Lee
Harvey Oswald and the Liberal
Crack-Up
James
Piereson
Liberalism
entered the 1960’s as the
vital force in American politics, riding a wave of
accomplishment running from the Progressive era
through the New Deal and beyond. A handsome young
president, John F. Kennedy, had just been elected
on the promise to extend the unfinished agenda of
reform. Liberalism owned the future, as Orwell
might have said. Yet by the end of the decade,
liberal doctrine was in disarray, with some of its
central assumptions broken by the experience of
the immediately preceding years. It has yet to
recover.
What
happened? There is, of course, a litany of
standard answers, from the political to the
cultural to the psychological, each seeking to
explain the great upheaval summed up in that
all-purpose phrase, “the 60’s.” To some, the
relevant factor was a long overdue reaction to the
repressions and pieties of 1950’s conformism. To
others, the watershed event was the escalating war
in Vietnam, sparking an opposition movement that
itself escalated into widespread disaffection from
received political ideas and indeed from larger
American purposes. Still others have pointed to
the simmering racial tensions that would burst
into the open in riots and looting, calling into
question underlying assumptions about the course
of integration if not the very possibility of
social harmony.
No
doubt, the combination of these and other events
had much to do with driving the nation’s political
culture to the Left in the latter half of the
decade. But there can be no doubt, either, that an
event from the early 1960’s—namely, the
assassination of Kennedy himself—contributed
heavily. As many observers have noted, Kennedy’s
death seemed somehow to give new energy to the
more extreme impulses of the Left, as not only
left-wing ideas but revolutionary leftist
leaders—Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro among
them—came in the aftermath to enjoy a greater
vogue in the United States than at any other time
in our history. By 1968, student radicals were
taking over campuses and joining protest
demonstrations in support of a host of extreme
causes.
It
is one of the ironies of the era that many young
people who in 1963 reacted with profound grief to
Kennedy’s death would, just a few years later,
come to champion a version of the left-wing
doctrines that had motivated his assassin, Lee
Harvey Oswald. But why should this have been so?
What was it about mid-century liberalism that
allowed it to be knocked so badly off balance by a
single blow?
To
recall John F. Kennedy’s brief
tenure as President is to be reminded of the
distance that American liberalism has traveled
since those days. His landmark domestic
initiatives, passed with modest adjustments after
his death, were a civil-rights bill and a major
tax reduction to stimulate the economy. The
civil-rights legislation is well known, but many
have forgotten Kennedy’s across-the-board,
30-percent tax cut, with the highest rate falling
from 91 percent to 65 percent—a measure that, two
decades later, would inspire Ronald Reagan’s own
tax-cutting agenda.
Kennedy
was, moreover, a sophisticated anti-Communist who
understood the stakes at issue in the cold war.
His inspiring inaugural address in 1961 was
entirely about foreign policy and the challenge of
Communism to freedom-loving peoples. As President,
his most notable victory was achieved by
confronting the Soviet Union over its missiles in
Cuba and by forcing their removal. And he was
nothing if not forthright in declaring America’s
universal aims. “Let every nation know,” he
famously announced in his inaugural address,
“whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall
pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship,
support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the
survival and success of liberty.” America, he said
in a speech to the Massachusetts legislature a
week before he took office, was “a city upon a
hill,” an example and a model for the entire
world.
Though
now remembered for his liberal idealism, Kennedy
was, in short, a representative instead of the
era’s pragmatic
liberalism: an advocate of practical reform at
home and American strength abroad. With his bold
rhetoric and confidence in problem-solving, he was
in many ways the personification of an earlier
era’s liberal hopes. Both in substance and in
approach, he seemed to express the central
principle of the reform tradition—namely, that
progress was to be achieved not by the quixotic
pursuit of ideals but by the application of
rationality and knowledge to the problems of
public life. Kennedy himself often spoke in these
terms, pointing to ignorance and extremism as the
twin enemies to be overcome.
None
of this was an accident of the moment; it had been
building for a long time. During the 1950’s,
thoughtful liberals had come to understand that
they were no longer outsiders in American life; to
the contrary, they had become the political
establishment. Already in power for two
extraordinarily eventful decades, they could take
credit for the domestic experiments of the New
Deal, the victory over fascism, and the creation
of the post-war international order. By virtue of
these achievements, liberalism had emerged as the
nation’s public philosophy.
Though
a doctrine of reform and progress, liberalism had
thus begun to absorb some of the intellectual
characteristics of conservatism: a due regard for
tradition and continuity, a sense that progress
must be built on the solid achievements of the
past. More strikingly, liberals had come to see
their most vocal domestic opponents as
radicals—individuals and movements bent on undoing
the established order. This challenge to the
liberal establishment came not from the radical
Left, however, but from the Right, in the form of
anti-Communism, Christian fundamentalism, and
racial and religious bigotry.
Adlai
Stevenson, a favorite of liberals of the era,
described during his 1952 presidential campaign
the paradoxical situation that liberals now
occupied:
The
strange alchemy of time has somehow converted the
Democrats into the truly conservative party in the
country—the party dedicated to conserving all that
is best and building solidly and safely on these
foundations. The Republicans, by contrast, are
behaving like the radical party—the party of the
reckless and embittered, bent on dismantling
institutions which have been built solidly into
our social fabric.
The
liberal movement was fortunate to
have had during this time a group of formidable
intellectual spokesmen, figures like Richard
Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, Lionel Trilling, and
David Riesman. Their persistent focus was on the
dangers to the nation, as they saw them, arising
from the American Right. In contrast to their
Progressive and New Deal predecessors, who had
thought mainly in terms of change, reform, and new
policy, these writers thought more in terms of
consolidating earlier gains, defending them
against fresh challenges, and reconciling them
with the broad tradition of American democracy.
In
their view, the complaints of the Right derived
not from groups in possession of competing status
and authority but from those who felt weak and
dispossessed by modern life. Bell referred to this
collection of forces as the “radical Right,” a
term he employed in the title of an influential
book of essays that he edited on the subject in
1962. Hofstadter preferred the term
“pseudo-conservative,” which he borrowed from
Theodor Adorno, the
German sociologist, to describe those “who employ
the rhetoric of conservatism, [but] show signs of
a serious and restless dissatisfaction with
American life, traditions, and institutions. They
have little in common with the temperate and
compromising spirit of true conservatism in the
classical sense of the word.”
These
scholars saw the McCarthyites and religious
fundamentalists of the 1950’s as only the most
up-to-date expression of an enduring extremist
impulse that had earlier produced the
“Know-Nothings” in the 1850’s, the populists in
the 1890’s, and the followers of Father Charles
Coughlin or Huey Long in the 1930’s. Such
movements, while arising out of different
conditions, had certain features in common—in
particular, the conviction that their people had
been “sold out” by a conspiracy of Wall Street
financiers, traitors in the government, or some
other sinister group. As Bell put it in an essay
in The
Radical Right, “The theme of
conspiracy haunts the mind of the radical
rightist.”
This
same thought was developed most memorably in
Hofstadter’s 1964 book, The
Paranoid Style in American Politics.
Hofstadter was impressed not simply by the wilder
statements emanating from the radical Right—for
example, the claim by Joseph Welch of the John
Birch Society that President Eisenhower was a
Communist—but by a mode of argumentation that
seemed to begin with feelings of persecution and
conclude with a recital of grandiose plots against
the nation and its way of life. Communist
infiltration was, of course, a favored theme, but
Hofstadter also cited paranoid fears about
fluoride in the drinking water, efforts to control
the sale of guns, federal aid to education, and
other (usually) liberal initiatives of government.
Important events, from this perspective, never
happened through coincidence, circumstance, or the
unfolding of complex processes; they were
invariably the work of some unseen but
all-powerful malevolent force.
In
the months leading up to Kennedy’s
assassination, violent acts committed by
representatives of the radical Right did indeed
seem to be escalating. In June 1963, the
civil-rights leader Medgar Evers was shot and
killed outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi.
In September, a bomb was detonated at a black
church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young
girls. The Ku Klux Klan was linked to both crimes.
In October, Adlai Stevenson, then the U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations, ventured to
Dallas for a speech to commemorate “UN Day” and
was met by demonstrators proclaiming “United
States Day.” Heckled during his remarks, Stevenson
was jostled and spat upon by protesters as he
tried to depart and finally was struck over the
head with a cardboard placard as he made his way
to his car.
Seeming
to fit into a pattern of right-wing violence,
these events were easily absorbed into the
explanatory structure of liberal thought. The
melee in Dallas, meanwhile, gave Kennedy aides
pause about the President’s planned trip to that
city. Dallas, they feared, was a hotbed of the far
Right and a dangerous place to visit.
Hence,
when the word spread on November 22 that President
Kennedy had been shot, the immediate and
understandable reaction was that the assassin must
be a right-wing extremist—an anti-Communist,
perhaps, or a white supremacist. Such speculation
went out immediately over the national airwaves,
and it seemed to make perfect sense, echoed by the
likes of John Kenneth Galbraith and Chief Justice
Earl Warren, who said that Kennedy had been
martyred “as a result of the hatred and bitterness
that has been injected into the life of our nation
by bigots.”
It
therefore came as a shock when the police
announced later the same day that a Communist had
been arrested for the murder, and when the
television networks began to run tapes taken a few
months earlier showing the suspected assassin
passing out leaflets in New Orleans in support of
Fidel Castro. Nor was Lee Harvey Oswald just any
leftist, playing games with radical ideas in order
to shock friends and relatives. Instead, he was a
dyed-in-the-wool Communist who had defected to the
Soviet Union and married a Russian woman before
returning to the U.S. the previous year. One of
the first of an evolving breed, Oswald had lately
rejected the Soviet Union in favor of third-world
dictators like Mao, Ho, and Castro.
Informed
later that evening of Oswald’s arrest, Mrs.
Kennedy lamented bitterly that her husband had
apparently been shot by this warped and misguided
Communist. To have been killed by such a person,
she felt, would rob his death of all meaning. Far
better, she said, if, like Lincoln, he had been
martyred for civil rights and racial justice.
Given
her husband’s politics, Mrs. Kennedy’s comment
might seem curious. For one thing, he had staked
his presidency on mounting an aggressive challenge
to Communism; for another, during his brief term
in office the cold war had reached its most
dangerous point in his confrontation with the
Soviet Union over Cuba. From this perspective, it
should not have been so jarring to learn that he
was a casualty of the cold war. More
significantly, however, the remark suggests that
Mrs. Kennedy was already thinking about how
President Kennedy’s legacy should be framed, and
was sensing that the identity of the assassin
might prove inconvenient in this regard.
Oswald
was arrested, and later charged with
the assassination, on the basis of solid
evidence—all of it laid out in the Warren
Commission report made public ten months later
and, since then, in numerous television
documentaries and in books like Gerald Posner’s
Case
Closed (1993).
Yet
the Warren report was vigorously attacked soon
after it appeared, and has been the subject of
controversy ever since. There is little point in
rehearsing the many criticisms of the commission’s
work, nearly all of which question the conclusion
that a single gunman was responsible for the
assassination. These criticisms have been
exhaustively answered in Posner’s book and in two
comprehensive articles in Commentary
by Jacob Cohen.* Even Norman Mailer, in his own
exhaustive study (Oswald’s
Tale, 1995), concluded that Oswald
was the probable assassin. Moreover, as Posner and
Cohen point out, whatever difficulties attend the
Warren report, they pale in comparison to those
confronting the various conspiracy theories that
have been offered as alternatives to the
much-maligned “single bullet” theory of the Warren
Commission.
What,
then, explains the resilience of such fanciful and
conspiratorial thinking? Part of the answer surely
lies in the enduring need of the Left to
circumvent the most inconvenient fact about
President Kennedy’s assassination—that he was
killed by a Communist and probably for reasons
related to left-wing ideology. If the case against
Oswald can be clouded or denied, it opens up the
possibility that Kennedy was killed by a more
familiar villain, one of the many malignant forces
on the Right.
Thus,
in JFK
(1991), the filmmaker Oliver Stone, like his hero
the New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison,
suggests that the assassination was engineered by
governmental figures connected to the FBI or CIA.
Some have insinuated that Lyndon Johnson was
involved in the plot. Others have argued that
Kennedy was the victim of a “hit” by organized
crime in retaliation for his administration’s
zealous prosecution of mob figures. All of these
theorists have much in common with the archetypes
of Hofstadter’s “paranoid style”: they begin their
investigations with presumptions of conspiracy,
and then arrange their facts to justify a
pre-determined conclusion.
True,
they are also responding to a key weakness in the
Warren report, which, though taking full note of
Oswald’s Communist sympathies and activities,
played them down as motivations for killing
President Kennedy. Oswald, the commission said,
was driven by several factors, including a
psychological “hostility to his environment,”
failure to establish meaningful relationships with
others, difficulties with his wife, perpetual
discontent with the world around him, hatred of
American society, a search for recognition and a
wish to play a role in history, and, finally, his
commitment to Marxism and Communism. This farrago
of causes implies that Oswald was more a confused
loner than a motivated ideologue. In the years and
decades following the assassination, the American
people would increasingly view the assassin in
such terms.
Yet
the record suggests that the decisive and
overriding factor behind Oswald’s various actions
was ideology. The assassination of President
Kennedy was hardly an isolated incident in his
political odyssey from the Marine Corps to the
Soviet Union and back to the United States. In the
months leading up to the assassination, Oswald had
tried to kill the ultra-conservative retired Army
General Edwin A. Walker (his shot missed) with the
same rifle that he later used to shoot President
Kennedy; initiated an altercation with anti-Castro
figures in New Orleans that led to his arrest; and
visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico City where,
while seeking permission to travel to Cuba, he
issued a threat against the life of the President.
Edward Jay Epstein (in Legend,
1978) and Jean Davison (in Oswald’s
Game, 1983) suggest that Oswald shot
President Kennedy in retaliation for the
administration’s schemes to eliminate Castro.
There
is much about Oswald and the assassination that
can now never be known for certain. Of one thing,
however, there can be little doubt: there would
never have been any serious talk about a
conspiracy if President Kennedy had been shot by a
right-wing figure whose guilt was established by
the same evidence as condemned Oswald. Such an
event would have been readily understood in terms
of then prevailing assumptions about the dangers
from the Right. Kennedy’s assassin, however,
bolted onto the historical stage in violation of a
script that many people had assimilated as the
truth about America. Instead of adjusting their
thinking accordingly, they strove to account for
the discordance by taking refuge in conspiracy
theories.
There
was also another avenue of escape
from the contradiction posed by the assassination.
If one had to accept the fact that Oswald
committed the deadly act, it was still possible to
identify some broader cause that did not
necessarily involve a conspiracy. Once again, Mrs.
Kennedy instinctively hinted at such a cause in
the grief-filled hours following the
assassination. Jim Bishop (in The
Day Kennedy Was Shot, 1972) reports
that aboard Air Force One en route back to
Washington, various people, including Lady Bird
Johnson, had urged her to change out of the
blood-spattered clothes she was still wearing.
“No,” she replied more than once, “I want them to
see what they have done.”
Who
were “they”? The New
York Times columnist James Reston
supplied an answer of sorts in an article that
appeared the next day under the title, “Why
America Weeps: Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He
Sought to Curb in Nation.” Reston wrote:
America
wept tonight, not alone for its dead young
President, but for itself. The grief was general,
for somehow the worst in the nation had prevailed
over the best. The indictment extended beyond the
assassin, for something in the nation itself, some
strain of madness and violence, had destroyed the
highest symbol of law and order.
The
nation itself, Reston implied, was ultimately
responsible for Oswald’s murderous act.
Returning
to this theme two days later in an article
suggestively titled “A Portion of Guilt for All,”
Reston asserted that there was “a rebellion in the
land against law and good faith, and . . . private
anger and sorrow are not enough to redeem the
events of the last few days.” He went on to cite a
sermon delivered on November 24 by a Washington
clergyman who, linking President Kennedy with
Jesus, told his congregation that “We have been
present at a new crucifixion. All of us had a part
in the slaying of the President.”
This
idea, too—that the nation as a whole was finally
to blame for the assassination—came to be repeated
widely and incorporated into the public’s
understanding of the event. Liberals in particular
tended to see Kennedy’s death in this light, that
is, as an outgrowth of a violent or extremist
streak in the nation’s culture. Yet doing so
required its own species of doublethink, for the
fact is that Oswald was not in any way a
representative figure. He played no role in any
domestic extremist movement. His radicalism was
wholly un-American and anti-American. Even as a
Communist or radical, he was sui
generis.
There was nothing about Oswald that even remotely
reflected any broader pattern in American life.
Something
strangely similar to this act of mental contortion
would occur five years later in response to the
assassination in Los Angeles of Senator Robert F.
Kennedy. Once again, many pointed to a national
culture of violence and extremism as the ultimate
cause of the killing. Jacqueline Kennedy herself,
according to several biographers, was sufficiently
shocked by this second assassination in her family
that she resolved to live abroad with her
children. Yet Senator Kennedy was killed by a
Palestinian Arab, Sirhan
Sirhan, who had resolved
to act when he heard Kennedy express support for
Israel while campaigning for the presidency in
California. Sirhan
represented more the hatreds of the world from
which he had emigrated than any impulse in
American culture.
Still
another curiosity in the wake of the
assassination was the transformation of the image
of Kennedy himself. Though very much a
characteristic liberal of his day, as we have
seen, he came to be portrayed as a liberal hero of
a very different sort—a leader who might have led
the nation into a new age of peace, love, and
understanding. Such a portrayal was encouraged by
tributes and memorials inspired by friends and
members of the Kennedy family as well as by the
numerous books published after the assassination,
particularly those by the presidential aides
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (A
Thousand Days, 1965) and Theodore
Sorensen (Kennedy,
1965).
The
most potent element of this image-making was, of
course, the now inescapable association of Kennedy
with the legend of King Arthur and Camelot. This
was the invention of Jacqueline Kennedy, who a
week after her husband’s death pressed the idea
upon the journalist Theodore H. White in the
course of an interview that would serve as the
basis for an article by him in Life
magazine. White later regretted the role he had
played in transmitting this romantic image to the
public. “Quite inadvertently,” he wrote in his
memoir, In
Search of History (1978), “I was her
instrument in labeling the myth.”
White’s
short essay in Life
contained a number of Mrs. Kennedy’s wistful
remembrances, one of which was the President’s
fondness for the title tune from the Lerner &
Lowe Broadway hit, Camelot.
His favorite lines, she told White, were these:
“Don’t let it be forgot,/that once there was a
spot,/for one brief shining moment/that was
Camelot.” “There will be great Presidents again,”
she continued, “but there will never be another
Camelot again.” According to Mrs. Kennedy, her
husband was an idealist who saw history as the
work of heroes, and she wished to have his memory
preserved in the form of appropriate symbols
rather than in the dry and dusty books written by
historians. Camelot was one such symbol; the
eternal flame that she had placed on his grave was
another.
Significantly,
Mrs. Kennedy’s notion of Arthurian heroism derived
not from Sir Thomas Mallory’s 15th-century classic
Le
Morte d’Arthur but
from The
Once and Future King (1958) by T.H.
White (no relation to the journalist), on which
the musical was based. White’s telling of the saga
pokes fun at the pretensions of knighthood,
pointedly criticizes militarism and nationalism,
and portrays Arthur as a new kind of hero: an
idealistic peacemaker seeking to tame the
bellicose passions of his age. This may be one
reason why Mrs. Kennedy’s effort to frame her
husband’s legacy in this way was widely regarded
as a distorted caricature of the real Kennedy and
something he himself would have laughed at. Aides
and associates reported that they had never heard
Kennedy speak either about Camelot
the musical or about its theme song. Some of Mrs.
Kennedy’s friends said they had never even heard
her
speak about King Arthur or the play prior to the
assassination.
According
to Schlesinger, Mrs. Kennedy later thought she may
have overdone this theme. Be that as it may, one
has to give her credit for quick thinking in the
midst of tragedy and grief—and also for injecting
a set of ideas into the cultural atmosphere that
would have large consequences. For not only did
the Camelot
reading of heroic public service cut liberalism
off from its once-vigorous nationalist impulses
but, if one accepted the image of a utopian
Kennedy Camelot—and many did—then the best times
were now in the past and would not soon be
recovered. Life would go on, but America’s future
could never match the magical chapter that had
been brought to a premature end. Such thinking
drew into question the no less canonical liberal
assumption of steady historical progress, and
compromised the liberal faith in the future.
Without
intending to do so, Mrs. Kennedy had put forth an
interpretation of her husband’s life and death
that undercut mid-century liberalism at its core.
The
success of the Kennedy myth bore
still other troubling fruit for American
liberalism. Kennedy had added something novel to
the mix of our public life, skillfully managing to
transcend his role as a politician to become a
cultural figure in his own right—indeed, a
celebrity. In this he was most unlike other
prominent political figures of the time.
Kennedy
was young and articulate; he wore his hair long;
he sailed and played touch football; he consorted
with Hollywood stars and Harvard professors; he
was even something of an intellectual, speaking in
measured cadences and having won (with the
assistance of his father) a Pulitzer Prize for
Profiles
in Courage (1955). Above all, he was
rich. His wife, moreover, was beautiful and
glamorous; she wore French fashions and even spoke
French (and Spanish, too). The two Kennedy
children were every bit as photogenic as their
parents. The American people had never seen
anything like the Kennedys, except in the
movies.
Kennedy
was thus our first President and—with the partial
exception of Bill Clinton—the only one so far
successfully to marry the role of politician to
that of cultural celebrity. Such a thing would
never have occurred to Harry Truman or Franklin
Roosevelt. As for Ronald Reagan, who moved in the
opposite direction, out of the world of celebrity
into politics, he never exercised the influence
over that world that Kennedy did. Indeed,
Kennedy’s earlier success in linking liberalism
with celebrity was greatly responsible for turning
Hollywood into the liberal-Left fortification that
it is today.
Kennedy
achieved this through a style that gave the
appearance of a man at the cutting edge of new
cultural trends, in contrast to other politicians
(like Nixon or Eisenhower) who generally
represented the established patterns and morals of
middle-class life. In his memoir, Sorensen
acknowledges that at the inauguration, Kennedy
deliberately played up this purely stylistic
contrast between himself and Eisenhower, his tired
and aging predecessor. Schlesinger, for his part,
sees in Kennedy’s style a substantive statement in
itself: “His coolness was itself a new frontier.
It meant freedom from the stereotyped responses of
the past. . . . It offered hope for spontaneity in
a country drowning in its own passivity.” Norman
Mailer, the original “hipster,” saw Kennedy as an
“existential hero,” a man who would courageously
court death in quest of authentic experience.
But
here is another curious twist. While Kennedy
understood courage to involve facing down
Communism or putting a man on the moon, Mailer was
thinking in terms of what he called “a revolution
in the consciousness of our time,” a goal (whether
laudable or not) far beyond the capacity of any
political leader to deliver. It is true that
Kennedy cultivated a style—a style whose charms
were magnified a thousandfold by the newly
potent medium of television. But it is also
obvious that many read far more into this style
than was really there. Intellectuals, journalists,
and significant cohorts of the college-educated
young erroneously equated Kennedy’s style with a
bohemian rejection of the blandness and conformity
of middle-class life, when it in fact reflected
the ways of the American aristocracy to which he
and his wife belonged. (So, in a somewhat
different way, did his relentless pursuit of sex
and use of drugs.)
In
projecting their own hopes on to Kennedy, liberals
like Schlesinger and cultural radicals like Mailer
were redefining liberalism more in terms of a
posture than in terms of a coherent body of ideas
about government and politics. This, too, would
have consequences. Because Kennedy embodied
sophistication, he was seen after his death as
more “authentic” than such otherwise authentically
liberal figures as Lyndon Johnson and Hubert
Humphrey, who labored for legislative victories
but were otherwise hopelessly old-fashioned. In
appearing to stand above and apart from the
conventions of middle-class life, he was seen as
having opened up possibilities for a different
kind of politics, sparking impulses that would
eventually be absorbed into the mainstream of
liberal thought. Within a few years of Kennedy’s
death, liberals had come to be more preoccupied
with cultural issues—feminism, sexual freedom, gay
rights—than with the traditional concerns that had
animated Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy himself.
Kennedy’s
had been a unique balancing act, combining ardent
patriotism with hip sophistication in a mix that
could appeal both to traditional Americans and to
the new cultural activists. After his death, these
two groups divided into conflicting camps, thereby
establishing the terms for the long-running
culture war that continues today. As much as
anything else, the immersion in cultural politics
in the years following the assassination may have
helped bring about the end of the liberal
era.
Kennedy’s
assassination heralded a break with
the American past and a corresponding rupture in
the evolving world of liberal ideas. Far from
spurring the liberal tradition forward, as some
today still suggest, it played a significant role
in its disintegration. In the years and decades
that followed, nearly all of the tendencies of the
far Right that had so unnerved the liberals of the
1950’s—the fascination with conspiracies, the use
of overheated and abusive rhetoric to characterize
political adversaries, expressions of hatred for
the United States and its national culture—moved
across the political spectrum to the far and then
the near Left.
For
many American liberals, the shock of Kennedy’s
death compromised their faith in the nation
itself. Against all evidence, they concluded that
a violent strain in our national culture was
somehow to blame. A confident, practical, and
forward-looking philosophy with a heritage of
accomplishment was thus turned into a doctrine of
pessimism and self-blame, with a decidedly dark
view of American society. Such assumptions, far
from marking a temporary adjustment to the events
of the 1960’s, have proved remarkably
durable.
James
Piereson
is a senior
fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His “Investing
in Conservative Ideas” appeared in the May 2005
Commentary.
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