Who killed Kennedy? Earl Warren Got It Right.
An anonymous comment was sent to me accusing me of being a conspiracy theorist. He alleged that while I was on active duty, the Government placed a computer chip in my brain that caused me to think that everything that happened in America was as a result of a vast Right Wing conspiracy. Well, I beg to differ.
As implausible as it might appear at first glance, Admiral Van Sice had help in the court-martial of Cadet Webster Smith. Based on the size of the operation, I deem it a conspiracy. Not only do I hope that I am wrong, but I search the news and the media airwaves constantly for evidence that I could be wrong. I have asked myself as mister Oliver Cromwell was wont to ask the Presbyterians "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken".
Try as I might to dismiss the possibility that this was a serious conspiracy by members at the highest levels of the Coast Guard organization, I always come back to the same conclusions. It is no more impossible than the recent death-bed confession of the mastermind behind the John F. Kennedy assasination.
E. Howard Hunt and the CIA killed President John F. Kennedy.
LBJ and the CIA killed JFK.
On March 17, 1960, the Eisenhower administration agreed to a recommendation from the CIA to equip and drill Cuban exiles for action against the new Castro government. The CIA began to recruit and train anti-Castro forces in the Sierra Madre mountains on the Pacific coast of Guatemala. The CIA was initially confident that it was capable of overthrowing Castro, having experience assisting in the overthrow of other foreign governments such as the government of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954.
On February 17, 1961, John F. Kennedy, the new U.S. president, asked his advisors whether the toppling of Castro might be related to weapon shipments and if it was possible to claim the real targets were modern fighter aircraft and rockets which endangered America's security.
As President John F. Kennedy's plans evolved, critical details were changed that were to hamper chances of a successful mission without direct U.S. help.
The 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion was an unsuccessful attempted invasion by armed Cuban exiles in southwest Cuba. An attempt to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro, this action accelerated a rapid deterioration in Cuban-American relations, which was further worsened by the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. The CIA was initially confident that it was capable of overthrowing Castro. Aviation is commonly considered the deciding factor during the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
The failed Bay of Pigs invasion severely embarrassed the Kennedy administration. Many military leaders almost certainly expected the invasion to fail but thought that Kennedy would send in Marines to save the exiles. Kennedy, however, did not want a full scale war and abandoned the exiles.
E. Howard Hunt joined the CIA in 1949. Hunt was born in Hamburg, New York, United States. A 1940 graduate of Brown University, Hunt during World War II served in the U.S. Navy, United States Army Air Forces, and finally, the Office of Strategic Services
Hunt was assigned to create a provisional government to take over after the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The failure of that project damaged his career. Hunt was undeniably bitter about what he saw as President Kennedy's lack of spine in overturning the Castro regime. In his semi-fictional autobiography, Give Us this Day, he wrote: "The Kennedy administration yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island of Jose Marti, then moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue would simply melt away." (p.13-14)
The April 5, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone contained an extensive article on Hunt, based in large part on an interview with his eldest son St. John. It describes Hunt's alleged deathbed confessions of his supposed knowledge and indirect complicity in the JFK assassination. Among other things, the article claims that Hunt, in hand-written notes and a voice recording to St. John, implicated Lyndon B. Johnson, and CIA operator Cord Meyer as the key players in the JFK assassination conspiracy. According to Hunt's son, Hunt claimed the other assassin was a French gunman on the grassy knoll, often identified in other assassination theories as Lucien Sarti.
On the April 28th, 2007 edition of Coast to Coast AM hosted by Ian Punnett, an audio tape sent to St. John Hunt contained his father's January 2004 recounting of the persons who were involved in the Kennedy Assassination. In the tape, Hunt named Cord Meyer, Frank Sturgis, David Sánchez Morales, David Atlee Phillips as participants in the assassination with Vice-President Lyndon Johnson apparently approving the assassination for political gain.
The following is a transcript of Hunt's confession on the audio tape clip:I heard from Frank that LBJ had designated Cord Meyer, Jr. to undertake a larger organization while keeping it totally secret. Cord Meyer himself was a rather favorite member of the Eastern aristocracy. He was a graduate of Yale University and had joined the Marine Corps during the war and lost an eye in the Pacific fighting.
I think that LBJ settled on Meyer as an opportunist, parent—like himself a parent—and a man who had very little left to him in life ever since JFK had taken Cord's wife as one of his mistresses. I would suggest that Cord Meyer welcomed the approach from LBJ, who was after all only the Vice President at that time and of course could not number Cord Meyer among JFK's admirers—quite the contrary.
As for Dave Phillips, I knew him pretty well at one time. He worked for me during the Guatemala project. He had made himself useful to the agency in Santiago, Chile where he was an American businessman. In any case, his actions, whatever they were, came to the attention of the Santiago station chief and when his resume became known to people in the Western hemisphere division he was brought in to work on Guatemalan operations.
Sturgis and Morales and people of that ilk stayed in apartment houses during preparations for the big event. Their addresses were very subject to change, so that where a fellow like Morales had been one day, you'd not necessarily associated [sic] with that address the following day. In short, it was a very mobile experience.
Let me point out at this point, that if I had wanted to fictionalize what went on in Miami and elsewhere during the run up for the big event, I would have done so. But I don't want any unreality to tinge this particular story, or the information, I should say. I was a benchwarmer on it and I had a reputation for honesty.
I think it's essential to refocus on what this information that I've been providing you—and you alone, by the way—consists of. What is important in the story is that we've backtracked the chain of command up through Cord Meyer and laying [sic] the doings at the doorstep of LBJ. He, in my opinion, had an almost maniacal urge to become President. He regarded JFK, as he was in fact, an obstacle to achieving that. He could have waited for JFK to finish out his term and then undoubtedly a second term. So that would have put LBJ at the head of a long list of people who were waiting for some change in the executive branch.
A Las Vegas gambler Odds-maker would say that the odds against this are off the books. One of my life long worries has been that I would die without knowing with any degree of certainty who killed President John F. Kennedy (JFK) or Martin Luther King (MLK)!
Who killed JFK has been a durable source of wonder. Otherwise sane and responsible people openly declare themselves to be conspiracy theorists. This secret has survived in America’s imagination for almost 50 years to become an enduring element of or national culture.
Who killed JFK was more than a mystery; it was a secret. It was unknown to the majority of the people, but it was known to a small minority of people.
The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK, and that he did it alone. The problem with that scenario has always been that it just did not “fit”. It did not fit with the evidence of another shooter on the Grassy Knoll; it did not fit with the number of shots that Oswald was supposed to have gotten off from a bolt action rifle in six seconds, etc.
Did the Warren Commission perpetrate a hoax on the public? I think not.
Conspiracy theorists often point to a memorandum written by Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach three days after the assassination as a call for a top-level government coverup of a conspiracy. One passage from the memo reads:
The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial. The memo called for a full disclosure of the facts of the case. This is made clear in a passage the conspiracy books seldom quote:
It is important that all of the facts surrounding President Kennedy's Assassination be made public in a way which will satisfy people in the United States and abroad all that the facts have been told and a statement to this effect be made now.
For conspiracy theorists, the Warren Commission's endorsement of the Single Bullet Theory is close to treasonous.
Doubts about the Warren Commission's findings were not restricted to ordinary Americans. Well before 1978, President Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and four of the seven members of the Warren Commission all articulated, if sometimes off the record, some level of skepticism about the Commission's basic findings.
Three other U.S. government investigations have agreed with the Warren Commission's conclusion that two shots struck JFK from the rear: the 1968 panel set by Attorney General Ramsey Clark, the 1975 Rockefeller Commission, and the 1978-79 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which reexamined the evidence with the help of the largest forensics panel.
What was intended to be a document to ostensibly provide assurance in a time of national crisis ended up providing only further indication that the public could reasonably mistrust the highest levels of government. Rather than erase any doubts as to what really happened in the assassination of the president, the Warren Commission only provided more fuel to the fires of public mistrust.
Newly installed President Lyndon Baines Johnson, by Executive Order 11130 on November 29, 1963, created an investigatory commission to be headed by Earl Warren. He also called on the following political figures and told them that they would be members of the commission:
• Congressman Hale Boggs (D-LA)
• Senator John Sherman Cooper (R-KY)
• Former CIA Director Allen Dulles
• Congressman Gerald Ford (R-MI), a future Vice President and U.S. President
• Former World Bank president and diplomat John J. McCloy
• Senator Richard Russell, Jr. (D-GA)
J. Lee Rankin served as the commission's general counsel. Future Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter worked as an assistant counsel for the commission.
The report concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for the assassination of Kennedy and that the commission could not find any persuasive evidence of a conspiracy—either domestic or foreign—involving any other person(s), group(s), or country(ies). The theory that Oswald acted alone is informally called the lone gunman theory.
The Warren Commission Report's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone has withstood the test of time, and is more plausible than Howard Hunt's deathbed confession. The conspiracy theorists and Hunt's deathbed confession have a wanton and reckless disregard for the facts of the case. I am fairly certain that 99 per-cent of the American who tend to believe the conspiracy theories on the Kennedy Assination have not read one page of the Warren Commission's 26 volumes of Report.
I have encountered an untold number of good Americans prone to accept blatant lies, distortions, and ommission rather than the plain truth. The sheer volume of incontrovertible evidence pointing to Lee Harvey Oswald is too compelling to deny.
I firmly believe beyond a reasonable doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President J F Kennedy, and that he acted alone.
As implausible as it might appear at first glance, Admiral Van Sice had help in the court-martial of Cadet Webster Smith. Based on the size of the operation, I deem it a conspiracy. Not only do I hope that I am wrong, but I search the news and the media airwaves constantly for evidence that I could be wrong. I have asked myself as mister Oliver Cromwell was wont to ask the Presbyterians "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken".
Try as I might to dismiss the possibility that this was a serious conspiracy by members at the highest levels of the Coast Guard organization, I always come back to the same conclusions. It is no more impossible than the recent death-bed confession of the mastermind behind the John F. Kennedy assasination.
E. Howard Hunt and the CIA killed President John F. Kennedy.
LBJ and the CIA killed JFK.
On March 17, 1960, the Eisenhower administration agreed to a recommendation from the CIA to equip and drill Cuban exiles for action against the new Castro government. The CIA began to recruit and train anti-Castro forces in the Sierra Madre mountains on the Pacific coast of Guatemala. The CIA was initially confident that it was capable of overthrowing Castro, having experience assisting in the overthrow of other foreign governments such as the government of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954.
On February 17, 1961, John F. Kennedy, the new U.S. president, asked his advisors whether the toppling of Castro might be related to weapon shipments and if it was possible to claim the real targets were modern fighter aircraft and rockets which endangered America's security.
As President John F. Kennedy's plans evolved, critical details were changed that were to hamper chances of a successful mission without direct U.S. help.
The 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion was an unsuccessful attempted invasion by armed Cuban exiles in southwest Cuba. An attempt to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro, this action accelerated a rapid deterioration in Cuban-American relations, which was further worsened by the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. The CIA was initially confident that it was capable of overthrowing Castro. Aviation is commonly considered the deciding factor during the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
The failed Bay of Pigs invasion severely embarrassed the Kennedy administration. Many military leaders almost certainly expected the invasion to fail but thought that Kennedy would send in Marines to save the exiles. Kennedy, however, did not want a full scale war and abandoned the exiles.
E. Howard Hunt joined the CIA in 1949. Hunt was born in Hamburg, New York, United States. A 1940 graduate of Brown University, Hunt during World War II served in the U.S. Navy, United States Army Air Forces, and finally, the Office of Strategic Services
Hunt was assigned to create a provisional government to take over after the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The failure of that project damaged his career. Hunt was undeniably bitter about what he saw as President Kennedy's lack of spine in overturning the Castro regime. In his semi-fictional autobiography, Give Us this Day, he wrote: "The Kennedy administration yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island of Jose Marti, then moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue would simply melt away." (p.13-14)
The April 5, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone contained an extensive article on Hunt, based in large part on an interview with his eldest son St. John. It describes Hunt's alleged deathbed confessions of his supposed knowledge and indirect complicity in the JFK assassination. Among other things, the article claims that Hunt, in hand-written notes and a voice recording to St. John, implicated Lyndon B. Johnson, and CIA operator Cord Meyer as the key players in the JFK assassination conspiracy. According to Hunt's son, Hunt claimed the other assassin was a French gunman on the grassy knoll, often identified in other assassination theories as Lucien Sarti.
On the April 28th, 2007 edition of Coast to Coast AM hosted by Ian Punnett, an audio tape sent to St. John Hunt contained his father's January 2004 recounting of the persons who were involved in the Kennedy Assassination. In the tape, Hunt named Cord Meyer, Frank Sturgis, David Sánchez Morales, David Atlee Phillips as participants in the assassination with Vice-President Lyndon Johnson apparently approving the assassination for political gain.
The following is a transcript of Hunt's confession on the audio tape clip:I heard from Frank that LBJ had designated Cord Meyer, Jr. to undertake a larger organization while keeping it totally secret. Cord Meyer himself was a rather favorite member of the Eastern aristocracy. He was a graduate of Yale University and had joined the Marine Corps during the war and lost an eye in the Pacific fighting.
I think that LBJ settled on Meyer as an opportunist, parent—like himself a parent—and a man who had very little left to him in life ever since JFK had taken Cord's wife as one of his mistresses. I would suggest that Cord Meyer welcomed the approach from LBJ, who was after all only the Vice President at that time and of course could not number Cord Meyer among JFK's admirers—quite the contrary.
As for Dave Phillips, I knew him pretty well at one time. He worked for me during the Guatemala project. He had made himself useful to the agency in Santiago, Chile where he was an American businessman. In any case, his actions, whatever they were, came to the attention of the Santiago station chief and when his resume became known to people in the Western hemisphere division he was brought in to work on Guatemalan operations.
Sturgis and Morales and people of that ilk stayed in apartment houses during preparations for the big event. Their addresses were very subject to change, so that where a fellow like Morales had been one day, you'd not necessarily associated [sic] with that address the following day. In short, it was a very mobile experience.
Let me point out at this point, that if I had wanted to fictionalize what went on in Miami and elsewhere during the run up for the big event, I would have done so. But I don't want any unreality to tinge this particular story, or the information, I should say. I was a benchwarmer on it and I had a reputation for honesty.
I think it's essential to refocus on what this information that I've been providing you—and you alone, by the way—consists of. What is important in the story is that we've backtracked the chain of command up through Cord Meyer and laying [sic] the doings at the doorstep of LBJ. He, in my opinion, had an almost maniacal urge to become President. He regarded JFK, as he was in fact, an obstacle to achieving that. He could have waited for JFK to finish out his term and then undoubtedly a second term. So that would have put LBJ at the head of a long list of people who were waiting for some change in the executive branch.
A Las Vegas gambler Odds-maker would say that the odds against this are off the books. One of my life long worries has been that I would die without knowing with any degree of certainty who killed President John F. Kennedy (JFK) or Martin Luther King (MLK)!
Who killed JFK has been a durable source of wonder. Otherwise sane and responsible people openly declare themselves to be conspiracy theorists. This secret has survived in America’s imagination for almost 50 years to become an enduring element of or national culture.
Who killed JFK was more than a mystery; it was a secret. It was unknown to the majority of the people, but it was known to a small minority of people.
The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK, and that he did it alone. The problem with that scenario has always been that it just did not “fit”. It did not fit with the evidence of another shooter on the Grassy Knoll; it did not fit with the number of shots that Oswald was supposed to have gotten off from a bolt action rifle in six seconds, etc.
Did the Warren Commission perpetrate a hoax on the public? I think not.
Conspiracy theorists often point to a memorandum written by Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach three days after the assassination as a call for a top-level government coverup of a conspiracy. One passage from the memo reads:
The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial. The memo called for a full disclosure of the facts of the case. This is made clear in a passage the conspiracy books seldom quote:
It is important that all of the facts surrounding President Kennedy's Assassination be made public in a way which will satisfy people in the United States and abroad all that the facts have been told and a statement to this effect be made now.
For conspiracy theorists, the Warren Commission's endorsement of the Single Bullet Theory is close to treasonous.
Doubts about the Warren Commission's findings were not restricted to ordinary Americans. Well before 1978, President Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and four of the seven members of the Warren Commission all articulated, if sometimes off the record, some level of skepticism about the Commission's basic findings.
Three other U.S. government investigations have agreed with the Warren Commission's conclusion that two shots struck JFK from the rear: the 1968 panel set by Attorney General Ramsey Clark, the 1975 Rockefeller Commission, and the 1978-79 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which reexamined the evidence with the help of the largest forensics panel.
What was intended to be a document to ostensibly provide assurance in a time of national crisis ended up providing only further indication that the public could reasonably mistrust the highest levels of government. Rather than erase any doubts as to what really happened in the assassination of the president, the Warren Commission only provided more fuel to the fires of public mistrust.
Newly installed President Lyndon Baines Johnson, by Executive Order 11130 on November 29, 1963, created an investigatory commission to be headed by Earl Warren. He also called on the following political figures and told them that they would be members of the commission:
• Congressman Hale Boggs (D-LA)
• Senator John Sherman Cooper (R-KY)
• Former CIA Director Allen Dulles
• Congressman Gerald Ford (R-MI), a future Vice President and U.S. President
• Former World Bank president and diplomat John J. McCloy
• Senator Richard Russell, Jr. (D-GA)
J. Lee Rankin served as the commission's general counsel. Future Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter worked as an assistant counsel for the commission.
The report concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for the assassination of Kennedy and that the commission could not find any persuasive evidence of a conspiracy—either domestic or foreign—involving any other person(s), group(s), or country(ies). The theory that Oswald acted alone is informally called the lone gunman theory.
The Warren Commission Report's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone has withstood the test of time, and is more plausible than Howard Hunt's deathbed confession. The conspiracy theorists and Hunt's deathbed confession have a wanton and reckless disregard for the facts of the case. I am fairly certain that 99 per-cent of the American who tend to believe the conspiracy theories on the Kennedy Assination have not read one page of the Warren Commission's 26 volumes of Report.
I have encountered an untold number of good Americans prone to accept blatant lies, distortions, and ommission rather than the plain truth. The sheer volume of incontrovertible evidence pointing to Lee Harvey Oswald is too compelling to deny.
I firmly believe beyond a reasonable doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President J F Kennedy, and that he acted alone.
Labels: Believe It or Not.
posted by ichbinalj at 5:07 PM
6 Comments:
JFK Conspirator Wanted Every Kennedy Dead
E. Howard Hunt wanted to "finish the job" by killing Senator Ted Kennedy, greeted news of RFK's assassination with satisfaction.
JFK assassination conspirator E. Howard Hunt wanted to "finish the job" by killing Senator Ted Kennedy and greeted news of Robert Kennedy's murder with satisfaction , according to his son Saint John Hunt.
E. Howard Hunt was a former veteran CIA agent and one of the infamous Watergate plumbers, he died in January 2007.
Saint John Hunt recently went public with an audio tape containing his father's deathbed admission that he was part of a conspiracy to kill JFK that was orchestrated by Lyndon Baines Johnson. Hunt agreed that others above LBJ were involved in the plot.
Appearing on The Alex Jones Show yesterday, Hunt dropped new bombshell revelations about his father's role in the murder of JFK as well as intriguing insights into his attitude as a whole towards the Kennedy family.
One of the things he liked to say around the house was 'let's finish the job - let's hit Ted (Kennedy)'" said Hunt, referring to the 75-year-old Massachusetts Senator.
"In the context that JFK had already been removed, RFK was gone and his motto was 'let's finish the job'," added Hunt, elaborating that whenever Ted Kennedy appeared on TV or in the newspaper his father would smirk and wish to see him dead.
In addition, Saint John Hunt said that his father greeted the news of Bobby Kennedy's assassination with satisfaction.
He was glad that it happened, he felt no sadness," said Hunt, "the rest of the nation was in a deep state of horror, tragedy, shock, disbelief and sadness and my father was just very cold about it - he was very composed, he was certainly not disturbed by it."
"When the news came over the television, he was pleased - it was a good day for him - we grew up hating Kennedy so if this was one less Kennedy the country was going to have to deal with it was a good thing," added Hunt.
Hunt agreed that his father's description of his role in the plot to kill Kennedy as a "benchwarmer" meant that he wasn't one of the shooters but was intricately involved in the management aspects of the conspiracy.
Some have claimed that E. Howard Hunt couldn't have been involved at Dealy Plaza because he had alibis at the time that said he was at home at the time of the assassination.
"I don't have any recollection of my father being home that day," said Hunt, "I know he used his children as an alibi - I have a vivid recollection, school was closed and we were sent home where I waited in my house with my mother for what to do next."
"As far as my father going to a Chinese grocery store and picking up ingredients for a home cooked Chinese meal and having dinner with his children and watching television - that's not my recollection," said Hunt.
(By Paul Joseph Watson of The Prison Planet, Tuesday, May 15, 2007)
LADY BIRD JOHNSON, former first lady, born, Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson, the widow of former US President Lyndon B Johnson, has died at the age of 94.
Mrs Johnson - who was widely known as Lady Bird Johnson - died at her home in Austin, Texas, of natural causes, a spokeswoman said.
In 2002, Mrs Johnson had a stroke that affected her speech. Last month, she was briefly admitted to a hospital with a low-grade fever.
Her husband - who was the US president in 1963-1969 - died in 1973.
As first lady, Mrs Johnson was known as a tireless environmental campaigner.
She raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to beautify Washington, and the 1965 Highway Beautification Bill was known as the "Lady Bird bill".
Mrs Johnson was born in Karnack, Texas, which was the plantation home of her parents.
She studied journalism and art and graduated from the University of Texas in 1934. She married Mr Johnson later that year.
After leaving the White House, the couple returned to live in Austin.
7/11/07
In "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution," Jim Piereson argues The Fall of Liberalism 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.
"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.
The nation's opinion elite made JFK a martyr to civil rights instead of the Cold War. Kennedy had been killed by a communist, Lee Harvey Oswald, who a few years before had tried to defect to the Soviet Union. Liberals nonetheless blamed the assassination on, in the characteristic words of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, "the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots."
"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.
"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."
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.
The Vietnam War was seen through the prism of American malignancy established by the Kennedy assassination. This downbeat and adversarial disposition is -- more than any specific policy weaknesses on, say, national security -- a drag on contemporary liberalism's long-term appeal.
JFK has to be remembered, in Piereson's words, as "the last articulate spokesman for the now lost world of American liberalism."
At 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.
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