Two Authors Ask about "Ask Not"

[FreedomAngel82]

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/10/books/10kenn.html?oref=login

Snip: <In an age when even a walk across the White House lawn can feel scripted, it is hard to imagine making a fuss over whether a speechwriter helped a president-elect compose his inaugural address. But when the president in question is John F. Kennedy, such questions never cease.

Recently two scholars examined the evidence around the authorship of Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address - poring over documents, interviewing still-living advisers - and came to opposite conclusions.

In "Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America," Thurston Clarke wrote last year that "important and heretofore overlooked documentary evidence" proves that Kennedy was "the author of the most immortal and poetic passages of his inaugural address," including the famous line that gives the book its title, "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."

But in "Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address" (Ivan R. Dee), to be published in July, Richard J. Tofel, a lawyer and a former assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal, concludes that "if we must identify" one man as the author of the speech, "that man must surely be not John Kennedy but Theodore Sorensen.">

[whistle]

1. And the evidence of Richard J. Tofel's claim that Ted Sorensen is......

....the true author is what?????