James Piereson’s provocative new book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (Encounter, 2007) argues that liberalism lost its political dominance and intellectual coherence when it proved too brittle to confront the awkward truth of John F. Kennedy’s assassination at the hands of an ideological Communist. “The assassination of a popular president by a Communist should have generated a revulsion against everything associated with left wing doctrines,” Piereson writes. “Yet something close to the opposite happened. In the aftermath of the assassination, left-wing ideas and revolutionary leaders, Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Castro foremost among them, enjoyed a greater vogue in the United States than at any time in our history.” 

Piereson’s discerning eye draws out a debilitating consequence of this development: the liberal movement abandoned the idea that the United States was fundamentally decent and could be fixed via incremental improvement and instead adopted the theme that America is a basically sick society. This has made the left today the home of paranoid conspiracy theories, once the exclusive province of the far right. Kennedy’s killing should have led to an “intellectual reconstruction” on the left, and its failure to come to grips with this problem continues to hobble liberalism today.

Piereson will be joined by Michael Barone, a resident fellow at AEI and senior writer for U.S. News & World Report, and David S. Brown, associate professor of history at Elizabethtown College. Steven F. Hayward, AEI’s F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow, will moderate.