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Yes, he actually wore this support brace , basically like a woman's girdle. It's actually kind of ironic in some of the Shooting Shows I have seen one that if he was not wearing that girdle on parade day one of those shots would have missed him!!! He also was in alot of pain . And he took alot of pain meds!!!
In 1988 I had the chance to meet Ted Sorenson who as a very young man had become John F. Kennedy’s speech writer and believed ghost writer for Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Profiles in Courage.
Now, Sorenson, a Nebraska native, was campaigning in the state for former Governor Bob Kerrey who was running for the US Senate and I was a staffer for.
I was excited to meet Sorenson as Kennedy was a hero of mine and that Kennedy was considered one of America’s great communicators, made it all the more appealing that I got to spend time with the person who wrote Kennedy’s most memorable speeches.
During a break in campaigning, I asked Sorenson if there was anything that stood out that made Kennedy such a strong communicator.
There was.
Sorenson told me this story:
Remember Steve, John Kennedy was severely wounded in WWII and suffered a back injury that haunted him his entire life, he said.
I told him I was familiar with President Kennedy’s injury.
Sorenson continued: At one point early in his career, Jack came to me and told me to begin writing his speeches in four or five-word segments.
I said, “Jack, that’s crazy. I’m not going to write your speeches in four or five-word sentences.”
To which Kennedy replied, “I didn’t say ‘sentences’ I said write them in four or five-word ‘segments.’”
I said to him, “Why would I do that?”
To which Kennedy replied, “I don’t know. But I’ve noticed that when my back flairs up and I’m trying to deliver a speech, after every four or five words I have to pause and catch my breath because of the pain. And when I do that, I noticed that people are paying a lot more attention to me and my words.”
“Jack was right,” Sorenson said, “It made us both better.”
It’s a great story.
What Kennedy had stumbled onto was that fast pace is a speech killer. His astuteness and Sorenson’s wordsmithing transformed an average speaker into a great one and the rest is history.