A great champion of nuclear disarmament, Theodore C. Sorensen, died on Sunday, 31 October 2010, at the age of 82. As the former Special Counsel to President John F. Kennedy, his was an important voice in the long struggle to, as President Kennedy said in his inaugural address, “bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations.”

Ted Sorensen has been an inspiration to the work of Global Security Institute and a personal friend of and adviser to our President, Jonathan Granoff. His generosity in giving his sage advice to our work will be sorely missed.

As one of the members of the “New Frontier,” the inner circle of thirtysomethings that dominated President Kennedy’s cabinet, Ted Sorensen was intimately involved in defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis and thus was one of the individuals who saved the planet on that thirteenth day in 1962. His involvement in bringing us back from the brink of annihilation fueled his lifelong commitment to nuclear disarmament. GSI is proud to have sponsored this event at the United Nations in 2005, where he and the late Robert McNamara imparted their wisdom with the UN community. (The webcast requires RealPlayer to view.) As Co-Chair of the American Bar Association’s International Law Section’s Blue Ribbon Taskforce on Non-proliferation, Mr. Granoff hosted a special dialogue with Mr. Sorensen and Mr. McNamara at the Spring meeting of the ABA in 2004.

Mr. Sorensen worked with President Kennedy on some of his greatest speeches, including the immortal words: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Together they infused many of Kennedy’s speeches with this sense of self-reflective duty, virtues that we as peacemakers must strive to attain every day: “Every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward, by examining his own attitude towards the possibilities of peace…” (from Kennedy’s 1963 commencement address to American University.) As we work to achieve the disarmament vision of Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and Obama, let us reaffirm peace, not only as a possibility, but, as Ted Sorensen understood it, as a moral imperative to achieve.

Global Security Institute