PJ Media

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