Off the Rails

Edward Driscoll interviews James Piereson about his new book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism:

The shock that Kennedy was in reality a victim of the Cold War simply did not compute on a national level. This was in stark contrast to the narrative that framed the death of Abraham Lincoln a century prior. “When Booth shot Lincoln, everybody knew that Booth was a southern partisan, and they could easily understand why he wanted to kill Lincoln,” Piereson says. “Northerners blamed the south for this, and you assimilate it into the moral framework of the Civil War.”

In contrast, “Liberals had great difficulty assimilating this idea that a communist would kill Kennedy. It made sense to them that an anti-civil rights person might do it, or an anti-communist might do it, but not a communist.”

But that’s exactly who Oswald was, having defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and then spending two and a half years there, and attempting to denounce his American citizenship along the way. Piereson says that his April 1963 attempt to kill Edwin Walker, former army general, anti-civil rights leader, and head of the John Birch Society in Texas says much about Oswald as well. In addition to his anti-civil rights action, Walker also gave frequent speeches calling for the overthrow of Castro. Piereson believes that Oswald’s attempt to kill Walker sheds light on why he killed Kennedy: his policies towards Cuba and his leading the nation’s other Cold War actions of the time.

“However, that is not how the Kennedy assassination was interpreted,” Piereson says, with enormous understatement. Instead, a sense of collective guilt is imposed on the nation through its liberal elites and media. “And this is really the first time that you get on the liberal-left this idea that America is guilty. But this however now becomes a metaphor for the left for everything that happens moving on in the 1960s.”

This is a little out of the realm of economics, but I have always been fascinated by the theories (both conspiratorial and otherwise) regarding the death of JFK.