Who?
Posted on 11/21/2007 4:31:55 PM PST by forty_years
What's wrong with American liberalism? What happened to the self-assured, optimistic, and practical Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy? Why has Joe Lieberman, their closest contemporary incarnation, been run out of the party? How did anti-Americanism infect schools, the media, and Hollywood? And whence comes the liberal rage that conservatives like Ann Coulter, Jeff Jacoby, Michelle Malkin, and the Media Research Center have extensively documented?
In a tour de force, James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute offers an historical explanation both novel and convincing. His book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (Encounter), traces liberalism's slide into anti-Americanism back to the seemingly minor fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was neither a segregationist nor a cold warrior but a communist.
Here's what Piereson argues:
During the roughly forty years preceding the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963, progressivism/liberalism was the reigning and nearly only public philosophy; Kennedy, a realistic centrist, came out of an effective tradition that aimed, and succeeded, in expanding democracy and the welfare state.
In contrast, Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower lacked an intellectual alternative to liberalism and so merely slowed it down. The conservative "remnant" led by William F. Buckley, Jr. had virtually no impact on policy. The radical right, embodied by the John Birch Society, spewed illogical and ineffectual fanaticism.
Kennedy's assassination profoundly affected liberalism, Piereson explains, because Oswald, a New Left-style communist, murdered Kennedy to protect Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba from the president who, during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, brandished America's military card. Kennedy, in brief, died because he was so tough in the cold war. Liberals resisted this fact because it contradicted their belief system and, instead, presented Kennedy as a victim of the radical right and a martyr for liberal causes.
This political phantasm required two audacious steps. The first applied to Oswald:
With Oswald nearly deleted from the narrative, or even turned into a scapegoat, the ruling establishment – Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, and many others – proceeded to take a second, astonishing step. They blamed the assassination not on Oswald the communist but on the American people, and the radical right in particular, accusing them of killing Kennedy for his being too soft in the cold war or too accommodating to civil rights for American blacks. Here are just four of the examples Piereson cites documenting that wild distortion:
In this "denial or disregard" of Oswald's motives and guilt, Piereson locates the rank origins of American liberalism's turn toward anti-American pessimism. "The reformist emphasis of American liberalism, which had been pragmatic and forward-looking, was overtaken by a spirit of national self-condemnation."
Viewing the United States as crass, violent, racist, and militarist shifted liberalism's focus from economics to cultural issues (racism, feminism, sexual freedom, gay rights). This change helped spawn the countercultural movement of the late 1960s; more lastingly, it fed a "residue of ambivalence" about the worth of traditional American institutions and the validity of deploying U.S. military power that 44 years later remains liberalism's general outlook.
Thus does Oswald's malign legacy live on in 2007, yet harming and perverting liberalism, still polluting the national debate.
http://netwmd.com/blog/2007/11/21/2103
In case you don't know who James "Scotty" Reston was here's one description.
"When President Kennedy finished a difficult meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the first person he talked to was not one of his advisers, his vice president, or his wife. Walking out of the meeting, Kennedy spoke first with James B. Reston (1909-95). And so it was for president after president, from Truman through Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Reston was the most powerful, most admired, and most influential newspaper columnist America had ever seen, the best journalist of his time and perhaps of any time."
I just picked this link below because it was the first to show up, it comports with what I've learned elsewhere. Reston published details of the 1961 Kennedy disaster after the assassination.
Bay of Pigs + Khrushchev, Kennedy at Vienna in 1961 = Viet Nam.
Ceasar, beware the ides of March.
John, beware the ides of Texas.
That theory is as good as several others.
Many want desperately to put exactitude on an event that will never have it. You are right about that shot coming from the rear. But we cannot say that Oswald pulled the trigger, because others were involved. At best, we will never know. I happen to believe Oswald was a carefully set screen, given all of the facts as well as the shooting forensics.
I would omit him too!
I guess Vietnam was not pulling our fat out of the fire then.
I have to agree. I was 19 at the time of the assasination, and remember quite well the overall reaction to the sealing of the whitewash job. The anger rose quickly, and soon became random violence the like of which had not been seen in this country.
In what way did I omit him? I listed him first, and he was the worst. Viet Nam was his baby; they owned millions in Michelin stock, and that was why he escalated the war days after taking office.
There ARE space aliens among us!
Time to hit the hay!
Thanks for the good com.
This was a good thread, I learned a lot from it.
One, that I have another book to read.
Who?
Speaking of books, Blood, Money & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K. by Barr McCellan. Published several years ago.
I have heard several interviews with Mr. McClellan. I have not read the book. (Mr. McClellan was a lawyer in the Texas firm that handled LBJ personal stuff and such, if I remember correctly.) I became interested in the folks he writes about almost fifty years ago.
Because, "in 1961, Henry Marshall was found shot to death on his remote Texas farm. He had been shot five times with a .22 caliber rifle and, since the rifle was lying beside his body, the coroner had no problem coming up with the probable scenario: Suicide. The only problem was the type of rifle - it was a bolt-action . . . ."
Mr. Marshall had been investigating the shenanigans of Billie Sol Estes.
(Years later another suicide would affect me in the same manner, Vince Foster.)
I don't know if you are old enough to remember Billie Sol Estes, Bobby Baker, Mac Wallace, Lyndon Baines Johnson (Rasputin's evil twin), and more of course.
Well, after Estes served his prison term he talked. Mac Wallace murdered Mr. Marshall and many others. He talked and he talked.
I think Baker served about 18 months. There was a lot more to Baker than a measly 18 months paid for. Baker considered LBJ is closest friend. Indeed, as Senate Majority Leader LBJ depended upon Baker.
There was talk of no LBJ on the '64 ticket and there were these (and other) LBJ associates being pursued by the Kennedy DoJ.
After the assassination it seemed that these stories kind of faded from the news.
In those days there was no Internet and the "Fairness Doctrine" kept controversial topics off radio. There were however limited-circulation publications and still some conservative newspapers around the country. It was very difficult to find alternate news about LBJ.
Of course the "underground" press (Ramparts, East Village Other, Berkeley Barb) hated Johnson but mainly because he was fighting their Ho in Hanoi.
When LBJ entered Hell the Devil stood up out of respect.
That's what I thought until I read Gerald Posner's excellent and highly regarded Case Closed a few months ago. It'll change your mind. Oswald did it because he was a communist fruitloop. The conspiracy theories were put forward by leftists, especially early on. It's easy to see why: they didn't want a communist to get the blame.
Oswald may have been a ‘fruitloop,’ but the conspiracy is far beyond theory, and no leftist had anything to do with it. The assasination was due to the very same tyranny that has dogged the common man for a millenium, and it poked it’s head up again last week. It’s time to get your head out from under the bed and act on the facts while you can. Wait too long and it’ll be all hindsight.
Yeah, I hear you but I think you’re wrong. Posner’s arguments are very persuasive.
When Posner can offer explanations that ring true for things like agent Abraham Bolden getting framed, and convicted, for a crime he couldn’t have committed, to keep him from testifying before the Warren Commission, he will begin to have credibility. I don’t see that happening soon.
Read the new book “Blacklisted By History” a new, highly favorable bio of McCarthy (which the Moonbats hate with venom).
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