00 before they came in. He had already written in the margin of the draft we were working on what he expected them to say.

He was already working on a resignation. But he explained to me at 3:00 that he thought it was important to hear them out so that it would be more like an impeachment and thus to less damage the future presidency. But then we worked on through and those calls that I mention, beginning at 8:30 on Wednesday, we were talking through and then really honing it down. And then it went on through two or three calls that evening. As he began to get into the kind of world view, the foreign policy stakes and what we’d done, what needed to be done. And then these continued up until about 11:00 or so. And he mentioned he wanted to get in that man in the arena quote and to find that, and that had been located and so on.

Then finally, around 1:00, I left the office. Well, piece to that, shortly before one, I got a call from Jerry Warren, who was the Deputy Press Secretary, but he was Acting Press Secretary, saying that he’d gotten … very cautiously, saying that he was getting some calls from reporters who were still on duty there, noticing the lights were on in my office and wondering if that meant that Nixon was planning to resign. And Jerry said, very cautiously, I told them I don’t know, or I told them or …How should I handle it? And I thought a second, I said, “Jerry, you can tell them you don’t know.” This was very careful, and he understood what I was doing. He was a man of total integrity. I was alerting him that he shouldn’t deny it, but not giving him actual knowledge so he didn't have to affirm it. But then we went on.

And then finally I went home and about 3:45, got a call from him. He was working more. He was working in the Lincoln sitting room, that's up in the family quarters, which was his working area up there. He’d been working on the end and fleshing out more about one thing after another that we’d been doing, but there was this much left to do and so on. And it was in those calls there that 3:45, 4:15, 4:30, 4:45, he really kind of worked out the meat of that. And then finally at 5:07, the last call, was from him saying, “Just bring it over in the morning.” He wanted it at 8:30. “But don’t run it by Al Haig, don’t run it by Henry Kissinger or anyone else. Just you and me, I want this to be my speech.”

MS. WERTHEIMER: Goodness. For those of us who spent as many hours, weeks and days as I did covering Watergate, it’s fascinating to hear the behind the scenes moments. We're going to move on to Chriss Winston who is, as you heard, the first woman, to head a speechwriting office. And it was in the Bush Administration, but she has chosen, instead, to include a speech which was delivered by the Great Communicator. Chriss?

CHRISS WINSTON: And I'm not casting any aspersions on my boss. I actually started out, I was going to do one of his speeches. He did a series of speeches in Europe just before and just after the fall of the Berlin Wall that were very exciting places to be, Prague and Poland and Budapest and a number of other places that we went in eastern Europe. So, initially, I was going to pick one of those speeches and talk about what it was like to be in these countries at that moment in time and hopefully in the Q&A, we’ll have some time to talk about that.

But kind of in the last minute, I had a change of heart and I decided to go with Ronald Reagan’s farewell address from the Oval Office, an excerpt from that speech. And the reason I did that was because it’s Presidents’ Day, and I started thinking about how important Presidents are as our models and have been since the beginning of our country. Abraham Lincoln talked about the fact that as a young boy, George Washington was his hero and his model. And I started thinking about what I’d been studying for the last couple of years, which is how do we create good citizens today in the sort of political and cultural climate in which our children are being raised.

And one of the ways we do that, I think, is to teach our children about America’s great story and our history is something that can inspire them. So I started thinking about Presidents’ Day and that made me think, well, Ronald Reagan talked about exactly that issue in his farewell address. It was sort of his final … He called it the warning as he left office. And so I wanted to focus on that in part because he is such a wonderful communicator and it seemed to me to have a panel here without something from Ronald Reagan would be a glaring omission.

But also because I thought about a quote from a Czech writer who wrote that if you want to destroy a nation, destroy its memory. And so I wanted to use this excerpt on Presidents’ Day to remind us all that our presidents are our models for our children, and heroes like John Kennedy was to me when I was a young girl at the time. And how important it is for our children to have those kinds of models in their lives to become good citizens. That's why I chose this excerpt.

[VIDEO]

PRESIDENT REAGAN: Finally, there is a great tradition of warnings in presidential farewells, and I’ve got one that's been on my mind for some time. And oddly enough, it starts with one of the things I’m proudest of in the past eight years: the resurgence of national pride that I call the new patriotism. This national feeling is good, but it won’t count for much and it won’t last unless it’s grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.

An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught very directly what it means to be an American, and we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn't get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea, or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-‘60s.

But now we're about to enter the ‘90s and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom -- freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise, and freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile, it needs protection.

So we've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion, but what's important. Why the pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, four years ago on the 40 th anniversary of D Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father who had fought at Omaha Beach. Her name was Liza Zanatta Henn and she said, “We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.” Well, let’s help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson number one about America: all great change in America begins at the dinner table. So tomorrow night in the kitchen, I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents hadn't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let them know and nail them on it. That would be a very American thing to do.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Chriss, this is a wonderful example of President Reagan’s long conversation with the American people. It’s not a particularly good example of Presidential speechwriting, however, because the President wrote it, according to David Gergen, he wrote it himself. But why does it stand out for you, besides the … I mean, just in terms of the writing of a speech?

MS. WINSTON: Well, I do think conversation is the right word. I think his final address from the Oval Office was very much a conversational kind of speech. The language was that way, and if you remember at the very end of the speech, he says something to the effect of all in all, we didn't do too badly, not bad at all. And it was very Reagan in so many ways. The language, the love of America. He was always optimistic about America. I think that's one of the reasons the American people always responded to him. He was hopeful and optimistic and clearly loved his country, and that was evident in so much of what he had to say to the American people over the eight years he was in office.

The other thing that I think was so typical of him was the humor. Ronald Reagan used humor sometimes to attack the other side, and they really wouldn’t feel it coming. I mean, he always did it in a way that would bring a smile to the faces of sometimes even the other side. So humor was a really great strength.

I brought the speech with me, and if I can do this without putting my glasses on, which is debatable, but I will try and read you what he said in this speech about being a great communicator. He said, “I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference. It was the content. I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things. And they didn't spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation, from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in principles that have guided us for two centuries.” And I think that really was his style. He always attributed his success to the country he grew up in. And he may not have wanted to take the credit, but he was, in fact, a great communicator. So I found this a very moving speech watching it at the time. And having reread it over the last couple of years several times, it just struck me as an appropriate speech today, when times are tough in the country again, that it might be something that we could maybe agree on.

MS. WERTHEIMER: I very much liked listening to Ronald Reagan’s speeches, I have to say. He ends this one talking about the shining city on the hill; he talked about it so much in his speeches. And he says how stands the city on this winter night? One of the things that you’d hear from him was what I think of as kind of cowboy rhetoric, talking about the Soviet Union.

He says that he wants the closeness that the United States had, and that he had, with the new Soviet leader Gorbachev at the time, to continue. And he says that as long as they continue to act in a helpful manner, and then he said, “If and when they don’t, first pull your punches. If they persist, then pull the plug. It’s still trust, but verify. It’s still play, but cut the cards. And watch closely, and don’t be afraid to see what you see.” I mean, that kind of thing, I think the American people used to love.

MS. WINSTON: I think that's one of the reasons why the current President has often been criticized for the same kind of rhetoric. I believe cowboy has been used frequently to describe this President as well, but there are some similarities between Reagan and Bush in terms of some of the rhetoric they've used over the years. Obviously, I think President Reagan had a real ability to communicate through a prepared text, through a speech, which is difficult to do, very difficult as a matter of fact, prepared text. And it was interesting hearing about how many prepared texts were done with President Nixon. It’s something we might want to talk about later, the whole technical process side of speechwriting in the White House today has become, I think in large part because of a change in how much coverage there is at the White House, Presidents today will have a fairly substantial speechwriting operation. We had seven speechwriters in our shop and seven researchers. And President Bush would give sometimes as many as four speeches a day. So you can see how things have really changed substantially. And most speeches were not written by President Bush.

But as Linda said, David Gergen, just after we finished lunch here today, we were talking about the speech and he said that he thought that President Reagan in this case had written this one, for the most part, himself though he did have a fairly large speechwriting operation, too.

MS. WERTHEIMER: We're going to move on to Ted Widmer, who was writing speeches in the administration of President Clinton, and as you heard, is instrumental in setting up the Clinton Library. So the speech you have chosen was given in Ireland.

TED WIDMER: It was given in a small town called Armagh, outside of Belfast, in Northern Ireland in September, 1998. Before I describe it, I want to thank the Library for organizing this thoughtful panel. It’s a great pleasure to be with my fellow speechwriters. And I want to particularly thank Ted Sorensen, who by the way, he asked me at lunch which speeches by President Kennedy I included in an anthology I’ve just published with the Library of America, Great American Political Speeches . And he correctly guessed all five speeches. [laughter] And I believe he would have known the dates of them also. And I want to thank Ted for a very personal reason. His speeches were not only moving and persuasive to the American people, leading to the election of then-Senator Kennedy, but they were exciting and persuasive to many of the young volunteers in the 1960 campaign, including two college students from Massachusetts who joined the campaign, met each other and got married, and they were my parents. So we speechwriters tend to beget more speechwriters. [laughter]

Well, this particular speech by President Clinton is probably not that well known to most of you, although it was an important foreign policy speech at the time. It was his first day in Northern Ireland since brokering the Good Friday Accord, and it was a very exciting day. We had been on a trip to Russia and then to Ireland and Northern Ireland, and you couldn’t find two more different regions of the world. Russia was dark and cold and people were not in a very good mood at the time. They had had a severe economic setback and we touched down in Ireland; I remember that day vividly. It was one of those days where you fly all around the world, it seems, giving speeches at different locations. And we left Moscow at about six in the morning and landed in Ireland. And everywhere we went, just driving from the airport into a city, the roads were thick with enthusiastic people waving at the motorcade and it was tremendously exciting, and he gave a number of speeches.

One of my great challenges today was to pick a single Bill Clinton speech after he gave so many of them. There are 17 volumes in the collected speeches of President Bill Clinton. I don't think any other President comes within five or six of that number. They were sent to me by the Clinton Library, and I remember thinking, “Would one UPS man be strong enough to carry all of these volumes?”

But this was a magical day and a magical particular speech. He gave it in the late afternoon. It’s September, early September, and the light was beginning to diminish. And we had chosen a location in this beautiful small town called Armagh. And there was a Catholic church facing a Protestant church across the town green. So it was a beautiful location for so many reasons. And it was a speech outdoors, which I fear is a disappearing presidential tradition. I loved the quote that President Nixon chose from Teddy Roosevelt, about the man in the arena. And I think for most of the 20 th century that was something that American presidents loved to do, certainly when they were campaigning, but then after they became president. And one thinks a little bit about JFK’s speech in Berlin, or Ronald Reagan’s speech in Berlin. And part of the drama is it’s this man who’s the embodiment of American openness and confidence standing amidst huge throngs of foreign people who are listening very closely. And so much of it is the body language. And I fear for many reasons, including unavoidable reasons stemming from 9/11, but also from the great unpopularity of the Iraq war and other U.S. policies, that it will be a long time before we return to that tradition.

But on this particular day, Clinton was in full form. He was very much the man in the arena, and he strode out to the lectern and an enormous roar came from the crowd and he gave a speech that was both beautiful with some literary allusions and deeply humane. He said he’d wanted to come back to his hometown in Ireland, but his ancestors were so poor that no one knew what that hometown was. And he just talked about peace, and I think that's very much related to the idea of the open air speech. He talked about how important the peace was that the Irish people had discovered for themselves, and I think he would have phrased it that way, he had just helped bring them together.

And the end of the speech I felt was moving because he said, “Look, you're not just doing this for yourselves. You have your own tradition. Part of the problem has been that you haven’t always been able to look at yourselves objectively outside these two traditions. And what is fantastic about the peace of Northern Ireland in 1998 is that all peoples indulging in similar feuds around the Earth will see this and see that peace is achievable.” And so, he ended the speech with a long section that wasn’t about Ireland at all, but it was about what this would mean to all other peoples on Earth. And I think that sort of contrarian approach, going a little bit beyond what is expected, can make a speech truly distinctive.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: We wanted to come here in person to thank you, to thank you for the peace, to thank you for strengthening the hand of everyone, everyone anywhere, who is working to make the world a little better. When I go about to other troubled places, I talk to you as proof that peace is not an idle daydream, for your peace is real and it resonates around the world. It echoes in the ears of people hungry for the end of strife in their own country.

Now, when I meet Palestinians and Israelis, I can say, “Don't tell me it’s impossible, look at Northern Ireland.” When I meet Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo, I can say, “Don’t tell me it’s impossible, look at Northern Ireland.” When I hear what the Indians and Pakistanis say about each other over their religious differences, I say, “Don’t tell me you can’t work this out. Look at Northern Ireland.” Centuries were put to bed and a new day has dawned. Thank you for that gift to the world.

And never underestimate the impact you can have on the world. The great English poet and clergyman, John Donne, wrote those famous lines, “No man is an island. We are all a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Tonight, we might even say in this interconnected world, not even an island, not even a very unique island, not even Ireland, is fully an island. On this island, Northern Ireland, is obviously connected in ways to the Republic as well as to England, Scotland and Wales. And in ways, the Republic of Ireland is connected to them also. All of you on this island increasingly are connected to Europe and to the rest of the world as ideas and information and people fly across the globe at record speed.

We are tied ever closer together, and we have obligations now that we cannot shirk to stand for the cause of human dignity everywhere. To continue John Donne’s beautiful metaphor, when the bells of Armagh toll, they ring out not just to the Irish of Protestant and Catholic traditions, they ring out to people everywhere in the world who long for peace and freedom and dignity. That is your gift.

We Americans will do what we can to support the peace, to support economic projects, to support educational projects. Tomorrow, the Secretary of Education will announce a cooperative effort here to help children bring peace by doing cross community civic projects. We know we have an obligation to you because your ancestors were such a source of strength in America’s early history., because their descendents are building America’s future today. Because of all that, we have not forgotten our debt to Ulster. But we really owe an obligation to you because none of us are islands. We are all now a part of the main.

Three years ago, I pledged that if you chose peace, America would walk with you. You made the choice, and America will honor its pledge. Thank you for the springtime of hope you have given the world. Thank you for reminding us of one of life’s most important lessons, that it is never too late for a new beginning. And remember, you will be tested again and again, but a God of grace has given you a new beginning. Now, you must make the most of it, mindful of President Kennedy’s adage that here on Earth, God’s work must truly be our own. Your work is the world’s work, and everywhere, in every corner, there are people who long to believe in our better selves, who want to be able to say for the rest of their lives in the face of an act of madness borne of hatred, over religious or racial or ethnic or tribal differences, they want to be able to shake their fist in defiance and say, “Do not tell me it has to be this way. Look at Northern Ireland.” Thank you, and God bless you.

MS. WERTHEIMER: An extraordinarily inspirational speech. I want to, because I want to get to the questions as quickly as possible, let me just ask you all to just talk for a few minutes about some of the technical aspects of speechwriting, and I suppose some of you will have questions of that sort as well. I’d like to begin with Ted Sorensen whose memoir, as you heard, is going to be published, but we don’t know the name of it yet. That I understand, in part of it, you talk about how you did what you did, how to write speeches for presidents. Could you just share a little bit of that with us?

MR. SORENSEN: Well, thanks for the plug. It’s true, I’ve been working for five years on my life story, and I'm at the finish line at last. And I expect it will be out next year, and I hope you’ll invite me back. One of the chapters is entitled, “Speechwriting.” And looking over the latest draft, and it’s still a draft …

MS. WERTHEIMER: And too long ... (inaudible)—

MR. SORENSEN: Oh yes, I couldn’t possibly. But I did find one excerpt that I thought I would read to you.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Great.

MR. SORENSEN: This is what somebody else said about the Kennedy/Sorensen collaboration, and I thought you might be interested in that. Now, these are not my views, please understand. “You need a mind like Sorensen’s around you that's clicking and clicking all the time. You can get a beautifully tooled speech, but at best just one sentence of it will make the difference. It takes an intellectual to come up with a phrase that may penetrate. Sorensen is tough, cold, not carried away by emotion, and he has the rare gift of being an intellectual who can completely sublimate his style to another individual. And in his case, it’s the right combination. Sorensen is analytical and unemotional, so was Kennedy. There hasn’t been such a combination of speechwriter and president since Raymond Moley and Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

And a little bit later, “A public figure shouldn’t be just a puppet who echoes his speechmaker. The ideas should be his, the opinions his, the words his. It’s easy for Kennedy to get up and read Sorensen’s speeches. But I don't think it’s responsible unless he believes in it deeply himself.” That's Richard Nixon. [laughter]

MS. WERTHEIMER: Well, that is the essential problem of being a presidential speechwriter, it does seem to me. You know, the big question, who wrote that? Which you always have to stand back from, deny, efface yourself from. What is that like? Ray Price, what was that like?

MR. PRICE: I didn't have that problem so much. I had been a professional writer before I joined up with Nixon, and I’d been a debater and things like that, and at times a speechwriter, as well as a parliamentary debater. But he taught me speechwriting. He’d been a master of the craft. And again, as I said, my rough count was probably 19 out of 20 speeches in the White House were not written. Most of our writing was things like the legislative messages to Congress and so forth, long written things in which we laid out what we wanted and made the argument for why and so on. And these were delivered in written form, they're not spoken.

Nixon had a first rate mind, a very organized mind. I was always appalled at speechwriters who would brag, as I heard a number of them do from time to time, about how they had snuck something into a president’s speech, or how they’d gotten him to say what they, the speechwriters, wanted him to say. I felt my role, both as a writer and as head of the writing department, was to make sure that nothing got into the President’s speech that was not what he wanted to say, the way he wanted to say it. And in the process of back and forth with him, in his case when we went back and forth on a written speech, it was usually through about six or seven or eight drafts. But he would be using that, and we’d be editing and revising and so on. He would be using that process as a means of refining ideas. As you find they don’t work out on paper, you find maybe they don’t work quite right. You get different views on it.

I did all State of the Unions with him, and every one of those worked out, coincidentally, did 14 drafts. But these were much more complicated things and much longer. But again, he was an organized thinker. He himself had been a champion debater from high school on, and debating teaches you something about rhetoric and about organizing thoughts and so forth. And he was a lawyer, and this was part of his background. But again, he was more comfortable without. He just felt he connected better with the audience without it, and he didn't need a text. And he was a natural, natural speaker.

MS. WERTHEIMER: So your habit of self effacement has completely overtaken you here. [laughter] Chriss, among other things, you had a principal who was not the orator that President Reagan was or President Clinton was. I remember many times reading a speech and thinking, “There's my quote,” and then he would get to it and he would stumble somewhere in the middle of the money quote.

MS. WINSTON: Right. [laughter] I remember that, too. One of my favorites was we were in one of those eastern European trips, and I believe it was -- I have to really go back to my memory bank here -- but I think it was Hungary, we were in Hungary. And Rubic, who did Rubic’s Cube, the man who had created Rubic’s Cube, was one of the first entrepreneurs in Hungary after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he’d been living there, he was Hungarian. So in one of the speeches that President Bush was giving there, Mr. Rubic was going to be in the audience and we were talking about entrepreneurship and capitalism and all of these things, and we were going to use him as a good example. When President Bush got to that section of the speech, he started talking about it, and he proceeded to call it Rubic’s Cone, which was one of those, we're just sitting there, “Well, great.” [laughter] And those things did happen sometimes with him.

But I think it’s true with anyone that you write for. One of the things that's most difficult to do is to try and learn that person’s voice, because you are reflecting not your thoughts and not your voice, but his or hers. And President Bush, when we started to write for him, none of us had written speeches for him during the campaign. We were in another part of the communications operation, and then we brought in some new speechwriters. And so we had to learn that, and we had to learn it on the ground as we went along. And one of the first things we discovered with him happened … Well, there were two things, really. First of all, frequently when a speech draft would come back, in the margin would be the phrase that all of us came to really hate. And it would say, “Too much rhetoric.” Okay, that's the phrase, and it was the kiss of death. Anything very flowery, the kind of language that speechwriters like to indulge in, he found it to be just overly dramatic or too flowery for him. He liked very plain language. So that was the first thing we learned.

The second thing we learned, and it happened just a few months after we were in office, and the U.S.S. Iowa had a terrible explosion and I think over 100 sailors were killed, a terrible accident. The President was going to speak to the memorial service. Now, this was the first military speech that we had written, and of course it was a very difficult moment. And so in the speech, the speechwriter, who was a very good speechwriter by the name of Mark Davis, wrote these really wonderful memorial remarks. And he, in it, used a phrase from a poem referring to the men behind the gun. And at one point in the speech, there was a paragraph where the President was to say something to the effect that he remembered as a young airman, Navy pilot in World War II, coming back to the ship at night after a mission — (pause on tape) -- and then we heard the President to be sniffling and kind of … And both of us were kind of, “What?” And as the speech went on, it was clear he was becoming more and more choked up as the speech went on. And as we got to that dramatic moment in the speech that we knew was coming, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, he’s really going to have a tough time getting through it.” Well, he didn't have any trouble getting through it at all because he just leapfrogged right over it and dropped the paragraph out of the speech and went on, and that paragraph never saw the light of day. And I thought Mark was going to commit suicide right there in my office. We're both sitting there, like, “He dropped it.” But that is what we learned -- was that President Bush, and I think this President Bush is much like his father, that they have a great difficulty talking about the military and military sacrifices. It is something very near and dear to their heart, and we learned to write in a way that he could get through that kind of language without breaking up. But that's what you have to do. It’s part of the process of learning to write for someone, whatever level.

MR. PRICE: If I could throw in a p.s. to that one, my guess would be that—President Bush, Senior., is an old friend of mine—That particular one would have been especially hard for him because as a Navy pilot in World War II, one of the most traumatic events of his life was being shot down. He survived, and his two crewmates did not.

MS. WINSTON: Right, and he still can’t talk about it. He has a lot of difficulty discussing that.

MS. WERTHEIMER: But some presidents, I keep going back to President Reagan, President Reagan, for example, could make an emotional speech in which tears would come into his eyes and then 3 ½ hours later, you know, in the next town, he would make the same emotional speech, and the tear would come into his eye. And four hours later. But the thing that was always just so dazzling to me was that tears would come into my eye! You know, and I had heard that speech …

MS. WINSTON: Every time.

MS. WERTHEIMER: For 11 times. [laughter] But he just had that capacity to cause you to share in the emotional content of the speech. Now, I was very impressed, Ted, with your boss’s …

MR. SORENSEN: Which Ted?

MS. WERTHEIMER: Other one. [laughter]

MR. WIDMER: I’m always going to be the other Ted in speechdom. [laughter]

MS. WERTHEIMER: Ted Widmer. Somebody pointed out at the beginning that we had lots of people whose names begin with W and two people named Ted. Let me just show you this. This is Ted Widmer’s book, The Anthology of American Speeches . And if you are interested in reading some of these speeches, it’s a very good place to go. I’ve been reading it all morning. One of the things that happened in the Clinton Administration, obviously, was that like the Nixon Administration, you had a very bad patch to go through and the President was not permitted to hide in the Rose Garden and never speak. And that, it seems to me, must have been a very difficult thing to do for you, for him as well?

MR. WIDMER: It was, but I think you could say that 1998, which was my first full year as a speechwriter, was in many ways his best year as well as his worst year, if you can say both things at the same time, which I think you can. He achieved an enormous amount with his foreign policy and I think we tend to forget what an effective foreign policy President Bill Clinton had. Besides Northern Ireland, he had quite an important trip to Africa, still the longest trip to Africa of any U.S. President, an important trip to China. And throughout the year, terribly serious things were happening that he was handling effectively and his political ratings were rising. So it was a funny year in that he was in dire political peril, but he was performing better than ever. No foreign policy jitters whatsoever, and the American people were growing to appreciate that.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Well, one of the things I remember was the State of the Union which came just days after all the Monica Lewinski revelations. I mean, that must have been an amazing drafting session?

MR. WIDMER: It was. [laughter] I was only involved peripherally; I’d been there just a couple of months. I was a very junior speechwriter. But until about the day of the speech, I had a single line in it, which was based on a repair that was happening in my house at the time where my wife had said the best time to fix our roof is when the sun is shining. And so I thought, “That's a pretty good line.” [laughter] That was about fixing the economy when things are— Fine tuning it when things are good, and that line survived until almost the moment of delivery, and then it was scratched at the last minute because apparently President Kennedy had said something very similar in a rather obscure place and time, and it was not a line I remembered. I truly had just heard my wife say it. And I was disappointed, it was my only line and it disappeared. But then the next day …

MR. SORENSEN: Wait until I tell you about President Kennedy and your wife. [laughter]

MR. WIDMER: Fortunately, we don’t get C-SPAN, we don’t have cable, you can say anything you want. [laughter] The next day, President Clinton said, “You know, when I was a kid growing up in Arkansas, we had a saying. The best time to fix your roof is when the sun is shining,” so a good line has many fathers.

MS. WERTHEIMER: But he really did knock that State of the Union speech out of the park.

MR. WIDMER: It was unbelievably dramatic. He never looked more confident than that day, and he was probably never in more peril than at that moment. It wasn’t just that he survived. In that same speech he saved the social security system with four strategic words, “Save social security first.” So it was like watching Nureyev, it was just an extraordinary thing to watch. I just watched it on TV in the White House with the other speechwriters, but it couldn’t have been more exciting.

MR. SORENSEN: You know, I got to thinking listening to this, I think one thing you really have to understand in understanding the presidency itself, setting speechwriting aside, is that you cannot function effectively as a president unless you're very good at compartmentalizing.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Yeah. Okay, your turn folks. Chriss is going to make one more comment, but you might want to start forming lines behind the microphones. Chriss?

MS. WINSTON: I was just going to mention a story about a line that we tried to get into a speech also, which was a speech -- this was in the run-up to the Gulf War, and the President was going to speak, I believe it was at the Defense Department to employees at the Defense

Department. And we were doing a whole series of speeches in terms of building support for the Gulf War. And we had decided in speechwriting, we were going to make a comparison of Saddam to Hitler. This sounds very familiar to some of you now, I suspect. But we thought that that was an apt description, given the … Remember at this time, it wasn't that long a period of time from when he had gassed the Kurds and so forth, and we thought this was an apt comparison and we put it in the draft of the speech and it went through the process. And it came back, and I believe it was the NSC, the National Security Council, had Xed it out. And I went in and I argued for it, and I said, “What's the problem? We need … “ “No, no, this is not the kind of rhetoric we want to use.” I said, “Okay, fine.” So we took it out. We went off to the Defense Department, the President got up there and gave the speech. And when he got to that point in the speech, and though he'd never seen this line, it never even made it into the Oval Office for him to even consider doing it, he got up there and he gave the speech and halfway through the speech, lo and behold, he just ad libbed it anyway. And, of course, speechwriting was cheering over this whole thing.

So the next speech we had to do for the Gulf War, we thought, “All right, he’s already said it, we're golden.” We put it back in the speech, it went through the process. Lo and behold, NSC scratched it out again. So even when the President says it, the bureaucracy can sometimes do you in, so I sympathize.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Okay, let’s start over here?

AUDIENCE: I’d like to address my opening remark to Ted Widmer. I was fortunate enough to be in Independence, Missouri, when President Clinton -- he wasn't President then -- but he accepted the nomination of his party to run for President. And then the next time I was in his presence was at the 50 th anniversary of D Day in Normandy. Senator Dole was also there, and he got a much bigger response, a much bigger response from the people who were there. President Clinton was not very popular with veterans at that point. But when he made his speech on Omaha Beach, he closed it with the words, “They walk with a little less spring in their steps, and their ranks are growing thinner. But we must always remember when these men were young, they saved the world.” And my voice is cracking a little bit and that is in keeping with Linda Wertheimer’s reaction to some other speeches.

But I also hark back to President Reagan’s speech when he quoted the woman who said that they would always be grateful to the American people. And when I go back to Europe, in Luxembourg, and in Belgium and France, and even when I meet, and I’ve been in Germany, and when people find out that I'm a D Day veteran, they—especially the Germans—they say, “Thank you for liberating my country.” And so I'm harking back to what President Reagan quoted that woman as saying, that we will never forget what the Americans in Normandy did for us. And since that time, I have read polls that say that they have interviewed young people, and fully onethird of them believed that the Germans were our allies in World War II. And I'm just wondering, Linda, I mean Chriss, what has happened to history? And why is this situation prevalent today?

MS. WERTHEIMER: Thank you. Chriss, you want to take a very quick …

MS. WINSTON: I’ll try and make this really short, and by using an example. In working on the book that I’ve been working on for the last couple of years, at one point I sat down and read my son’s 11 th grade American history textbook, all 1,000 pages and some of it. And this will give you an example. Part of the problem, I think, with the teaching of American history today is how the textbook authors decide what subjects to tackle and how much space they're going to get. And so let me just give you an example, and I think this will say it all.

I looked at his book and I started counting words. And there was a section called The Disco Generation, and it got 214 words. And Steven Spielberg got his own section, and that was 381 words. Nicaragua, Iran Contra, but a lot on the history of Nicaragua, got over 1,000 words. And Neil Armstrong and the moon landing got a whopping 78 words, which I think is shocking. And I actually thought very seriously today of using President Kennedy’s speech at Rice University, which is one of my favorite speeches, because I think that the space program is one of America’s most wonderful and inspiring stories for our children. There's no downside, it’s courageous, it embodies all of our values and spirits and has brought so much new science and technology to the world. And yet, American history today all but ignores it.

And so I would just use that example to tell you that's part of the problem. And I would suggest that people read their child’s textbooks.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Let’s try to keep this to relatively concise questions, yes?

AUDIENCE: Absolutely. My question is for Ted No. 1, and I believe that President Kennedy’s favorite orator, from my understanding, was Sir Winston Churchill. And so my question is, in your workings with President Kennedy, how much was Churchill referenced, his speeches or his actions or deeds? And could you possibly give an example?

MR. SORENSEN: The answer to everything you just said is yes. President Kennedy admired Winston Churchill, both as a public figure and as an orator. And I believe you will find references to Churchill in Kennedy’s speeches and in his off the cuff remarks, such as press conferences. And I have to tell you that I read a lot of Churchill in my role in helping Kennedy on some of the things that he said and wrote. And I have often, when I occasionally lecture to students on speechwriting, invoke Churchill as the example of what -- Who was it? I guess Tom Putnam in the introduction here today cited as being one of my principles, which is don’t use any unnecessary words of which the best example is Winston Churchill after the fall of France. He began his report to the British people over radio with what, it’s about seven words. “The news from France is very bad.” Says it all.

MS. WERTHEIMER: I was just checking—I'm not fast enough here—I was checking the index to see if I could find one. Yes?

AUDIENCE: Yes, hi. I listened to a lot of President Kennedy’s speeches personally,and also downstairs a number of times. And I’ve always wondered the source of two words that he uses repeatedly, and that's “let us.” And I wondered if there was a history to how that started and if he used it a lot before he was President, or just this part of his way of saying things when he became President?

MR. SORENSEN: I have to say I’ve never thought about that before, and I don't know the answer. I learned from the master that when you don’t know the answer, don’t give one. [laughter]

MS. WERTHEIMER: Yes?

AUDIENCE: Mr. Sorensen, it’s an honor to speak to you. My question is related to something you said earlier. You referred to the American University speech as being President Kennedy reexamining attitudes about the Cold War, including his own attitudes. And that made me think of the passage in the inaugural address, which obviously came first, “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to insure the survival and the success of liberty.” And that quote is obviously magnificent oratory, but it has been criticized, unjustly in my view, but criticized nonetheless as maybe raising the bar a little too high. And do you think that in the later speech, the American University speech, President Kennedy was reexamining some of the things he’d said about the Cold War.

MR. SORENSEN: That's a very thoughtful question. I have to say that he had the same help on the inaugural as he had on the American University speech. [laughter] And so no, I don't think it was a reexamination. And I'm glad you said that he is unjustly criticized for those words in the inaugural because people who single out those words and focus on it as a Cold War rhetoric forget the rest of the speech in which he said—back to the lady’s question—“Let us, let both sides, join.” Meaning east and west, Soviets and Americans. “Let us together join in exploring the heavens and the stars. Let us enjoin in pushing back the desert. Let us explore the ocean depths, and let us fight the …“ I don’t remember it exactly. “Fight the common enemies of disease, poverty, tyranny and war itself.” No American President had ever said that before.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Here's another one. “Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Cold War.” This is from the American University speech. Yes?

AUDIENCE: This is directed primarily to Mr. Sorensen, but the other …

MS. WERTHEIMER: We’ve got to broaden out here.

AUDIENCE: When did it become apparent that in working with John Kennedy that you two were of a mind, or more significantly, of a voice together, and that your writings pretty much represented his voice, or captured his thoughts and the rhetoric captured the way he preferred to communicate them?

MR. SORENSEN: First, I have to say this is all in my book and you’ll have to buy it. [laughter]

AUDIENCE: And I happily will.

MR. SORENSEN: But I would say that our compatibility was not apparent until the afternoon of the first day we met. [laughter] I had worked for him almost a year before he asked me to help on speeches. And interestingly enough, here in Boston, the reason was—I still remember him coming into my office adjoining his, or actually a waiting room in between—He came into my office and he said, “I have to give three speeches, I believe all in Boston, on St. Patrick’s Day. How about helping?” I’m a Unitarian from Lincoln, Nebraska, where we never observed St. Patrick’s Day, but I thought it’d be an interesting challenge. And I turned out three speeches for St. Patrick’s Day, and he loved them, and I never got rid of the job for the next ten years.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Ted, the other Ted, let me just ask you to speak to the, as Chriss already has, about finding the voice of your principal?

MR. WIDMER: Well, you just read his speeches. I came well into his Presidency, I came in in ’97, and you begin by just reading. And then you learn a lot from your fellow speechwriters. We were similar numbers, we were up to nine or ten, I think, in Clinton. We had two staffs, by the way. We had a foreign policy staff inside the NSC, which I was part of, and then a domestic staff. And so it’s imitative. You're just trying to get that voice, and for me, the best coaches were my fellow speechwriters at first. But then after a certain amount of time, it becomes more natural.

MS. WERTHEIMER: I remember on a couple of occasions when I was standing right behind President Reagan because I was in the tight pool, I saw him change his speech while he was giving it, into a locution that was more comfortable for him. You know, it’s just something that, I guess, they just get good at it after they do it for a while. Over here?

AUDIENCE: My name is Alison Shapiro, I work at the Kennedy School and I'm a public speaking and speechwriting consultant. My question is I’d like to hear from any of our distinguished speechwriters about the unique relationship between our speechwriter and a principal, and how that manifests itself on a presidential level, especially given the large number of speechwriters who are involved in writing a speech?

MS. WERTHEIMER: Shall we start with Ted Sorensen?

MR. SORENSEN: Occasionally, since I left the White House, I have been asked by others if I would write speeches for them, which I have for the most part not done. And I have tried to explain to them that for ultimately 11 years, I was with John F. Kennedy day and night. I knew what he thought and what he said on almost every subject. Between the convention of 1956 and the convention of 1960, we traveled to all 50 states together. We ate together, we lived together, we formed a bond that unless you have that kind of bond, you don't have the same relationship. And with a stranger calling me up on the phone asking me to write a speech for him, it’s not going to be in his voice the way I was able to help JFK with words that he was comfortable with.

But I would add one other important fact at the presidential level, as you suggest. We've heard quite a bit today about speechwriting and research departments. We didn't have a speechwriting and research department in the Kennedy White House. Occasionally, and on some important occasions, Arthur Schlesinger would help. He was our resident historian. During the first ten months of the presidency, as during the Presidential campaign, that is the post convention campaign, Dick Goodwin was a very good speechwriter who made a lot of contributions. But the speechwriting department was essentially John F. Kennedy and me.

And I had the advantage of being counsel to the President, special counsel to the President and policy advisor, as mentioned by Tom in his introduction, so that I was able to take part in the policy decisions, and the great speeches are communicating great decisions. And I would listen to the evidence being presented to the President and watch his reaction. I could tell what impressed him, what ideas, what themes, what thoughts, even what words or what data made a difference to him. And then walk down the hall to my office and put it together in the form of a draft speech. That is so much easier than being across the street at the executive office building, in a speechwriting and research department with six or nine other people and getting a phone call from the Chief of Staff, “The President wants a speech on agriculture. Who wants to write the speech on agriculture?” Thank goodness I didn't have to do that. And I sympathize with Chriss and the fact that the clearance process sometimes interfered with good lines, except on State of the Union messages and on the Cuban Missile Crisis speech, which was a totally different story. I didn't have a clearance process. My drafts went to John F. Kennedy.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Would anybody else like to add something? Chriss?

MS. WINSTON: Only, you know, the phrase good old days comes to mind because it would have been wonderful to have that kind of a relationship. I think maybe a couple of things changed over time. One was the demands of the numbers of speeches that presidents gave. I know I was working on a book and I called Franklin Roosevelt’s Presidential Library to get a five or six month schedule, a particular time to look at his speeches, to see where he’d given speeches. And in that five month period, he gave four speeches, which was staggering to me. I just assumed presidents gave lots of speeches, they didn't.

I think that's one change that is different. And I also think the intense media scrutiny of speeches, now there's so much. There's just so much more media out there to cover speeches; I think sort of intensifies that. But, you know, I agree with everything Ted said. The ideal is the kind of relationship that he had with President Kennedy. I mean, you can always do a better job if you're very close to the principal you're writing for.

MS. WERTHEIMER: I'm going to move on because we can really only take, I think, one more question. We have planes to catch here, people are about to leave.

AUDIENCE: To those of you who’ve done both, which is more challenging and which more enjoyable: writing for the presidential candidate or writing for the man in the Oval Office?

MS. WERTHEIMER: That's a good question. Ted, do you want to start?

MR. WIDMER: I haven’t written for a campaigner, I only wrote for President Clinton. The first speech I ever wrote was for President Clinton, and I haven’t written any after. So I can’t compare.

MS. WINSTON: No, I was on the campaign but I had other responsibilities on the campaign.

MR. PRICE: I’m not sure how to answer. In the ’68 campaign, I was part of—His key writer, and I did a lot of speeches there, although a lot of these—We did our policy things in ’68 campaign on radio. We didn't use television, we used radio. That worked much better. It was cheaper, and—[laughter] No, quite seriously, we could buy half an hour of radio for 2,000 bucks, and also we wouldn't preempt “I Love Lucy.” And we got anywhere from half a million to two million people actually sitting and listening to what was said.

And so for serious policy things, we used radio. That's more cerebral than television is. But in terms of satisfaction, I'm going to suggest a different thing. The first presidential campaign is an exciting thing in itself. The second campaign is less exciting. The presidency is very demanding, the campaigns are very demanding. And my guess it would be more, not so much more one to the other as within each one, was more or less.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Mr. Sorensen?

MR. SORENSEN: There's a total difference, vast difference, between writing speeches for the presidential candidate and writing speeches for the president of the United States. First of all, the campaign, I warn those of you who want to be a speechwriter, is the most exhausting ordeal of your life. The candidate gets a little sleep at night, but the speechwriter doesn’t. That's when he has to work.

Second, the speeches themselves are much easier to write. When a crisis arises during the campaign, the candidate can give a speech raising the right question, pointing with alarm, demanding an investigation. That's no good when you're president of the United States. You're in charge, you have to come up with the answer. And every word the president utters is fraught with implication. If it’s in foreign policy, the president’s words become the policy. Not in domestic, because Congress has to authorize it and appropriate the money for it. But in foreign policy, every word is policy. Moreover, as president, you are simultaneously addressing many different and inconsistent audiences. Your supporters and your opponents at home, Congress, the allies, the adversaries abroad, every one of them is going to look and listen to that speech very differently, and all of that has to be weighed. So it’s much tougher for the president.

MS. WERTHEIMER: I think that this is it for us. And thank you all so much. My apologies to the people who are still waiting in line, but we have a group that has to leave. Thank you all so much. [applause]

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By the People: Essays on Democracy

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Harris’s Brother-in-Law, a Corporate Executive, Emerges as a Close Adviser

Tony West, the top lawyer for Uber, is weighing in on polling and running mates. His presence has made some liberals anxious.

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Tony West looks at the camera, seated wearing a light blue shirt.

By Kate Kelly Noam Scheiber and Kenneth P. Vogel

Vice President Kamala Harris had a secret weapon on hand as she worked the phones in the hours after President Biden dropped his re-election bid and endorsed her.

Tony West, her brother-in-law and the chief legal officer at Uber, was with Ms. Harris in the vice president’s residence when she received the news, and he spent the afternoon helping her reach out to would-be supporters. At various points he peeled away to a nearby anteroom to call his own network of donors and business contacts, after which the two relatives compared notes, someone familiar with the matter said.

Since that Sunday, Mr. West has emerged as a major force behind Ms. Harris’s campaign and its record-setting fund-raising, but also as a concern for some progressives who want her to take a hard line against big business. He is expected to remain involved in the final 92 days of the race, with Uber announcing on Friday that Mr. West would soon take an unpaid leave of absence to focus on the White House run.

Ms. Harris’s campaign brought on several senior political operatives on Friday, some of whom worked on former President Barack Obama’s campaigns, to add to the team that had been assembled to re-elect Mr. Biden. But none has the advantage of family ties like her brother-in-law, who has held top positions in the Justice Department and corporate America while advising Ms. Harris’s campaigns since she ran for San Francisco district attorney in 2003.

And Mr. West, who is serving as an unpaid adviser, has already made a mark on her campaign.

He recommended bringing on Eric H. Holder Jr., the former attorney general, to handle the vetting process for Ms. Harris’s running mate, said the person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss internal dynamics. Mr. West has also helped shape Ms. Harris’s campaign team by supporting the elevation of her longtime pollster , this person added. And he has served as a critical point of contact for business leaders and major donors, according to several people with knowledge of his role.

He did all of this during a pivotal period for his work at Uber, the publicly traded ride-sharing company. On July 25, shortly after Ms. Harris addressed the influential American Federation of Teachers union in Houston, the California Supreme Court issued a ruling that ensured that Uber would not see its labor costs rise by hundreds of millions of dollars. The ruling provoked outrage among some of the unions whose help Ms. Harris may need to win in November.

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IMAGES

Jack Schlossberg reflects on his grandfather on JFK's 100th birthday
JFK's Harvard Entrance Essay Resurfaced Online and People Are Underwhelmed
JFK’s Harvard application (with essay) and other school records
JFK’s Harvard application (with essay) and other school records
Jack Schlossberg reflects on his grandfather on JFK's 100th birthday
JFK Essay

VIDEO

JFK got into Harvard bc his LOR had CLOUT!!! Letters of recommendation are as valuable as the influe
Studying the Kennedy Assassination
JFK got into Harvard in just 5 sentences
Dissertation tip #12: JFK example
American Royalty Under the Spotlight: John F. Kennedy Jr.'s Turbulent Life and Tragic End
Harvard's JFK receives degree form Yale 1962

COMMENTS

JFK's Very Revealing Harvard Application Essay
JFK's Very Revealing Harvard Application Essay. At 17 years old, the future president seemed to understand that the value of an elite education is in the status it offers. John F. Kennedy stands ...
Here's The 5-Sentence Personal Essay That Helped JFK Get Into Harvard
Here's John F. Kennedy's personal essay from his Harvard University application.
Resume and Essays
A résumé is required of all applicants. This document should highlight the following information: employment, including titles and dates (months and years) for each position, job responsibilities, reason for any gaps in employment history; academic degrees, achievements, and honors; volunteer, public service, and political work; recent ...
Why Is JFK's Harvard Admissions Essay Going Viral?
After John F. Kennedy's grandson Jack Kennedy Schlossberg graduated with a dual degree from Harvard, JFK's own Harvard admissions essay went viral. The 35th president of the United States ...
JFK's Harvard essay resurfaces online 87 years later
A 17-year-old John F. Kennedy wrote a five-sentence college admissions essay to Harvard University -- and got in, of course. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Read JFK's Surprisingly Short Harvard College Application Essay
JFK 's 1935 Harvard University application essay has hit the Internet thanks to the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. The scanned document gives us a look at Kennedy's grades, academic ...
PDF JFK's Very Revealing Harvard Application Essay
Still, Kennedy's essay shows a profound, if implicit, understanding of the primary value of attending an elite school: status and personal connections, rather than mastery of academic skills and knowledge. Notice that he only makes one mention of the education he'd receive at Harvard—a passing reference to the school's superior "liberal education." The rest of the paragraph focuses on the ...
Final thesis: Harvard copy
This folder contains an electrostatic copy of the final version of John F. Kennedy's Harvard University senior thesis, Appeasement at Munich: The Inevitable Result of the Slowness of Conversion of the British Democracy from a Disarmament to a Rearmament Policy.
Harvard Kennedy School MPP and MPA2 Application Essay Tips [2021
MPP and MPA JFK essay The Harvard Kennedy School motto, echoing the President for whom the School is named, is "Ask what you can do." Please share with the Admissions Committee your plans to create positive change through your public leadership and service. (500 word limit) This is essentially a vision-and-goals question.
JFK's Harvard application (with essay) and other school records
JFK's Harvard application (with essay) and other school records. The 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy this Friday has prompted an avalanche of coverage about ...
JFK Lazy Harvard Essay Resurfaces After SCOTUS Admissions Ruling
John F. Kennedy's 1935 Harvard essay seeking admission to Harvard mentions his wealthy father as one of the reasons he thinks he should be admitted.
JFK's Harvard Essay
April 23, 1935. John F. Kennedy. What did JFK do in his essay? He establishes his interest in getting a liberal education, and established Harvard as the school strongest position to deliver this service. He flatters Harvard and differentiates it by saying that it's not "just another college". He states his long held desire to go to Harvard.
Application FAQs: Essays
Essays are a critical component of your application. They allow you to tell the Admissions Committee more about your personal history and experiences, professional aspirations, and commitment to public service. We want to know who you are and why you are interested in pursuing a master's degree at Harvard Kennedy School—and essays are the best way for us to gather this information. Below ...
JFK's Harvard
JFK's Harvard | Harvard's JFK. Just as Harvard shaped "Jack" Kennedy during his time as a student, John Fitzgerald Kennedy influenced Harvard during his political career, first as US senator, then as President of the United States. This year, a century after the birth of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the nation will reflect on the life and ...
Harvard Kennedy School 2022-2023 Essay Advice: MPP, MPA, MPA/MC, MPA-ID
Expert essay advice, tips, sample essay outlines, and mistakes to avoid from a Harvard Kennedy School & HBS joint degree grad.
Harvard Kennedy School
Harvard Kennedy School combines research, teaching, and direct interaction with practitioners to impact public problem-solving.
John F Kennedy's "Why Harvard?" Essay : r/ApplyingToCollege
John F Kennedy's "Why Harvard?" Essay. "The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite ...
Hogg, Quintin M.: Oral History Interview
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is dedicated to the memory of our nation's thirty-fifth president and to all those who through the art of politics seek a new and better world.
JFK's Harvard essay resurfaces, to mockery, after Supreme Court strikes
In Kennedy's response to the essay prompt — fewer than 100 words — some saw hypocrisy in the court's decision to overrule nearly half a century of legal precedent.
Commencement Address at American University, Washington ...
President John F. Kennedy. Washington, D.C. June 10, 1963. President Anderson, members of the faculty, board of trustees, distinguished guests, my old colleague, Senator Bob Byrd, who has earned his degree through many years of attending night law school, while I am earning mine in the next 30 minutes, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen ...
American University speech
The American University speech, titled " A Strategy of Peace ", was a commencement address delivered by United States President John F. Kennedy at the American University in Washington, D.C., on Monday, June 10, 1963. [1] Widely considered one of the most powerful speeches Kennedy delivered, [2] he not only outlined a plan to curb nuclear arms ...
Have you ever seen JFK's college essay for Harvard? And his high school
JFK's college application essay to Harvard has been floating around the Internet for years, but his terrible high school grades have escaped my notice-till now.
How Two Russian Spies Went Deep Undercover With Their Children
A couple planted as sleeper spies in Slovenia posed as an Argentine art dealer and an entrepreneur. They were caught in December 2022 and sent to Moscow in a sweeping prisoner exchange last week.
PRESIDENTIAL SPEECHWRITERS
Theodore Sorensen served for 11 years as policy advisor, legal counsel and speechwriter to Senator and President John F. Kennedy. He was deeply involved in such presidential decisions as the Cuban Missile Crisis, civil rights legislation, and the decision to send a man to the moon. He is the author of numerous books, including his best-selling biography, Kennedy, and Let the Word Go Forth, a ...
Presidential Election
Harvard Kennedy School professors, Nancy Gibbs and Thomas Patterson, reflect on the challenges news media creators and consumers face, and whether we are likely to get away from the usual horse race coverage of the presidential election.
Harris's Brother-in-Law Tony West, an Uber Executive, is a Key Adviser
Mr. West's influential position in Ms. Harris's operation has prompted comparisons to Robert F. Kennedy, who was a close adviser to his brother John F. Kennedy's campaigns, and became his ...