The Last Liberal

National Review's Rich Lowry discusses Jim Piereson’s new book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution.

 the assassination of President Kennedy represented the descent of liberalism from an optimistic creed focused on pragmatic improvements in the American condition to a darker philosophy obsessed with America's sins—echoes that can still be heard in the querulous tones of contemporary liberalism.

 the real John F. Kennedy, though a liberal, did not want anyone to tag him as such. He was also vigorously anti-communist, a tax-cutter and a cautious supporter of civil rights.

 the nation's opinion elite made the "tough and realistic" Kennedy—liberal in the tradition of FDR and Truman—into a martyr to civil rights instead of the Cold War. Thus, the assassination curdled into an indictment of American society. Until that point, 20th-century liberalism had tended to see history as a steady march of progress.

 Kennedy’s assassination turned American history into a twisted story of rapine and oppression. "With such a bill of indictment," Piereson writes, "the new liberals now held that Americans had no good reason to feel pride in their country's past or optimism about its future."

 the left developed ambivalence about national power, in which the old liberal reformers had placed such faith. The Vietnam War was seen through the prism of American malignancy established by the Kennedy assassination. That makes Kennedy, in Piereson's words, "the last articulate spokesman for the now lost world of American liberalism."