With convincing argumentation, Piereson lays out his original theory that, central to the untimely demise of American liberalism is the assassination of JFK—and not the assassination as such, but the political left’s subsequent interpretation of history as occasioned by that assassination.

“Liberalism,” writes Piereson—referring to its stature in the early 1960’s, “had earned the designation as the public philosophy of the nation.”  Liberalism was confident in itself and America.  By the end of the decade, however, that great political movement collapsed. Piereson argues that key to this transformation of liberalism into a deeply divided movement which flirted with irrationalism and revolution, embittered against America, was its incapability of coming to terms with the assassination of JFK. By creating the myth of a martyred Kennedy who died for the sins of a nation unworthy of him, rather than accepting him as a moderate Democrat who was killed by a communist agitator, the left lost its confidence in America and destroyed liberalism in the process.  

          The novum accomplished by Piereson is to locate—with a very readable prose and convincing argumentation—the Kennedy assassination in this historical perspective, particularly as the cathartic event which irreversibly compromised the fate of the liberal movement in the United States. Among its many merits (especially for readers not deeply familiar with this period of American history) Piereson’s essay places in articulate contrast the liberalism that flourished prior to the assassination and the liberalism that emerged from the ashes of that tragic event.

          Piereson authoritatively explores how the conspiracy theories which almost immediately emerged from the tangled circumstances of the assassination, were simply so many attempts to make sense out of what was, in essence, a senseless killing.  Almost overnight, Kennedy is remarkably and unfoundedly, engraved in the American mind as the victim of all that ailed the nation, even as a martyr—on a parallel with Abraham Lincoln—for the civil rights movement.  Of course, as Pierson unapologetically points out again and again, the facts of Kennedy’s life, let alone the assassination, do not corroborate such images. Nonetheless, “it was this interpretation,” writes Piereson, “that would lay claim (irrationally) to the liberal mind in the years after the assassination.”

          But no conspiracy theory or journalistic interpretation of events could surpass the re-writing of history occasioned by Jackie Kennedy’s construal of the assassination the whole Kennedy-New Frontier phenomenon with the myth of Camelot, and the subsequent cultural identification of Kennedy as a modern King Arthur figure. Unbeknownst to Jackie Kennedy at the time, argues Piereson, this was to have a cataclysmic effect on the liberal movement:

To the extent that after 1963 the liberal movement reshaped itself in terms of this image, it absorbed in great degree the sentimental liberalism of Jacqueline Kennedy. By this route, the excessively idealistic version of liberalism that earned the rebuke of all the leading postwar liberals in the 1950s, including Kennedy himself on many occasions and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in The Vital Center, moved into the mainstream of liberal thought in the 1960s and thereafter.  But by turning John F. Kennedy into a liberal idealist, Mrs. Kennedy inadvertently contributed to the unwinding of the tradition of American liberalism that her husband represented in life… The Camelot myth was contrived to magnify the sense of loss felt as a consequence of Kennedy’s death and the dashing of liberal hopes and possibilities. If one accepted the image (and many did), then the best times were now in the past and would not soon be recovered.

As Pierson observes, such an interpretation of the events constituted a sharp departure from the liberal ideal of history as a progressive enterprise on a continuum toward an ever-more perfect instantiation of the great American experiment. By fostering nostalgia for the past, the Camelot image presented the Kennedy assassination as the tragic and blunt end of that noble project, reinforcing the national sentiment of dashed hopes.  The consequence of such an upheaval, as Pierson writes, was one of the great historical paradoxes of recent times, namely, “that many of those young people who filed in shocked grief past the president’s coffin in 1963 would just a few years later embrace as political activists the very doctrines that drove Oswald to assassinate him.”

          As Pierson ultimately points out, “the legacy of the liberal movement of the 1950’s however was picked up somewhat later by a loose collection of intellectuals called ‘neo-conservatives.’” I suspect Piereson would also agree with the following observation penned by the late Richard John Neuhaus, critiquing an earlier article on this topic by Pierson appearing in a 2006 issue of Commentary:

There are, of course, changes in public policy specifics, and the divide over abortion created by the Supreme Court has skewed political alignments in surprising ways, but the angry, conspiracy-obsessed Left of today is wrong in thinking that it is contending against the Right. As in the 1960s, so also now, it is raging against liberalism. To put it somewhat differently, the neoconservatism of today is the liberalism of 1960.

Camelot and the Cultural Revolution is supported by ample notes and a complete bibliography. For readers born—like me—in the 1960’s, this essay is a must-read for an in-depth interpretation of a chapter in American history which shaped our own childhood and informed our earliest notions of political “left” and “right”.  I also recommend a superb video interview with Piereson conducted by Peter Robinson for the Hoover Institution’s “Uncommon Knowledge” series.