Amanuensis.(The Talk of the Town)(Ted Sorensen's Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History)

There was a long pause before Ted Sorensen answered the door the other day at his apartment, on Central Park West. In chinos and a tennis shirt, he still had the trim physique that all the New Frontiersmen had during their days of playing touch football on the beach at Hyannis Port. But Sorensen's gait is unsteady, and his eyes are cloudy. The clutter of the day's Times was absent; he has trouble reading the newspaper.

Sorensen, who was John F. Kennedy's closest aide and amanuensis, moved to New York shortly after the assassination, spent several decades practicing law at Paul, Weiss, and procrastinated about writing his memoirs. Still, on July 18, 2001, a historian visited Sorensen in his office and pretty much talked him into starting the job. Two days later, Sorensen suffered a massive stroke while working in his office. He underwent brain surgery immediately and for several days hovered between life and death. In time, his condition stabilized, but the stroke took a toll. "I have visual agnosia, which means I can see shapes and images but I can't put them together," he said. "I don't always recognize people. It's hard to read much of anything." Sorensen was compelled to bring his law practice to a close. But a few months later he recruited a Princeton junior named Adam Frankel to serve as his reader, adviser, and muse--his Sorensen--for the memoir project.

Sorensen ordered up reams of files from the Kennedy Library and elsewhere, and the two began, starting with Sorensen's boyhood, in Nebraska, where his father was the state attorney general and his mother waged a secret battle against mental illness. More than four decades after the fact, he began to reexamine his relationship with J.F.K.--their lonely travels across the country during the early days of the 1960 campaign, their close (and controversial) collaboration on Kennedy's book "Profiles in Courage," and Sorensen's knowledge of Kennedy's complex private life. Various additional health problems--including a mini-stroke, prostate cancer, melanoma, a leaky heart valve, and Lyme disease--compounded Sorensen's difficulties in writing the book.

"What he did was heroic," Frankel said recently. "Ted never typed and had difficulty reading his own handwriting anymore, so he would dictate for hours, and I would send the tapes to a transcription company, edit them, then give it back to him"--in large type. ...