For 11 years, Ted Sorensen was President John F. Kennedy's speechwriter, special counsel and friend. Today, I am meeting him at his local, O'Neals', a middle-of-the-road New York restaurant a few hundred yards from Sorensen's home on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It has wooden floors, Halloween pumpkins, painted murals on the wall, and CNN flickering at the bar.

Sorensen, now 78, walks uncertainly through the door, a square- jawed man wearing a grey suit, white check shirt, and yellow tie. He has a pale, open, smiling face. His dark grey hair, slightly damp, is combed neatly back. I help him to his seat. He suffered a stroke five years ago, and is now almost blind. "Losing your eyesight is a terrible thing," he says. "It is central to everything I want to do." It stops him from looking at pretty women, he jokes - he doesn't mind me writing that, his wife knows that much. Despite the disability, as soon as Sorensen begins talking - in his deep, burring voice - it is as if the restaurant closes around us and we are back in an America of half a century ago.