She
thought it robbed his death of any meaning. But a meaning would be quickly
manufactured to serve a new politics. First, however, an inconvenient fact —
Oswald — had to be expunged from the story. So, just 24 months after the
assassination, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Kennedys’ kept historian, published a thousand-page history of the thousand-day presidency without mentioning the
assassin.
Three
days after the assassination, a Times editorial, “Spiral of Hate,” identified
Kennedy’s killer as a “spirit”: The Times deplored “the shame all America must
bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down” Kennedy. The
editorialists were, presumably, immune to this spirit. The new
liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people’s defects.
The bullets
of Nov. 22, 1963, altered the nation’s trajectory less by killing a president
than by giving birth to a destructive narrative about America. Fittingly, the
narrative was most injurious to the narrators. Their recasting of the tragedy
in order to validate their curdled conception of the nation marked a ruinous
turn for liberalism, beginning its decline from political dominance.
Punitive
liberalism preached the necessity of national repentance for a history of
crimes and misdeeds that had produced a present so poisonous that it murdered a
president. To be a liberal would mean being a scold. Liberalism would become
the doctrine of grievance groups owed redress for cumulative inherited injuries
inflicted by the nation’s tawdry history, toxic present and ominous future.
Kennedy’s
posthumous reputation — Americans often place him, absurdly, atop the
presidential rankings — reflects regrets about might-have-beens. To reread Robert Frost’s banal poem written for Kennedy’s inauguration (“A golden age of poetry and power of which this noonday’s the beginning hour”) is to wince at
its clunky attempt to conjure an Augustan age from the melding of politics and
celebrity that the Kennedys used to pioneer the presidency-as-entertainment.
Under
Kennedy, liberalism began to become more stylistic than programmatic. After him
— especially after his successor, Lyndon Johnson, a child of the New Deal,
drove to enactment the Civil Rights Act , Medicare and Medicaid — liberalism
became less concerned with material well-being than with lifestyle and cultural
issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom.
The
bullets fired on Nov. 22, 1963, could shatter the social consensus that
characterized the 1950s only because powerful new forces of an adversarial
culture were about to erupt through society’s crust. Foremost among these
forces was the college-bound population bulge — baby boomers with their sense
of entitlement and moral superiority, vanities encouraged by an intelligentsia
bored by peace and prosperity and hungry for heroic politics.
Liberalism’s
disarray during the late 1960s, combined with Americans’ recoil from liberal
hectoring, catalyzed the revival of conservatism in the 1970s. As Piereson
writes, the retreat of liberalism from a doctrine of American affirmation left
a void that would be filled by Ronald Reagan 17 years after the assassination.
The
moral of liberalism’s explanation of Kennedy’s murder is that there is a human
instinct to reject the fact that large events can have small, squalid causes;
there is an intellectual itch to discern large hidden meanings in events. And
political opportunism is perennial.