PJ Media

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.