November 2007
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.
At a book forum held at AEI on November 29, 2007, Mr. Piereson discussed his book, followed by commentary from 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, moderated.
James Piereson
Author, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution
John F. Kennedy's assassination was an overwhelming event, difficult to assimilate according to the assumptions of the time. Postwar liberalism's narrative about America was that it had problems but could be progressively perfected. By 1968, however, progressive liberalism was in tatters.
When Kennedy was shot, broadcasters quickly speculated that he was killed by a member of the radical right, so it was a surprise to liberals when they found out that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Communist. Political leaders, however, claimed Kennedy was a casualty of the civil rights movement, not a victim of the Cold War. The other dominant narrative motif was that Kennedy was a victim of American hatred and violence. These interpretations were influenced in part by the reactions of government officials and Kennedy's family, who had various reasons for wanting the Communist story line deemphasized.
Kennedy was clearly a victim of the Cold War. Prior to assassinating Kennedy, Oswald tried to assassinate the president of the John Birch Society, attempted to visit Cuba, demonstrated against Adlai Stevenson, and was investigated by the FBI.
The narrative of American liberalism completely changed from 1963 to 1968, and the Kennedy assassination was a pivotal event in this change. In the 1950s, liberalism was progressive and future oriented; by 1968, liberals said that America was sick. They said that our prosperity was based on materialism and despoiling the environment; we coddled dictators, and we needed to be punished. This change in discourse brought about the end of the liberal era.
David Brown
Elizabethtown College
In the 1950s, there was no consensus about what liberalism was. It was changing from the programmatic liberalism of the New Deal to a liberalism of ideas. Liberals argued that this was an evolution, but within a pre-New Deal liberal tradition.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy was only one of the causes of the change in the liberal movement during the 1960s. The Vietnam War had a major impact, as did Cold War fatigue. There were also broader cultural issues, such as the civil rights movement; feminism; and the student movement, which was partly a product of the baby boom and the resulting increase in the number of college students. Other demographic issues also played a part as the population shifted from the Northeast to the Southwest, which had booming energy and defense industries. All of these began or had roots before John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
In the 1960s, programmatic liberalism came back with the war on poverty and the civil rights movement. It happened too quickly for the public to assimilate, but even before 1963 there were cracks in liberalism, like the Dixiecrat candidacies of Strom Thurmond and George Wallace. Dwight Eisenhower's military-industrial complex speech brought up a major critique of society, as did various books in the 1950s and 1960s that expressed distrust of the United States and modern liberalism.
Michael Barone
AEI
Liberalism used to believe in American exceptionalism, but it no longer does. The assassination undermined liberals' belief in American exceptionalism and began discussion about America's "violent streak." Liberals took an adversarial stance against America that continues today.
We see this on college campuses, where the idea is propagated that all cultures are morally equivalent, except America is worse. The civil rights movement made major reforms in the 1960s, but afterwards liberals started teaching that America was a fundamentally racist country. We started thinking the worst of ourselves.
The Kennedy assassination does not account for all of this, but it played a major role. If Oswald had succeeded in killing the president of the John Birch Society and then been arrested, American history would be quite different.
AEI research assistant Abigail Haddad prepared this summary.
