The antithesis was drafted and redrafted, with Ted Sorensen, until it was almost architecture. It asks for sacrifice and it flatters the listener by treating them as an actor. The years after — the Bay of Pigs, the missiles, the murder in Dallas on November 22, 1963 — sit beside the sentence and do not erase the craft of it. A quotationary’s job is to keep both the cadence and the date of the death, and not let either one tidy the other.