Camelot Interupted

the assassination curdled into an indictment of American society: "Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation," read a New York Times headline. Until this point, 20th-century liberalism had tended to see history as a steady march of progress. Now, the march had been interrupted by the country's own pathologies. "Kennedy was mourned in a spirit of frustrated possibility and dashed hopes," Piereson argues, and that sense of loss came to define the new liberalism.

American history no longer appeared to be a benign process, but 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."

Their agenda took on a punitive edge, focused on compensating victim groups and expiating the country's guilt.

The left developed ambivalence about national power, in which the old liberal reformers had placed such faith. In the paranoid theories that sprang up in the wake of Kennedy's assassination - many of them to avoid the simple, uncongenial fact that a lone communist had killed the president - the seat of American government had been the locus of a secret plot to kill JFK. The conspiracy theories and anti-Americanism that had so appalled liberals about the far right in the 1950s had now gravitated to the left.

Bizarrely, after a liberal hero was slain by a Marxist, communist icons and ideas became more fashionable on the left than ever before.