JFK's assassination (1963): Weigel pt. 1

From George Weigel's provocative essay in First Things on "six moments" from the 1960s that continue to have tremendous impact on today's politics and society.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy would be ninety years old today—a circumstance nearly impossible to imagine. When Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullets struck on November 22, 1963, the national memory of the thirty-fifth president was frozen in a kind of memorial amber. It’s hard enough to picture a sixty-year-old Kennedy as the proprietor of a great newspaper (a post-presidential career he was considering); it is simply impossible to conjure up images of him at ­seventy-five or ninety. He remains forever young in the national consciousness.

Do we understand why he died, though? In Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, James Piereson argues that the answer is, in the main, no. According to the Authorized Version of the Kennedy story advanced by biographers (and former Kennedy aides) Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy’s assassination was the by-product of a ­culture of violence that had infected the extreme American right wing. Right-wing paranoia about communism and civil-rights activism was abroad in the land, and this paranoia had turned the city of Dallas into a seething political madhouse. Something awful was likely to happen there, and it happened to John F. Kennedy, who had gone to Dallas to defend the politics of reason against the politics of irrational fear. Kennedy was martyred by unreason....

Schlesinger and Sorensen were not operating in a vacuum, of course. As Piereson usefully reminds us, they followed the lead of a mainstream media that bathed Kennedy’s assassination and Oswald’s subsequent murder in a torrent of introspection about an America fearful of the world, terrified of social change, and addicted to violence....

Yet certain stubborn facts remain, as Piereson points out: Lee Harvey Oswald was a convinced communist, a former defector to the Soviet Union, and a passionate supporter of Fidel Castro; the Kennedy administration was a sworn foe of Castro’s communist regime, had authorized the Bay of Pigs operation, and had negotiated the removal of Soviet IRBMs from Cuba, much to Castro’s chagrin. Hatred of Kennedy’s Cold War policies was Oswald’s motivation. John F. Kennedy was not a victim of the irrational American right wing; he was a casualty of the Cold War—a Cold War, Piereson reminds us, that he prosecuted vigorously, if not always wisely or successfully....

The Kennedy assassination was the event that ignited the firestorm in American political culture that we call the Sixties. Of course, some of the tinder was already there, waiting to be lit. A year before the president’s death, Students for a Democratic Society issued what would become a key text for the New Left, the Port Huron Statement. The Kennedy assassination seemed to confirm Port Huron’s lament for a generation’s lost political innocence: As Tom Hayden and his SDS colleagues put it, “What we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era.” With Kennedy dead, there were no answers left in the old pragmatic liberalism—hence the New Left’s loathing of two of the last standing pragmatic liberals, Hubert Humphrey and Henry M. Jackson (not to mention the New Left’s rabid hatred of the most legislatively successful liberal president in history, Lyndon Johnson)....

This rapid decline of the political imagination and discourse of the American left in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination led, in time, to another surprise: a reversal in the gravitational field of American political ideas. In 1949, Lionel Trilling, the literary embodiment of the old liberalism, deplored those American conservatives who “express themselves” only in “irritable gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Less than twenty years later, it was the New Left that embodied Trilling’s grim description, while a revitalized conservative movement was taking its first steps in developing the economic, cultural, social-­welfare, and foreign-policy ideas that would dominate American public life from 1980 through the attacks of September 11, 2001....