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Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism

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James Pierson convincingly argues that a deceitful left wing campaign turned John F. Kennedy's death into a martyrdom on behalf of fighting racism. This was the exact opposite of the truth. Kennedy was first, last, and foremost an opponent of Communism. He was, at best, mildly interested in racial integration. This unjust situation could not be allowed to become our number one priority. We were perceived to be in an existential fight to the death against Communist totalitarianism. We had to make sure our priorities were kept straight. A committed pro-Castro Marxist, Lee Harvey Oswald, and not a reactionary racist murdered Kennedy. Our national sins had nothing to do with it. Regrettably, however, a large majority of Americans bought into this con game perpetuated by the Communists and their fellow travelers---and some very well meaning individuals close to the assassinated president. Jacqueline Kennedy, adds the author, unwittingly did enormous damage. These efforts to distort the truth resulted in pervasive American self-hating by many members of the Democratic Party. Our nation is allegedly vile and a real threat to peace on this planet. We should be deeply ashamed of ourselves. How could we legitimately oppose Communist tyranny when the United States itself is so morally bankrupt?

Is the author exaggerating even slightly? No, he is not. The Democrats today are among our biggest obstacles in the current struggle against worldwide Islamic nihilism. They are inclined towards national suicide and have even essentially excommunicated Connecticut U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman from their ranks. You should immediately order James Pierson's book. Understanding the mindset of these self-hating Democrats is mandatory. Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism must be on your summer reading list. It is that important of a book.

There are no guarantees when buying books. We often eagerly anticipate a release hoping it will be a classic but soon discover that it belongs on the ash heap of history alongside the collected works of Marx, recordings of the Back Street Boys, and every single movie featuring Madonna. Occasionally however, we unfurl a package and find that its contents widely exceed our expectations. One such work is James Piereson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism.

Whatever the angle or line of rumor, the one thing for certain is that a sizable plurality of Americans agree that Oswald was who he said he was...just a pawn in the game. Piereson's text dispassionately, but skillfully, refutes this thesis. In one of his strongest chapters, "Assassin," he reexamines the facts of Oswald's life. To say that his case history lacks nuance is an understatement. The man who liquidated our 35th President was a diehard Marxist and anything but a shill for the military. Oswald's acceptance of Marxism came in 1953 after he was handed a bill advocating clemency for the Rosenbergs. His allegiance to communism meant, as it does for so many angry radicals, that this alienated and troubled young man would no longer be alone.

The infamous gunman had nothing but contempt for American history and its institutions. He hated the radical right and attempted to kill segregationist, General Edwin A. Walker, six months before he trained his sights on Kennedy. Oswald went to the Soviet Union to savor the worker's paradise but found a bureaucratic nightmare instead. He returned, albeit begrudgingly, to his homeland. The FBI's refusal to take him seriously was a disgrace and a testament to their incompetence; while the media's refusal to consider the possible significance of his visits to the Cuban and Soviet embassies [in Mexico] is a testament to their bias. That he conferred with KGB agent Valeriy Kostikov a few months before taking aim should be of interest to anyone in pursuit of the truth.

Why did Oswald do it? Mr. Piereson's explanation resonates far more than the conspiracies contaminating our public square. His purpose was to get the attention of Fidel Castro and also to preserve the life of the dictator. The Cuban Marxist was the last leader for whom Mr. Oswald had any faith. After he threatened the president in a 1963 interview, the deluded and alienated communist may have interpreted his words in the same manner as King Henry II's deputies. Oswald happily answered the question, "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" by stepping forth to the window of the book depository in Dallas.

By itself, reminding the world of who Oswald actually was is an important achievement, but it is just one of the many rejuvenating and provocative arguments elucidated in Camelot and the Cultural Revolution. His discussion of "punitive liberalism" is potent and completely transferable to the present day. The practitioners of this school deem America--in lieu of its historical crimes--as a land and country in need of punishment. The founding of the new world coincided with slavery, the death of hordes of Indians, and, eventually, the internment of Japanese citizens during the Second World War. The punitive liberal believes that we deserve a comeuppance for what we have done.

Piereson destroys this emotive reasoning with aplomb. Blaming America for the slaughter of the Kennedy brothers is entirely irrational. The punitive liberal hates everything about his homeland, but becomes outraged whenever this is pointed out to him. For some reason, conservatives allow the left to frame the debate on this issue. Many timidly retreat from coming out and saying that left is unpatriotic. This is puzzling because their anti-Americanism is blatantly obvious. When they gaze at Old Glory "jingoism and vengeance and war" come to mind.

Mr. Piereson's concise account is a tour de force and not merely a historical study. It is a theoretical work which increases our understanding of both the past and present. Of a book we can ask for nothing more.

This book is assuredly a must read, especially for any conservative looking for ammunition against the "Left." However, it would serve equally well any person, regardless of political persuasion. What makes this book invaluable is that it accomplishes, in a mere 211 pages, to elucidate likely every key fact that is directly related to the Kennedy assassination. As a result, any "debunking" of conspiracy theories is the product of how the reader perceives the facts of the case as set forth by Piereson. He is especially effective at making use of the opinions of liberals from the '60s to bolster his point; for example, why would a big liberal like Earl Warren fabricate a report that implicated a communist in the death of Kennedy, when other liberals disregarded the facts and suspected a right-wing consipracy? In other words, a reader can apply simple logic in analyzing the facts, and conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald was almost surely the assassin.

With regard to the "liberal crackup" aspect of the book, Piereson dances around a thorough assessment of this until the end, although he peppers every chapter with references of how liberals of the day misinterpreted the national attitude as well as the facts of the case. When he puts the final nail in the coffin of New Liberalism, at book's end, the reader is thoroughly convinced. Still, the book ends on a positive note (for those not of conservative persuasion). Piereson notes that neoconservatives (Irving and William Kristol and the like) have reignited the tradition liberals abandoned in favor of a more irrational liberalism. One may be familiar with Irving Kristol's statement that a neoconservative is "a liberal that has been mugged by reality," and thus we can take comfort that all pre-60s liberal progress has not been completely lost. For those who are currently members of the Left, perhaps you should reevaluate your core principles, because you may find that you are part of that clique just because it is "cool." After all, as Piereson asserts, this irrational movement would likely not have come about if not for Kennedy's assassination.

Further reading:
Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, by Douglas Murray.

Nearly half a century after President Kennedy's death in Dallas, it's time to remind people just who Lee Harvey Oswald was, what he did,and how what happened on Elm Street that day has affected the entire course of American politics. James Pierson has done just that with a brilliant analysis of the Kennedy Assassination -- the event that, more than any other, drove the American Left completely off the deep end.

If it was hard to imagine that a little man like Oswald could have brought down JFK, it has been impossible for many to wrap their minds around who Oswald really was: a self-proclaimed Marxist who defected to the Soviet Union, married a Russian girl, was "allowed" to return to the U.S. with his wife in tow (the KGB would have had to approve her exit visa), took a shot at a right-wing general, agitated on behalf of Fidel Castro, tried to re-defect to the USSR via its embassy in Mexico City (which then as now was the KGB's chief station in the western hemisphere), was denied, returned to Dallas, learned of Kennedy's motorcade route, brought his rifle to work, and killed the president with a classic three-shot group: miss, hit, kill.

In the aftermath of the assassination, President Johnson was hysterical at the thought that the Soviets had deliberately sent a "Manchurian Candidate" back to the U.S. to kill the president, as declassified conversations between LBJ and FBI director Hoover make abundantly clear. It was a question LBJ didn't want the answer to, for obvious reasons: if the Soviets had assassinated the American president, we would have to retaliate. And so, in part, the myth was born that Kennedy was killed due to the "climate of hate" in Dallas in the fall of 1963 -- a myth the Left has clung to ever since.

I know whereof I speak: in researching my first novel, "Exchange Alley," I spent a month at the National Archives, working with the JFK Assassination files. If you'd like a fictional take on the assassination, please check it out. But, by all means, buy this book for yourself and all your friends.

This is a book I cannot recommend highly enough. Not only is its central thesis well and convincingly argued - that Kennedy's assassination proved to be the catalyst for a dramatic leftward shift in American liberalism in general, and in the democratic party in particular; that this New Left embraced an often anti-American political philosophy and worldview; and that this philosophy and worldview were actually squarely in opposition to the views of John F. Kennedy, a man this New Left (rather ironically in light of his actual views) came to regard as its martyr. But Mr. Piereson also writes in a clear, concise, highly readable style that makes it difficult to put this book down. Moreover, Piereson's thesis also explains the apparent immortality and widespread acceptance of the conspiracy theories surrounding JFK's assassination.

Fittingly, Piereson begins by explaining what some of Kennedy's actual views, and the actual policies and programs he promoted were, and thus reminds us that Kennedy, far from being a liberal in the current popular use of the term (like his recently deceased youngest brother Edward Kennedy), was actually a moderate with some views that would today be classed as fiscally conservative (and indeed some of his policies were later adopted by conservatives), as well as a truly ardent cold warrior, whose hawkish stance on anti-communism and national defense would also be embraced by conservatives. Also, while JFK was generally liberal in his views on civil rights, support of labor unions, and some other matters, these views were not extreme in him, and his support for some liberal causes, such as desegregation for example, was cautious, since he feared alienating democrats in the South, and thus imperiling his ability to accomplish things in the areas which really were priorities for him. Given these facts about the man, it's rather ironic that John F. Kennedy was posthumously made into a martyr for the civil rights movement, and a symbol for late 20th century liberalism.

Piereson argues convincingly that Kennedy was recast in this image after his death, by liberals trying to come to terms with his assassination and the way it challenged some of their most deeply held core assumption about the United States and its society. Liberals had long regarded the right as paranoid for its insistence on the danger that communism represented, not just as a foreign threat, but also as a domestic one. The true danger to American society, they had always believed very deeply, was not from communism, but from the right's overreaction to communism. McCarthyism, for example, was regarded as far more dangerous to the American way of life than communism ever was (and to be fair, they were certainly not entirely wrong in this either.) With JFK dead at the hands of a communist, however, suddenly those on the right looked a lot less paranoid and extreme in their views, and liberals were confronted with the uncomfortable possibility that they hadn't judged matters as well as they had thought. This is the seed of the subsequent remaking of JFK into a liberal martyr of the civil rights movement, and victim of the hateful, bigoted elements of American society.

It wasn't that liberals cynically and opportunistically tried to exploit JFK's death in order to advance their agenda (though there may have been some cynical enough to do this - Lyndon Johnson comes to mind), it was merely that JFK's assassination at the hands of a pathetic, maladjusted nobody like Lee Harvey Oswald, who was also an ardent, dyed-in-the-wool Marxist, so completely shook their core assumptions, that deep down, on a fundamental level, many of them just couldn't accept it. If Oswald shot Kennedy, and Oswald was a communist acting from ideological motives, then it followed that communism was the cause behind the assassination, and maybe they hadn't taken this threat seriously enough. No, it just had to be something else. It HAD to be! And then they started looking for what that something else was.

Jackie Kennedy, in the immediate aftermath, was perhaps the first to express this perception of things, saying, upon learning of Oswald's arrest: "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little communist. It even robs his death of any meaning." She had earlier assumed that it was right wing reactionaries, responding to suggestions that she change out of her bloodstained clothes for the cameras "No, I want them to see what they've done." "They" were the forces of right wing reaction who had opposed desegregation, founded the John Birch Society, and other things. Then, within days, the editorials and commentaries began to appear, casting Kennedy as the victim of a current of rage and hatred in American society. NY Times columnist James Reston weighed in with a piece titled "Why America Weeps: Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation." Two days later, he added an article titled "A Portion of Guilt for All," in which he wrote that there was a "rebellion in the land against law and good faith," and laid the blame for JFK's murder at its feet. Martin Luther King Jr. said that JFK's death had to be seen against a background of violence in the South in reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. Numerous commentaries and eulogies picked up this theme, and before very long, it was accepted wisdom. John F. Kennedy was a victim of a streak of anger, bigotry, hatred, and revanchism that deeply corrupted American society.

But how does one square this interpretation of events with the fact that JFK was apparently killed by a single man whose life story shows with abundant clarity that he was very, very far from representative of American society? Well, really you can't, so it must follow, must it not, that someone or something else was behind all this? Oh Oswald was involved, certainly, the evidence makes that clear. But there must have been someone else. He didn't act alone. In fact, it's not too far a jump from here to making Oswald just a pawn in a greater conspiracy. And that's precisely what happened, and today, a majority of American's believe it.

But this interpretation of JFK's death had another unintended consequence as well, and one that's far darker. If, after all, the nation itself were in some way responsible for Kennedy's murder, then a mood of punishment and chastisement was a more appropriate attitude to take toward that nation than the mood of self-confidence and optimism that had prevailed up to that time. If American values are in fact so deeply corrupted that they led to the slaying of so noble and idealistic a leader, who was trying to make the country a better, freer, more just nation, then does it not make sense to reject those values? Why would one embrace or defend a society that is so polluted and so rotten? And many of the liberals who had had their assumptions so badly shaken asked this very question, and began to drift toward radical, even anti-American views. And since many suspect the CIA, or other elements of the U.S. government itself, of being involved, does it not follow that our country's government is deeply corrupt, and highly untrustworthy? And if this is the case, it might lead you to a whole new view of American policy in general -- a view in which this corrupt, untrustworthy government seldom if ever acts from good or admirable motives (and is this not precisely how the far left today does think of America)? And to this trend Piereson attributes the rise of the New Left, whom he names punitive liberals, many of whom were among those who grieved most deeply for Kennedy, and then went on, in another great irony, to embrace views which were deeply antithetical to those of the slain president himself, but sometimes quite close, ideologically, to those of the man who had murdered him.

This is Piereson's thesis. And he argues for it so persuasively, and with so many detailed notes and references, that I do believe he has produced a remarkable and accurate work of scholarship that elegantly explains both the anti-American current so evident in modern liberalism, as well as the durability of conspiracy theories about JFK's assassination. This is a book that should be in anyone's library.

Even though it happened four decades ago, the Kennedy Assassination still holds heavy weight on today's America. "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism"discusses the far reaching aspects of President Kennedy's assassination, and how Lee Harvey Oswald's merciless bullets shattered the progressive momentum that America had for the first half of the century. The aftereffects of the assassination continue to hold modern liberalism at a strange place to this day. An intriguing and fascinating dissection of the past forty-five years of liberal politics, "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution" is a scholarly and intriguing read, enthusiastically recommended.

Camelot and the Cultural Revolution is a solid, although problematic work. The book's strength is its exploration of the reactions to and myths surrounding Kennedy's death. Pierson's comparison of the Lincoln and Kennedy assignations is particularly insightful. He guides the reader through the often-contradictory opinions on the tragedy and equips them to make further explorations on their own. Pierson's argument, while interesting and supported by some evidence, is ultimately unconvincing. While he does prove that the Kennedy assignation was an important step in the death of American optimism, he fails to prove that "This was the moment, if there was a particular moment" (vii). Patterson's argument that the cultural consensus died after repeated blows and ultimately succumbed to a failing economy (Grand Expectations ix) is far more convincing. The highly speculative nature of Piereson's argument is its greatest weakness. In a single paragraph, he uses the phrase "may have" five times and the phrase "must have" once (154). In spite of its problems, this is a very interesting book that makes a powerful case for the power of myth in American society, because, at least in Piereson's view, this is a moment in history when flawed perceptions shaped reality and the myth of a slain race crusader was more powerful than the reality of a cold warrior's battlefield death.

Over the years, I have heard many Left-wing people explain that it was the Kennedy assassination of 1963 that destroyed their faith in the system, and radicalized their politics. In this fascinating book, author and political thinker James Piereson examines the mythology that surrounds the Kennedy administration, how it was created, and the strange, unhinging effect it had on the American Left.

This book came highly recommend to me, and I can see why. The author does an excellent job of showing how we got from the intelligent Left of the immediate post-War era to the loony Left of today. In the 50s, the loonies were on the Right, finding Communists under their beds, and fighting such devious plots as fluoride in the water. And now we have Fahrenheit 911 and Leftists seeing a "vast Republican-wing conspiracy." Want to know how we got here? Then read this book and find out!

The premise of this work is that while assasinating President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald put American liberalism in its grave. The contortions that liberals had to go through to avoid the idea that their hero had been killed by a communist transformed them, in the end, from the optimistic, future oriented people they were in 1963 to the hateful and hating maniacs that they are today. The irony is that if JFK were to be brought back to life today, he would shortly be drummed out of the modern, Democrat Party.

Length:: 7:11 Mins

Few individuals know the political left better than James Piereson. What a magnificent job he does here in outlining the dysfunction of our foes. The Democratic Party is a plague and they began morphing into the calamity they now are after the death of JFK.