The Assassination of JFK Shattered American Liberalism

Interview with James Piereson, author of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism,

Liberalism was an optimistic pursuit then. It really goes back to the New Deal and continued into the Kennedy years in the 1960s. The liberals really believed they owned the future, that history was moving in their direction. Then came the assassination of JFK and it all changed. Most people today agree that liberalism is immersed in pessimism and negativism.

Liberals have always presented a dual idea about America. There was the good America, that’s them. There was the bad America, that’s the conservatives, the business people, the “reactionary public”. But the liberals were the guardians of the real ideals of America, the vanguard of the future. They controlled the universities and the news media, and all the “best people” were liberals in their view. They still possess this dual idea, but as a result of the assassination their attitude is angry and no longer optimistic. The election of Barack Obama injected a renewed enthusiasm, but the attitude is still decidedly negative.

In the run-up to the assassination, they were all talking about the right wing atmosphere in Dallas. It was overblown because Kennedy and Johnson carried Texas in the 1960 election. And Dallas was an area where they drew a lot of strength. Watch the film of the Dallas trip and you see the warm welcome President Kennedy received in Dallas. So this “atmosphere of hatred” was really overblown. They don’t talk about the contradiction that it was a communist, a Castro supporter who pulled the trigger.

In the background was McCarthyism and the notion that communism was a domestic threat. The liberals would always say that was ridiculous. Then a communist kills the President, it seems to prove McCarthy’s point which they could never acknowledge. It ran against the script and against their deepest beliefs. This was an event in the Cold War. But this was the first big event in which liberals blamed America and the American culture. On the weekend Kennedy was shot, I found only one public person out of hundreds who attributed the event to communism and the Cold War. Everybody said it was due to prejudice, bigotry, hatred, Dallas.

But it gets worse. I have information that the Justice Department phoned the Dallas district attorney and told him they didn’t want to hear about communists any more. The American Ambassador in Mexico asked Mexican authorities to arrest an embassy official in Cuba who Oswald visited two months earlier. They were told to “stop the investigation, let this lady go”. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren said on the day of the assassination that Kennedy was killed because of the actions of bigots. He then authors the Warren Report which downplays Oswald’s ideological motives.

The problem here is that in the liberals view, the civil rights movement was much more important than the Cold War. So, they wanted the assassination of JFK to make him a martyr of the civil rights movement and not communism and the Cold War.

There is actually some truth to the fact that had Kennedy lived, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 might not have happened because Kennedy does not support this bill. This entire South is Democratic and the opposition is coming from the Southern Democrats. Kennedy needs them again inn 1964.

Had he lived, would he be a Democrat today? In the 1960s, Kennedy was a moderate, liberal Democrat. Today, like many Democrats of the day who did not go along with this anti American narrative, he would be a mainstream Republcan.

During the 50th anniversary of the assassination, liberals went all out again to convince America that it was all about rotten place Dallas was. It makes no logical sense, because a communist shot the President.

Liberals have invented a narrative of events, and of politics, and of America, and they will not let any facts get in the way.

To this day, the left tries to blame every shooting or bombing on conservatives. The shooting of the Congresswoman in Arizona was by a very mentally disturbed person. Yet the “climate of hate’ was marched out and that the Tea Party had something to do with it without any evidence whatsoever.

In 1963, we had a stable country. By 1968, America was coming apart at the seams.

To this day they keep conspiracy theories alive about the assassination to keep the discussion away for the Marxist, communist killer. The narrative has created confusion in America and the American culture. With most assassination there is agreement on who did it. Kennedy’s been gone for 50 years, and the debate continues, despite the facts.

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