Revising the History of Camelot: The JFK Legacy Re-Examined
My %%AMAZON=1594031886 book %% on the Kennedy assassination makes two large claims:
First, that though President Kennedy was assassinated by a communist, the liberal leadership of the country deflected the responsibility on to other groups and forces: the radical right, a climate of hatred and bigotry promoted by opponents of civil rights, or a spirit of violence and lawlessness in the nation (also reflected in violence against civil rights workers). In truth, Kennedy was a casualty of the Cold War but his death was interpreted against the backdrop of the civil rights movement of the time.
Second, that this interpretation of the assassination was incorporated into the unfolding radical narrative of the 1960s which saw American society as “sick” and the United States as an out of control colossus on the world scene – the latter point, of course, an aspect of the opposition to the war in Vietnam. Thus, Kennedy’s assassination came to be seen in the 1960s as a piece of a broader indictment of American society and the nation’s role in the world.
It was this general indictment that discredited post-war liberalism and brought about the end of the liberal era. The traditional optimism and progressivism that had marked liberal thought since the time of the New Deal could not be sustained against this cultural attack that gained great strength by the end of the 1960s. Various radical and oppositional themes that had been bubbling for years on the margins of American life burst during the 1960s into the mainstream of liberal thought – redefining that doctrine as it did so. The Kennedy assassination was not a cause of this development, but one of the important unfolding events in the 1960s that contributed to it.
The first of these points, I think, is plainly validated by the historical evidence; the second point is more interpretive in character and far more controversial. Yet the two points are closely linked.
Mr. Sterngold appears to accept this first point, as he acknowledges that members of the Kennedy family and liberal allies tried to use President Kennedy’s death as a means of advancing his agenda. This, I think, is a large admission, though he passes it over very quickly, as if an effort to deceive the nation about a large event in order to advance a political agenda is perfectly legitimate, so long as that agenda itself is worthwhile. What is not noted here, of course, is that while Kennedy supported a civil rights bill he was also an ardent cold warrior. Why should not his death have been used to justify fighting the cold war? That at least would have made more sense in terms of the motives of the assassin.
Mr. Sterngold claims that I cite no evidence to show that President Kennedy was a victim of a worldwide communist conspiracy. This is true. I do not suggest or imply that President Kennedy was a victim of a wider conspiracy. There is no evidence to suggest that Lee Harvey Oswald – the assassin – acted in concert with other groups or foreign governments, such as Cuba or the Soviet Union. In my book, I criticize the various conspiracy theorists (most of them on the left) for concocting scenarios of the assassination that have no evidence to back them up.
The evidence suggests that Oswald probably acted alone in carrying out the assassination. However, he was not a “nut,” if by that term we mean someone who is mentally or emotionally unstable. He was rather a dedicated communist who was prepared to give his life for his cause. The evidence suggests that he shot President Kennedy in order to protect Fidel Castro – in other words, to interrupt Kennedy’s efforts to overthrow Castro’s regime in Cuba. This is why Kennedy was a casualty of the Cold War rather than of the Civil Rights movement.
Mr. Sterngold is under the misimpression that my aim in the book was to discredit John F. Kennedy. I intended nothing of the kind. Kennedy remains in many was an admirable figure, notwithstanding the facts that have emerged over the years about some of his personal conduct. We have not had a president since his time who spoke so admirably and clearly about the hopes and ideals of the American people. He did so not only in connection to civil rights but more often and more consistently in connection to America’s role in the world and the stakes at issue in the Cold War.
A major point that I make in the book is that the liberalism that emerged out of the 1960s had little in common with the kind of liberalism that Kennedy championed. Kennedy was an exemplar of the post-war liberalism that the radicals of the 1960s attacked and eventually discredited, even as they cited JFK as a liberal hero.
Mr. Sterngold thus misunderstands the points I make about Profiles in Courage, JFK’s Pulitzer Prize winning book published in 1956. He thinks that my criticisms of that book are part of an attempt to discredit Kennedy. This is not true. It is true that Profiles in Courage is a muddled book (as I say) because it sometimes praises political leaders for having the courage to compromise and at other times for having the courage to stand on their principles. My point in this discussion, however, is to show that Kennedy in the 1950s was careful not to pigeonhole himself as a liberal, since he praised both Democratic and Republican leaders, along with liberals and conservatives (Senator Taft, for example). Kennedy understood that being tagged as a liberal was the kiss of death in national politics – and thus he was careful to position himself as a moderate or as a “pragmatist.” This aspect of Kennedy’s career conflicted with the posthumous myth that developed in the 1960s of JFK as a liberal idealist. Kennedy in life was by far the more admirable figure than the mythic character that was constructed by Kennedy loyalists after his death.
Mr. Sterngold seems particularly exercised by my characterization of the movements of the 1960s as being politically radical and proto-violent. This is not the place to get into a debate about the 1960s. In my view, the late 1960s were an unhappy time in American life because of the many negative and destructive developments associated with it. Mr. Sterngold views it as a time of hope and needed change. That debate is best left for another time. Readers might note, however, that nearly all of the reformist legislation that is associated with the period was enacted in 1964 and 1965 before the radical movement became widely influential. The Civil Rights bill was passed in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Medicare and Medicaid programs were approved in 1965. The radical movements began to develop wide followings beginning in 1967 and 1968.
Mr. Sterngold argues that the Kennedy assassination could not have been linked in any causative way to the rise of radicalism in the 1960s because the radical movement was already taking shape years earlier in the 1950s with the rise of the “Beat” movement and then in the early 1960s with the beginnings of the New Left. To prove this he points to the episode in 1958 in which James Wechsler, the liberal journalist, debated Jack Kerouac at Hunter College in New York City. Wechsler, commenting later on Kerouac’s wild behavior, noted that he was dealing with a man from “outer space.”
Mr. Sterngold is wrong, I think, to locate the effective origins of the 1960s in the fringe movements of the 1950s. As I argue in the book, left wing movements of various kinds were active in American life going back at least to the turn of the 20th century. Some were communists and socialists who attacked capitalism as the source of oppression for the common man. Others were cultural radicals who saw the family, school, and church as institutions of repression and targets for reform. Yet both groups operated out on the margins of national politics with little in the way of popular followings.
This was true as well of the socialists and Beat poets of the 1950s – the latter representing an updated expression of the old cultural radicalism. Liberals were interested in practical reform to help the working and middle classes; the cultural radicals wished to upset their entire way of life. Liberals like Kennedy kept a wide distance between themselves and the socialists and cultural radicals of the time. The influential liberal intellectuals – Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Hofstadter foremost among them – criticized the radicals as sentimental, impractical, and largely irrelevant to the political controversies of the time.
During the 1960s, the wall of separation that had been erected between the radicals and the liberals came crashing down – and many of the ideas associated with the socialists and cultural radicals of the earlier time entered the mainstream of left/liberal thinking. Central to this new thinking was the critique of American society as repressive, materialistic, and violent. It is certainly possible (as Mr. Sterngold says) that these ideas would have achieved a mass following in any event – that is, in the absence of Kennedy’s assassination or the war in Vietnam. I have my doubts. There was little sign in 1963 or even in 1964 that a significant portion of the educated population in the United States was about to embrace a body of ideas that just a few years earlier was thought to exist on the lunatic fringe of public life.
Mr. Sterngold criticizes my observation that from World War II until Kennedy’s death, most of the political violence in the United States came from the right, but for a generation after that time it came from the left. He mentions as evidence against this the bombing of the federal building in 1995 and the bombings carried out by Eric Rudolph in the mid-1990s. These events occurred more than thirty years – or a full generation – after Kennedy’s death. He also notes the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968. While the King assassination no doubt came from the right, Robert Kennedy’s assassination was something different altogether (and a subject I discuss in the book). Sen. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian national whose family had emigrated from Jordan to the United States some years earlier. Sirhan’s dispositions were anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-Israel. He hated Kennedy because of the Senator’s support for Israel that he expressed on the presidential campaign trail. He resolved to kill Kennedy before the one-year anniversary of the “Six Day” war which began on June 5, 1967 and in which Israel staged a successful preemptive war against Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Sirhan shot Kennedy on June 5, 1968 – the one year anniversary of the war. Sirhan acted independently of anything going within American society – just as Oswald had done.
There is little doubt that this assassination came from the left – even though (once more) the assassination was interpreted at the time as an event arising from the madness and violence of American life. Indeed, nearly forty years later, Mr. Sterngold is still so characterizing it in contradiction to the facts.
I do not say that President Kennedy’s assassination caused the downfall of post-war liberalism and a reconstruction of that doctrine out of the upheavals of the 1960s. I acknowledge the influence of other events, most especially the war in Vietnam and the growing opposition to it from the mid-1960s forward. Still, as I argue, the Kennedy assassination was an important early event in that unfolding process. The curious aspect of the whole thing was that, since Kennedy was killed by a communist, some significant intellectual contortions were required to fit the event into the radical narrative then being constructed.
My book has been called a “revisionist” interpretation of the Kennedy assassination. If this is so, what then is the standard or consensus interpretation? It seems fair to conclude that Mr. Sterngold has expressed it: President Kennedy was killed by a “nut” who happened to be a communist, but that this latter fact is irrelevant to the meaning of the event. The assassination arose from the generally violent temper of American society and the easy access provided to guns. While the assassination was a tragedy for the nation and the Kennedy family, it had no wider political meaning – and in this sense resembled more the assassinations of Garfield and McKinley than the assassination of Lincoln.
In my book, I dispute this interpretation in just about every respect. Readers who are interested to look into this further can read my book, which is inaccurately and unfairly characterized in Mr. Sterngold’s essay. While any revisionist assessment is bound to arouse controversy and consternation among those with settled views of a subject, there is little reason for it to close off discussion of a major event that is now more than forty years in the past. Mr. Sterngold says that I am out to discredit liberals when my main purpose has been to try to understand how a popular and potent political doctrine was turned on its head in just a few short years.
James Piereson is the author of %%AMAZON=1594031886 Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism %%
Oswald did not kill Kennedy nor police officer Tippit. For more information see:
http://jfkmurdersolved.com/interview.htm
“Oswald did not kill Kennedy…”
Ah, the conspiracy theorists are out. Must be a full moon.
I lived through it all as a young adult, and had voted for JFK as a strong anti-Communist, liberal. Kennedy was a rather ineffectual President, although he was a free market capitalist who lowered taxes, and certainly recognized Communism for the threat it posed world wide. The left disliked him for it, but after his death, quickly created a narrative to explain his death in line with their radical, capitalism loathing philosophy. Compare Ted Kennedy’s views with his brother’s to see how those ’60′s radicals have changed the Democratic party. I must praise Mr. Piereson for the courage it took to write the book. He should take it as a compliment that the Sterngolds of the world are screaming bloody murder. The book struck home.
On page 238 of The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. edited by Clayborne Carson, we find the following:
“The assassination of President Kennedy killed not only a man but a complex of illusions. It demolished the myth that hate and violence can be confined in an airtight chamber to be employed against the few. Suddenly the truth was revealed that hate is a contagion; that it grows and spreads like a disease; that no society is so healthy that it can automatically maintain its immunity. If a smallpox epidemic had been raging in the South, President Kennedy would have been urged to avoid the area. There was a plague afflicting the South but its perils were not perceived.
We were all involved in the death of President Kennedy. We tolerated hate; we tolerated the sick simulation of violence in all walks of life; and we tolerated the differential application of law, which said a man’s life was sacred only if we agreed with his views. This may explain the cascading grief that flooded the country in late November. We mourned a man who had become the pride of the nation, but we grieved as well for ourselves because we knew we were sick.”
If this is Sterngold’s thesis:
“President Kennedy was killed by a “nut” who happened to be a communist, but that this latter fact is irrelevant to the meaning of the event. The assassination arose from the generally violent temper of American society and the easy access provided to guns. While the assassination was a tragedy for the nation and the Kennedy family, it had no wider political meaning – and in this sense resembled more the assassinations of Garfield and McKinley than the assassination of Lincoln.”
he is wrong. The JFK murder had a profound impact on people throughout the 1960′s and beyond. It shattered a world view and a youthful confidence that we still possessed in 1963. It colored much of how we viewed government actions thereafter and forever inserted into our phsychi a distrust and fear of secret government activities. Obviously the murder did not start the radical 1960′s movement, and obviously the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam played important roles. But you cannot view the murder in isolation and say it had no impact.
I do think however that the JFK of 1963 may not have been the same Cold Warrior of 1960. I think the JFK of 1963 distrusted the CIA, was looking for a different way to deal with the Soviets; something that started in the Cuban Missile Crisis. I think this kind of thinking influenced his brother Bobby and ultimately led to the RFK liberalism of the late-1960′s, which became the Ted Kennedy liberalism of the 1970′s and 1980′s.
Your thesis is interesting and I look forward to reading your book.
“…but we grieved as well for ourselves because we knew we were sick.”
I was there. The assassination of Kennedy, a popular president, especially with the media, was appalling. I don’t understand what Carson means by “…we tolerated the sick simulation of violence in all walks of life…” and all the rest of that leftist puke. I didn’t grieve for myself because I wasn’t sick.
I am grateful to David Thomson for pointing out this quotation, which I did not cite in my book, but which demonstates the point that liberal leaders at the time were determined to place the Kennedy assassination in the context of the civil rights struggle rather than in the context of the Cold War (where it really belonged). In the boo, however, I do go through various reasons why this happened. J Piereson
James Pierson — Well said and cogently defended!
I’ve not read your book–just read reviews and heard an interview–so I was reluctant to respond to Sterngold’s piece. However, I’ve not gotten the impression you were attacking liberals, liberalism or JFK. You were describing, to my mind, a real phenomenon, the trauma of the JFK assassination and its unmooring effects on American liberals.
As a boomer, a peace activist, and something of a conspiracy buff, I can relate. The JFK assassination was definitely a big factor in my distrust of the US government and American society. It wasn’t the only one, but it was a big one, so I think you have performed a service here. For me 9-11 was the wake-up call to reassess the political views I held for most of my adult life.
If one believes that the US government conspired to kill its own beloved President, it’s much easier to slip-slide down the road to sympathizing with the likes of the Weather Underground and Noam Chomsky that America is the greatest enemy to the world. Like you, I find it difficult to imagine that such a mainstreaming of such a radical view could have happened without the trauma of the JFK assassination, compounded by those of MLK and RFK five years later.
Precisely!! The loss of power and influence the tinfoil hatted leftist loons would lose is enough to make them choke, not only themselves, but us as well, to death. The truth is so very hard and thus, they refuse to see or hear it.
Thank you Mr. Piereson for putting my general beliefs about Kennedy and the 60′s in a book I can read and pass around.
The odds are very high that my earlier quote of Martin Luther King, Jr. was influenced—if not even actually written by a man named Stanley Levinson. He was a convinced Communist. I dare anyone to ask their friends or acquaintances this question: who was Stanley Levinson? Few people have ever heard the name. And yet, he may be the single most important person behind the reason American blacks are contemptuous towards the Republican Party. MLK claimed in the late 1950s that the GOP was not doing enough for blacks. However, he also thought that it was too capitalist and militaristic. The hard-core Democratic Party white racists were conveniently ignored. MLK accused his own country of conducting a racist and imperialist war against the Vietnamese. We were supposedly always on the wrong side of the wars of liberation. MLK was for all practical purposes, perhaps inadvertently, a spokesman on behalf of Communist doctrine.
The Leftist establishment felt compelled to dissuade Americans that JFK was murdered by a Communist. It would have only strengthened the position of the anti-Communists. This was something they absolutely dreaded. Communists like Stanley Levinson did everything possible to keep the truth from the citizens of our country.
Mr. Pierson’s analysis is trenchant and quite above the criticism of the former New York Times “journalist”, Sterngold. (Full disclosure: in thirty years as an aspiring semi-public figure and punching bag of the Left, only one American reporter ever lied to me, betrayed off-the-record confidences, and generally tried to sabotage my career: the inimitable Mr. Sterngold. It is a mark of his ineptitude he failed to understand my career had already suffered all the damage the Left could inflict.) That said, his leftist shriek of “right-wing” agitprop is self-contradictory if one but reads JFK’s inaugural — or any other public statement or act. Would that the Kennedys had indeed used the assassination to further JFK’s goals: hawkish Cold War engagement, tax cuts, and muscular advancement of American superiority in Space as examples. Rather, it became a tool in the hands of the decayed, effete, Abbie Hoffman/Pete Seeger/Woodstock Left who saw us only as evil and seemingly romanced a vision of Soviet Hegemony (presumably presided over locally by a cabal drawn from Manhattan’s Upper West Side and the West Side of L.A.) They embraced Jacquie’s Camelot myth with both arms, and now, like White Russians in Paris of the 1920s dream of a Romanoff Restoration (can you say “Obama”? Or, in dire straights, “Hillary”?) and thus fight jealously for the custody of the JFK memory, all the better to ensure their distortions remain current cant. Careful, thoughtful analysts of Mr. Pierson’s caliber need not be bothered by such hive-minded, robotic-mouthed “criticism”.
In the Kennedy era, the Democrat Party was well to the right of today’s Republican Party. That’s why so many former Democrats have changed parties. It’s a trend that accelerated under Reagan and continues today – particularly in the new South.
My advice to the lefties, get over it. Oswald was a radical Communist who adored Marx, Castro, and Mao more then he did JFK. He wasn’t a main stream liberal, but he clearly wasn’t a southern racist intent on killing JFK over hatred of integration. If he were alive today he would be carrying the water of Hugo Chavez.
Revisionism, revisionism, revisionism…. If you want to control an argument polarize it and have your talking heads take the lead on both sides. In Mr. Sterngold’s critique I recognize nothing of the ’60s I lived through, except for the fact that there was a president who we knew as JFK. But for all the so called conflict between these two talking heads they both emphatically agree that that dastardly killer Oswald was a lone assassin, for of course they don’t want to be tarred with ‘Conspiracy Nut’ brush. After all we all know that conspiracies, the bane of humankind since forever, and the hallmark of our ancestry politic European, have never ever crossed the broad Atlantic waters. Politicians, power players, and egomaniacs have never taken root in our virgin soil. Aaron Burr was a nice mis-understood patriot, as was General James Wilkinson, and Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt had no dealings with William Walker, that lone flash in the pan adventurer. Ruby himself, that two-bit sometimes Mafioso nightclub sleaze parlor owner, was at heart a loveable soul who was shattered over the plight of the love of his life: Jackie Kennedy. If you don’t believe any of this then I have a cheap piece of junk made in Italy mail order bolt action rifle you can have if you can use it and duplicate the three shots heard around the world. No one has ever been able to successfully duplicate these shots, but that of course is because Oswald was the Calamity Jane of the twentieth century – it’s what Commie mind control can do for the losers of the world.
Revulsion, revulsion, revulsion is what one feels when confronted with the idea that any government or any organization on earth of two or more members could pull off a con job of this magnitude in the U.S.A. What con job? The “con” that Mr/Ms Short refers to above. All of us are idiots to believe Oswald and Ruby did what they did on their own. Mr/Ms Short knows better. He and his/her comrades in the ever-busy conspiracy industry, and only they, know the real truth.
The History Channel; which made a mint on promoting the JFK conspiracies in the early to mid 90s; with that BBC series; The Men who Shot Kennedy; who Bugliosi
systematically dismantled in his Killing History (the deaf mute witnesses, the story of the Corsican shooters who were all in jail on the day of the Assasination)re-aired their corrective; Beyond Conspiracy which debunked the single bullet supposed deception, the’ proof of the grassy knoll shooters’, Oswald’s suppsedly poor aim, etc. But that poison has already sunk into the groud water, just like the odious “Loose change”
A parody of this sort of think is proffered in the latest “National
Treasure” sequel.
Piereson again makes some good points, but his book and his remarks here continue to dance around a stark contradiction at the heart of his argument. He wants to claim that, since Oswald was an avowed communist, his assassination of Kennedy ought to have been regarded as an act of communist aggression against the United States. The Right, he claims, correctly perceived it as such (and so only the Left spun conspiracy theories, not the Right) and remained staunch anti-communists. The Left interpreted the killing as a product of growing Right wing anger in the country and so became anti-American rather than anti-communist, Piereson says.
This ignores the reality that what almost pushed the United States off a cliff in the 1960′s was not too little anti-communism but too much, in the form of the tragic war against communist aggression in Vietnam. What makes this even more inconvenient for Piereson is that the war on communism was pushed initially by a Left wing Democrat, Lyndon Johnson. Piereson is correct in arguing that some of Kennedy’s supporters blamed Right wing resistance to his agenda, metaphorically, for his death, and sought to use this interpretation to advance Kennedy’s policy priorities. But with tens of thousands of conscripted Americans dying in Vietnam for a cause that even some on the Right doubted, the assassination receded in importance as a factor in radicalizing the American youth movement. However divisive and traumatic the assassination, it was overshadowed many times over by the disastrous course of the war against communism in Vietnam.
Further, Piereson conveniently ignores the truth that it was a staunch anti-communist from the Right, Richard Nixon, who ran successfully for president in 1968 based on a supposed secret plan for ending the war against communism in Vietnam. This Right wing Republican was also the president who went to Beijing on bended knee and recognized the communist government there, in the process betraying our anti-communist ally on Taiwan.
Piereson is welcome to his opinions but ignoring inconvenient historical facts does not make them go away. Whatever good points Piereson makes are diminished by the fact that he cannot admit Рand still stick to his ideologically driven brief Рthat anti-communism, in the way that both Republicans and Democrats pursued it, cost the country dearly in those difficult times. It was a president from the Right, Nixon, who perceived this and so sought in his strange ways to extricate the country from Vietnam and abandon blind anti-communism by building better relations with the communist powerhouses, China and the Soviet Union. Remember détente?
One of Piereson’s key errors is that instead of calling his book an ideological broadside he pretends it is history. Whatever strengths or weaknesses one finds in his political views, the book simply isn’t history, if one believes that necessarily involves an accurate use of the facts. He wants to claim, for instance, that the lesson of the British effort to appease Hitler at Munich was that the U.S. would never lie down in the face of a dictator’s aggression again, (see page 37). That, of course, ignores the reality that the guiding principle throughout the Cold War was containment, not confrontation. How does Piereson explain the fact that the U.S. did nothing when Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968? How does he explain our half-hearted efforts to oust Castro at the Bay of Pigs? Even Piereson’s efforts to characterize Oswald as a communist infiltrator out to advance world communism by killing Kennedy falls flat. Anyone interested must read page 154 of his book, where Piereson delivers the decisive closing argument that Oswald was not a desperate, dangerously unbalanced misfit but a communist hit man. His zinger, the paragraph wrapping up the brief has seven “may haves” and “had good reasons” and “must haves,” in lieu of hard facts and hard evidence, in just 9 sentences. That’s conclusive proof?
The point is that this was a complex era of dangerous extremes and unprecedented challenges, experiments with violence and desperate pursuits of “justice,” whatever that meant. People from all sides of the political spectrum were thrown off balance groping for a wise way forward. For Piereson to claim that the Left lost its way because it stopped fighting communism while the Right gained traction because it kept its eye on the ball is just contrary to the facts, an absurd reductive argument.
There is no serious doubt whatsoever concerning Lee Harvey Oswald’s commitment to Communism. This is extremely well documented. The only question is whether he was a member of a wider conspiracy. I personally agree completely with Gerald Posner’s position in Case Closed that Oswald acted alone. The young man even spent a few years in the Soviet Union. His wife Marina was born and raised in Russia. Oswald was hoping the Soviet authorities would treat him as some sort of great Marxist scholar. Instead, they merely perceived him to be a marginally literate individual. He was, needless to add, not pleased.
The late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr failed to perform his scholarly duty. He knew damn well that a Communist murdered Kennedy—and right-wing political fanatics had nothing to do with this vile act. One can reasonable conclude that Schlesinger only cared about helping to further the left-wing Democratic Party agenda. He truly disgraced himself.
James Sterngold conveniently ignores the fact that anti-anti-Communist George McGovern became the standard bearer of the Democratic Party in less than eight years after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. We also know that North Vietnamese Communist leader General Giap openly credited the American leftist movement for their victory. Anti-Communists did indeed debate whether Communism should be outright defeated or merely contained. The risk of a nuclear holocaust played a part in their thinking. They were nonetheless in full agreement that Communism was evil! A high number of Democrats like Martin Luther King, Jr, if not even the majority, however, considered our actions in Vietnam to be racist and imperialistic. They turned into self-hating Americans. Our country became the enemy. Sterngold may wish to pretend that MLK never existed. Alas, his writings are easily accessible.
As a 1972-born Canadian, I don’t have an ideological dog in this fight. However, I can say after reading the book cover-to-cover that Mr. Pierson’s analysis rings true. There’s not a single person of my generation I’ve spoken to who believes Oswald was a communist activist acting out of solidarity with Castro – and yet, Pierson makes it clear that there’s no evidence that it was anything else but that.
Mr. Sterngold, bringing Nixon into the equation is a red herring, and a deflection from the issues at hand. I believe Mr. Pierson’s point is that the Kennedy assasination helped radicalize liberalism and spread an attitude of anti-Americanism and anti-Capitalism in the Democratic Party. Nixon was simply the beneficiary of this radicalization, because it mainstream America rejected it. Nixon’s actions regarding Communism are simply Nixon’s, an enigmatic figure if there ever was one.
The broader point that Pierson makes is absolutely accurate. Liberalism did crack up, and never has recovered. Ask any “progressive” what the meaning of the Kennedy assassination was, and they’ll tell you it was either proof of out-of-control guns and violence, or proof of a shadowy right-wing conspiracy designed to ensure escalation of the Vietnam War and prevent Civil Rights legislation.
James Piereson replies:
Mr. Sterngold now appears to have read at least parts of my book for he is beginning to zero in on some of its main themes. I cannot say, however, that he has interpreted it accurately or fairly. Yet he raises some worthwhile issues for debate.
He says in his opening sentence that I make some “good points” either in the course of my book or in my respose to his review. I wish he would say what these are so we can identify where at least we may agree.
He asserts that there is a key flaw in my argument — namely, that in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, Lyndon Johnson did not pull back from the Cold War but accelerated it with his escalation of the war in Vietnam. He says that this contradicts my claim that the American left (including liberals) turned against the cold war in the wake of the assassination. This is not what I say, nor does it contradict my general theme.
Lyndon Johnson, first of all, was not a “new” liberal or a new leftist but a traditional or post-war liberal in the New Deal tradition — in many ways like Kennedy. This form of liberalism — progressive, optimistic, incremental — broke apart in the 1960s, so much so that by 1968 a liberal champion of the 1950s (Hubert Humphrey) was being denounced as a reactionary by activists of the left. The new liberals and the new left rejected Kennedy’s views every bit as much as they did Johnson’s and Humphrey’s. Kennedy was, if anything, more of a centrist and certainly more of a cold warrior than Humphrey.
The questions that I raise in the book are: What caused the disintegration of the liberal consensus? And what did the Kennedy assassination have to do with it? I acknowledge that various factors (including the war in Vietnam) contributed to the unravelling of the post war liberal outlook, just as various events in the 1850s contributed to secession of the South and the Civil War. However, I do assert that Kennedy’s assassination was an important event in this process because the liberal leadership of the nation blamed it on bigotry, intolerance, and a national culture of violence — rather than as an event in the Cold War. Thus, as events unfolded in the 1960s, it could be interpreted within the new radical narrative which said that the USA was a “sick” society, though here the new leftists did not mean that they were sick, but that everyone else was.
It was in the wake of the Kennedy assassination that this interpretation of American life was first impressed upon the public — and it then served as a template for the interpretation of other events (the war in Vietnam, other assassination, urban riots) as they unfolded during that tumultuous decade.
Mr. Sterngold claims that it was anti-communism that drove the nation “off a cliff” in the 1960s and which “cost the country dearly in those years.” Of course, Mr. Sterngold is here reflecting the mindset of the “new liberalism” that emerged from the 1960s — which he associates with objective truth. I cannot agree that, even if we admit the war in Vietnam to have been a mistake, it would have justified the then fashionable conclusion that the nation itself was sick, violent, and bigoted. The Korean war became unpopular but failed to produce any such sweeping cultural attack. Even at the time, many liberals and conservatives criticized Johnson’s Vietnam policy but did not resort to anti-American rhetoric to do so. Thus, as I think, it was not anti-communism that drove the nation “off a cliff” in the 1960s, but the irrational and anti-American disposition of the new liberals and radicals. One piece of evidence of their irrationality was their belief that JFK was a victim of a violent society.
I’m not sure what point Mr. Sterngold is making in raising the issues of containment and detente in this context. Both were viewed by their architects (Truman and Nixon) as ways of contesting the Cold War, not of withdrawing from it. Sen. McGovern and other liberal Democrats of the 1970s wanted to abandon the Cold War as not worth the price and as a conflict that was caused more by our own conduct than by the Soviet Union’s. Here they were far apart from Richard Nixon — and also from JFK, a measure of the ideological distance travelled by the new liberals in less than a decade from 1963 to the early 1970s. A good question (addressed in my book) is why they continued to view JFK as a liberal hero even as they repudiated the substance of his ideas.
Mr. Sterngold denies that the left lost its way in national politics because it “stopped fighting communism.” But this was one powerful reason why the voters turned against the liberal Democrats from the end of the 1960s forward — that is, the voters questioned their credentials on national security and their commitment to fighting the Cold War. This is one major reason why the left lost influence in national politics — and why the right gained it. Nixon defeated McGovern on this issue in 1972. It is doubtful that Ronald Reagan could have been elected president in 1980 if the liberals had not so badly fumbled the national security issue. Once in office, President Reagan pursued the end game in the Cold War without any help (and against resistance) from the post-1960s liberals.
Mr. Sterngold raises some serious points worth debating (I have debated them), but his citation of page 154 in my book cannot be taken seriously as a criticism. This reads more like an act of desperation than as a real criticism. He points to this page as proof that my assertion that Oswald was a communist is based only on speculation. On that page, I do in fact speculate about Oswald — but not about his communist ties or about his motives in killing JFK but rather in connection with his paranoia about the FBI agents who were shadowing him in Dallas. I suggest many reasons why Oswald may have gone to great lengths to evade the FBI at a time when he had not yet committed any crime. (Things changed after he took his shot at Gen. Walker in April of 1963, after which time he had good reason to fear law enforcement agents of any kind.)
But this has nothing to do with Oswald’s ideological motives, which I spend an entire chapter documenting. Mr. Sterngold doubts that Oswald acted out of motives linked to his communist ideology. This is delusional. Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, denouncing American capitalism and pledging to betray classified military secrets as he did so. When he returned to the United States, he acknowledged that he was still a communist (or a Marxist as he preferred to call himself). In Dallas, he subscribed to communist and socialst publications, and maintained contacts with the communist party and the Soviet embassy. He set up a front group in New Orleans in support of Castro. In September of 1963, he visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City to secure a visa to travel to Cuba. He was aware of Kennedy’s efforts to overthrow Castro. I conclude on the basis of these facts (and much more) that Oswald shot President Kennedy in order to protect Castro — in other words, to interrupt Kennedy’s plans to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba. That is not speculation but rather a justified inference from undisputed facts.
If Mr. Sterngold doubts this inference, he should give us another interpretation that can be reconciled with the facts. Does he think that Oswald shot President Kennedy to hold back civil rights –as Earl Warren, Lyndon Johnson, and others suggested at the time? Does he think that Oswald was impelled to act by a “culture of violence” (that is, seeing much violence in American society, he resolved to get in on the fun)? This is silly. Does he think that Oswald was mad at his wife and therefore shot the President of the United States (as the Warren Commission suggested)? Does he think that Oswald was just a standard brand American “nut” who also happened to be a Communist, who had defected to the Soviet Union, who set up pro-Castro front groups, who tried to assassinate the head of the Birch society in Dallas, who tried to travel to Cuba by visiting the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City, who read communist literature, who sought advice from communist leaders in the USA, etc.? If Owald was only a nut, he was a most unusual one. Does Mr. Sterngold even believe that Oswald was the assassin?
I am grateful to Mr. Thomson and Mr. Flagg (see comments)for their observations, with which I concur. Their comments add a broader dimension to the discussion of the place of the JFK assassination in the history of the 1960s.
Mr. Sterngold says that my theme is “reductive.” A reductive argument is one that reduces a complex phenomenon to a single cause. I do not do not assert that the Kennedy assassination was the single cause of the unravelling of liberalism in the 1960s — but that it was an important piece of an unfolding process of events, a piece that has heretofore been neglected, misinterpreted, or misunderstood.
Finally, without taking personal shots against Mr. Sterngold of the kind he takes against me, he is not the arbiter of who is an historian and who is not. He seems to think that the test of who is an historian depends upon agreement with his point of view. Whether I am called an historian or not is irrelevant to the issues being debated here. In fact, I don’t claim to be an historian. As if it matters, I have a degree in political science.
I will not here go into the ideological biases of board certified historians such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to rebut Mr. Sterngold’s suggestion that we should look only to members of that guild for an understanding of the past. I do, however, spend a chapter on that subject in my book.
J Piereson
Yes, Mr. Sterngold, we didn’t confront the Russians in Budapest
in ’56 and Prague in ’68. We did
precious little in East Germany, Poland, Albania, the Ukraine et al.
The Cuba project showed the same level of effort. Yet we were criticized for even taking this
little steps at the Bay of Pigs, Mongoose was another half measure.
but it apparently too much for the
like of Oswald and the ‘Fair Play
for Cuba’ Committee. It’s ironic that Vietnam was where the major military confrontation of the Cold
War was; not really, it was an extrapolation of what the planners were the ‘lessons’ of the Cuba operation. Ho Chi Minh wasn’t a nationalist; he was closer to a Stalinist than the Maoist Khmer Rouge counterpart/rival. The left
and the ‘malleable’ center used this tragedy commited by a Marxist
partisan to undermine the foun-dations of the country. They used
the experience of the civil rights movement, as a template to judge all political institutions. Those who would support the war at the outset; like Halberstam (for those
valuable tungsten deposits)Moyers, Bundy, Cronkite,Schlesinger, Goodwin, the Wise Men (the precursors to the 9/11 commission in vitro) even BobbyKennedy, turned tail when the situation became more complicated.The same reaction seemed to be ocurring until very recently with this current conflict. That is why by 1972; the proper reaction to the revelation that Howard Hunt had been CIA in All the President’s Men; was not curiosity or even admiration but hatred. Nixon won the ’72 election, but the cultural, legal, and political opposition rendered their own verdict. Carter would follow suit, Reagan was almost derailed in
a similar project in Central America.
In the early 70′s I attended a talk in the MIT Student Center by Carl Oglesby (former SDS President) giving his slant on the JFK assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, etc. The audience seemed enthralled by his dramatic, skillful linkage of all these various strands, which he later published as a book—but all of it was Communist propaganda, a masterful piece of disinformation that had great resonance in those times. As Conway Twitty sang, “It’s only make believe”.
Mr. Piereson is his own worst enemy here. I quote a sentence from his most recent post, and then another passage from his opening post (my emphasis in the first):
“However, I do assert that Kennedy’s assassination was an important event in this process because the liberal leadership of the nation blamed it on bigotry, intolerance, and a national culture of violence — rather than as an event in the Cold War.”
“Kennedy understood that being tagged as a liberal was the kiss of death in national politics – and thus he was careful to position himself as a moderate or as a “pragmatist.” This aspect of Kennedy’s career conflicted with the posthumous myth that developed in the 1960s of JFK as a liberal idealist.”
John F. Kennedy was never a liberal even by the standards of the time, and Mr. Piereson properly notes that and the reason – liberals were losers.
But then he uses the term “liberal leadership of the nation” for the period of the Johnson administration. There was no such thing. There was Lyndon Johnson. He made the difference.
Certainly there was a group which could be termed the “liberal leadership”, i.e., a group of generally recognized leaders of the liberal Democratic political faction, in the period 1964-66, but they represented only their faction, not the nation.
Furthermore this leadership group was tearing itself apart over the war in Vietnam during the 1967 calendar year. This was very, very apparent in California.
The period when “radical” but non-nutball lefties started merging with anti-Vietnam War but still “traditional” liberals began after 1968. Even the Democratic freshman Congressional class of 1974 was not at all radical.
IMO political scientist historians should pay more attention to events during the Carter administration for the process under discussion. The non-nutball lefties and the by-then remnants of what Piereson and Sternhold call “liberals” really merged during the first Reagan administration. But this did not start until after 1968.
Piereson’s argument makes a lot of sense to me. It does not sound like right wing “agitprop” as Sterngold says. It sounds like he is over reacting to the idea that a communist assassinated JFK — which is obviously what happened.