AP & Sorensen distort JFK to help Obama

The AP’s Hillel Italie recently interviewed Ted Sorensen, former aide to President John Kennedy. Sorensen’s recently written a book concerning his relationship with the late President.

Here’s the begining of Italie’s interview, after which I comment below the star line.

As he watched the breach and then the break between Senator Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, former White House speechwriter Ted Sorensen was reminded, as he is so often, of his years with John F. Kennedy.

It was September 1960, Kennedy was addressing a gathering of ministers in Houston, responding to concerns that a Catholic could be trusted as president - a major obstacle then for Kennedy's campaign.

“All of those conservative Protestants were glaring at him in the audience," recalls Sorensen, speaking from the living room of his apartment overlooking Central Park, light rain falling on a cool spring morning.

"And he referred to the fact that a lot of these pamphlets quoting popes and priests and prelates from the Catholic church were from other countries and, sometimes, other centuries, and then he said, 'I do not consider these other quotations binding upon my public acts. Why should you?' "

"And I've always felt that that's what Obama should say about Rev. Wright," Sorensen says of Obama's former pastor, whom the candidate denounced after Wright suggested that the U.S. government invented the AIDS virus to destroy blacks and made other inflammatory remarks. …

The rest of the AP’s Italie’s interview is here.

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Comments:

What you’ve just read is a mix of distorted history and advocacy journalism.

I’d like to think Sorensen didn’t say the things he’s quoted as saying. He knows Kennedy was able to reject the ministers’ attempts to tie him to the pamphleteers and popes they were quoting because Kennedy never accepted them in the first place.

You can read and watch Kennedy state that in this post, John Kennedy's Houston: nothing like Obama's Philadelphia. (Apr. 10, 2008)

Obama’s problem is that he’s had a 20 year relationship with Rev. Wright in which he embraced Wright as a close friend, sought spiritual counsel from him, and brought his children to Wright for religious instruction.

John Kennedy rejected religious bigotry, including his father’s, and he rejected racism and anti-Americanism. I can imagine Kennedy sitting in Wright’s church for 20 minutes. But does anyone believe he'd remain a member for 20 years and contribute generously to the church?

In 1960 Kennedy sought a highly publicized face-to-face Q&A session with his critics. Obama’s avoided such a Q&A for understandable reasons.

Obama undoubtedly hopes political partisans like Sorensen and friendly MSM will fog things over, so he can get to the White House without answering the Wright-Obama questions he’s been ducking.

Sorensen, Italie and the AP have distorted what Kennedy and Houston were about to aid Obama.

They ought to be ashamed.