DesertFox
08-05-2007, 06:58 PM
Rich Lowry
From a distance of nearly 50 years, the liberalism of 1960 is hardly recognizable. It was comfortable with the use of American power abroad, unabashedly patriotic, and forward-looking. But that was before The Fall.
In his eye-opening new book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, Jim Piereson argues The Fall was the assassination of President Kennedy. It represented more than the tragic death of a young president, but the descent of liberalism from an optimistic creed focused on pragmatic improvements in the American condition to a darker philosophy obsessed with America’s sins. Echoes of the assassination — and the meaning attributed to it by JFK’s admirers — can still be heard in the querulous tones of contemporary liberalism.
The real John F. Kennedy wasn’t the paladin of liberal purity of myth. He was friends with Joseph McCarthy. In his 1952 campaign for Senate and his 1960 presidential campaign, he got to the right of his Republican opponents on key issues. “Kennedy did not want anyone to tag him as a liberal, which he regarded as the kiss of death in electoral politics,” Piereson writes. As president, he was vigorously anti-communist, a tax-cutter and a cautious supporter of civil rights.
His kind of liberalism — “tough and realistic,” as Piereson puts it, in the tradition of FDR and Truman — was carried away in the riptide of his death.
More (http://author.nationalreview.com/latest/?q=MjE1NQ==)
From a distance of nearly 50 years, the liberalism of 1960 is hardly recognizable. It was comfortable with the use of American power abroad, unabashedly patriotic, and forward-looking. But that was before The Fall.
In his eye-opening new book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, Jim Piereson argues The Fall was the assassination of President Kennedy. It represented more than the tragic death of a young president, but the descent of liberalism from an optimistic creed focused on pragmatic improvements in the American condition to a darker philosophy obsessed with America’s sins. Echoes of the assassination — and the meaning attributed to it by JFK’s admirers — can still be heard in the querulous tones of contemporary liberalism.
The real John F. Kennedy wasn’t the paladin of liberal purity of myth. He was friends with Joseph McCarthy. In his 1952 campaign for Senate and his 1960 presidential campaign, he got to the right of his Republican opponents on key issues. “Kennedy did not want anyone to tag him as a liberal, which he regarded as the kiss of death in electoral politics,” Piereson writes. As president, he was vigorously anti-communist, a tax-cutter and a cautious supporter of civil rights.
His kind of liberalism — “tough and realistic,” as Piereson puts it, in the tradition of FDR and Truman — was carried away in the riptide of his death.
More (http://author.nationalreview.com/latest/?q=MjE1NQ==)