The madness begins.(Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism)(Book review)

Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, by James Piereson (Encounter, 253 pp., $25.95)

PITIFULLY few subjects in American history have received, or wasted, as much ink as the Kennedy assassination. Conservatives, however, have written very little about the assassination, for among conservatives Kennedy has never commanded the reverence or infatuation he has from the left. Even those on the right who admire Kennedy for his tax cuts and his anti-Communism have been very reluctant to dive into the discussion.

James Piereson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has bucked the trend with his provocative and innovative new book. Concentrating on the effects of the event rather than the event itself, Piereson contends that the Kennedy assassination set in motion the sharp leftward turn of liberalism in the late 1960s. The young president's death, says Piereson, shook liberals' confidence in the future and in their own country, transforming them from optimists to pessimists and sapping them of the positive energy that had driven them--and the greater part of the nation--for many decades.

Like most conservatives, Piereson does not pull his hair out over who shot JFK. He accepts the most credible explanation for the assassination, that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. The multitudinous theories about larger conspiracies, however, do interest Piereson greatly because of what they say about American liberals.

Piereson stresses that most of the conspiracy theorists blamed American rightwing extremists, inside or outside the U.S. government, for the assassination. In 1963, Dallas was a conservative city with its share of far-right fanatics, so certain people could easily be persuaded that sinister right-wing forces had orchestrated the killing. Later, after Hollywood and the media had repeatedly demonized the military and the CIA, there would be fertile ground for the idea that rightist military or CIA elements had assassinated Kennedy.

In Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, Piereson argues convincingly that liberal Kennedy admirers espoused the conspiracy theories because they cared more about civil rights than the Cold War and therefore considered it much more noble for the president to have been assassinated by a right-wing opponent of civil rights than by a Communist. If Oswald was guilty of the crime, moreover, it would highlight something Kennedy admirers tried to hide but which Kennedy biographers such as Richard Reeves, Thomas C. Reeves, and Robert Dallek have fully illuminated--that Kennedy himself was much more interested in combating Communism than in promoting civil rights and other domestic liberal causes.

Absolving Oswald had other benefits for liberals. Since the days of Alger Hiss, liberals had been claiming that conservative accusations of Communist machinations in the United States were bogus witch hunts, motivated by partisan politics or various psychological maladies. To admit that an American Communist had killed Kennedy would be to admit that the conservatives had been right. In addition, many liberals, including Lyndon Johnson, worried that if the Communist Oswald took the blame for the assassination, then conservatives would be encouraged to undertake new McCarthyist investigations into domestic subversion, to the detriment of the Democratic party and Johnson's Great Society. Here, as Piereson points out, Kennedy's posthumous fans misrepresented the deceased president again, for Kennedy himself had been on friendly terms with Joseph McCarthy and had supported McCarthy's efforts to ferret out Communist spies in the American government.