By George Will
'Ex-Marine Asks Soviet Citizenship'
— Washington Post headline, 1 November 1959
'He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It’s — it had to be some silly little Communist.'
— Jacqueline Kennedy, 22 November 1963
She thought it robbed his death of any meaning. But a
meaning would be quickly manufactured to serve a new politics. First,
however, an inconvenient fact — Oswald — had to be expunged from the
story. So, just 24 months after the assassination, Arthur Schlesinger
Jr., the Kennedys’ kept historian, published a thousand-page history of the thousand-day presidency without
mentioning
the assassin.
The transformation of a murder by a marginal man
into a killing by a sick culture began instantly — before Kennedy was
buried. The afternoon of the assassination, Chief Justice Earl Warren ascribed Kennedy’s “martyrdom” to “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” The next day, James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story
that Kennedy was a victim of a “streak of violence in the American
character,” noting especially “the violence of the extremists on the
right.”
Never mind that adjacent to Reston’s article was a Times report on Oswald’s Communist convictions and associations. A Soviet spokesman, too, assigned “moral responsibility” for Kennedy’s death to “Barry Goldwater and other extremists on the right.”
Three days after the assassination, a Times editorial, “Spiral of Hate,”
identified Kennedy’s killer as a “spirit”: The Times deplored “the
shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that
struck down” Kennedy. The editorialists were, presumably, immune to this
spirit. The new liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting
other people’s defects.
Hitherto a doctrine of American
celebration and optimism, liberalism would now become a scowling
indictment: Kennedy was killed by America’s social climate, whose
sickness required “punitive liberalism.” That phrase is from James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute, whose 2007 book “Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism” is a profound meditation on the reverberations of the rifle shots in Dealey Plaza.
The
bullets of Nov. 22, 1963, altered the nation’s trajectory less by
killing a president than by giving birth to a destructive narrative
about America. Fittingly, the narrative was most injurious to the
narrators. Their recasting of the tragedy in order to validate their
curdled conception of the nation marked a ruinous turn for liberalism,
beginning its decline from political dominance.
Punitive
liberalism preached the necessity of national repentance for a history
of crimes and misdeeds that had produced a present so poisonous that it
murdered a president. To be a liberal would mean being a scold.
Liberalism would become the doctrine of grievance groups owed redress
for cumulative inherited injuries inflicted by the nation’s tawdry
history, toxic present and ominous future.
Kennedy’s posthumous
reputation — Americans often place him, absurdly, atop the presidential
rankings — reflects regrets about might-have-beens. To reread Robert Frost’s banal poem written for Kennedy’s inauguration (“A golden age of poetry and power of which this noonday’s the beginning hour”)
is to wince at its clunky attempt to conjure an Augustan age from the
melding of politics and celebrity that the Kennedys used to pioneer the
presidency-as-entertainment.
Under Kennedy, liberalism began to
become more stylistic than programmatic. After him — especially after
his successor, Lyndon Johnson, a child of the New Deal, drove to
enactment the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid
— liberalism became less concerned with material well-being than with
lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual
freedom.
The bullets fired on Nov. 22, 1963, could shatter the
social consensus that characterized the 1950s only because powerful new
forces of an adversarial culture were about to erupt through society’s
crust. Foremost among these forces was the college-bound population
bulge — baby boomers with their sense of entitlement and moral
superiority, vanities encouraged by an intelligentsia bored by peace and
prosperity and hungry for heroic politics.
Liberalism’s disarray
during the late 1960s, combined with Americans’ recoil from liberal
hectoring, catalyzed the revival of conservatism in the 1970s. As
Piereson writes, the retreat of liberalism from a doctrine of American
affirmation left a void that would be filled by Ronald Reagan 17 years
after the assassination.
The moral of liberalism’s explanation of
Kennedy’s murder is that there is a human instinct to reject the fact
that large events can have small, squalid causes; there is an
intellectual itch to discern large hidden meanings in events. And
political opportunism is perennial.
If you doubt Will, read Robert F Kennedy's article at the Huffington Post from after the Gabby Giffords shooting: Tucson: Time for Another Examination of Conscience. Be sure to read the comments for some first-class revisionist history.
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