Camelot and the Cultural Revolution

How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism

James Piereson

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781594037436
• eBook ISBN: 9781594037542
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

James Piereson examines the bizarre aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination: Why in the years after the assassination did the American Left become preoccupied with conspiratorial thinking? How and why was Kennedy transformed in death into a liberal icon and a martyr for civil rights? In what way was the assassination linked to the collapse of mid-century liberalism, a doctrine which until 1963 was the reigning philosophy of the nation?

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2003). See also Barbara Leaming, Jack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006); Michael O’Brien, John F. Kennedy: A Biography (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2005); Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1997); Geoffrey Perret, Jack: A Life Like No Other (New York: Random House, 2001); Thomas C. Reeves, A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy (New York: Macmillan, 1991); and John Hellmann, The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

2 On Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, see, for example, Sarah Bradford, America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (New York: Penguin Books, 2000); C. David Heymann, A Woman Named Jackie (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1995); Christopher Andersen, Jackie after Jack: Portrait of the Lady (New York: William Morrow, 1998); Edward Klein, Just Jackie: Her Private Years (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998); John H. Davis, Jacqueline Bouvier: An Intimate Memoir (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996).

3 An ABC News poll in 2003 found that 22 percent of respondents believed that Oswald acted alone, while 70 percent said that a wider conspiracy was responsible. A Gallup Poll taken the same year placed the proportion believing in a conspiracy at 76 percent.

4 On Oswald’s anti-American outlook, see Norman Mailer, Oswald’s Tale (New York: Random House, 1997); and Jean Davison, Oswald’s Game (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1983), pp. 29–40, esp. pp. 38–39.

5 Arthur Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965); and Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Bantam Books, 1966). Other works of this genre include Paul B. Fay, The Pleasure of His Company (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); and Pierre Salinger, With Kennedy (New York: Doubleday, 1966).

6 Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 1031.

7 Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 35.

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ONE: LIBERALISM

1 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), p. 14.

2 Summaries of the Progressive point of view (especially the twin emphases on democracy and expertise) may be gleaned from several works of the period, especially: Walter Weyl, The New Democracy (New York; Macmillan, 1912).; Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909; New York: Capricorn Books, 1964); Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (1913; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).

3 Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, p. 18.

4 On the differences between Progressive and New Deal reform, see Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, ch. 7; and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), ch. 8.

5 For an insightful critique of postwar liberalism, see Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1965), ch. 9.

6 Schlesinger, The Vital Center, p. 182.

7 Ibid., ch. 6 .

8 Sen. Joseph McCarthy, “Enemies from Within,” speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, February 9 , 1950; reproduced at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6456/.

9 Quotation from Daniel Bell, “Interpretations of American Politics, 1955,” in The Radical Right, ed. Bell (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1963), p. 58.

10 Quoted in Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), p. 93.

11 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955).

12 On these points, see ibid., ch. 11.

13 Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1963). This volume was an expanded and updated version of The New American Right (Criterion Books, 1955).

14 Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” 1955, in The Radical Right, ed. Bell, p. 76. Hofstadter’s harsh treatment of American conservatism suggests why Clinton Rossiter subtitled his book on this subject (cited above), “The Thankless Persuasion.”

15 Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” p. 85.

16 Ibid., p. 83.

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17 Daniel Bell, “The Dispossessed,” in The Radical Right, ed. Bell, pp. 3–8.

18 On the subject of status and its link to radicalism, see Bell, “The Dispossessed”; and Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt.”

19 Bell, “The Dispossessed,” p.10.

20 Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965). The article originally appeared in Harper’s, October 1964, based on a lecture delivered at Oxford University in November 1963. For a more general discussion of Hofstadter’s thought, see David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

21 See Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, p. 37.

22 On Goldwater and the Republicans, see Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” p. 3.

23 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Random House, 1964).

24 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 1950s (New York: The Free Press, 1962), pp. 402–3. Bell’s argument drew heavily from an earlier suggestive essay by Edward Shils, “The End of Ideology,” Encounter, November 1955, pp. 52–58. The theme is also taken up in Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1963), ch. 13, “The End of Ideology?”

25 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931; New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1965). See also George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 2, My Country Right or Left, 1940–43, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston: David R. Godine, 2004), p. 259.

26 Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968; New York: Vintage Books, 1970), pp. 42–43.

27 Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little Brown, 1945). For a critique of Schlesinger’s interpretation of Jackson, see Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961).

28 Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians (first published by Random House, 1968).

29 See Peter Viereck, “The Revolt against the Elite,” in The Radical Right, ed. Bell, p. 169.

30 See Lasch, The New Radicalism in America.

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31 Ibid., p. 90.

32 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Anchor Books, 1950). Quotations cited are from the Preface, pp. xi–xii. On Trilling see also Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), pp. 219–29.

33 Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, p. xii.

TWO: KENNEDY

1 Kennedy’s approval rating was at 58 percent according to a Gallup Poll taken November 8–10, 1963.

2 Victor Lasky, J.F.K.: The Man and the Myth (New York: Macmillan, 1963). Lasky’s was the first comprehensive and critical study of Kennedy’s career. His book laid the foundation for subsequent Kennedy biographies. Kennedy was killed before he and his aides could mount a counter-campaign against the book. After the assassination, Lasky’s publisher withdrew the book from circulation. However, subsequent biographies by members of Kennedy’s inner circle, particularly Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days, can be read as official answers to th...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Foreword
• FOREWORD TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
• Introduction
• ONE · LIBERALISM
• TWO · KENNEDY
• THREE · MARTYR: LINCOLN
• FOUR · MARTYR: KENNEDY
• FIVE · CONSPIRACY
• SIX · ASSASSIN
• SEVEN · CAMELOT
• EIGHT · THE OLD LIBERALISM AND THE NEW
• Acknowledgments
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• Copyright Page