Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism by James Piereson

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It has now been more than forty years since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the streets of Dallas on November 22, 1963. No event in the post-war era-- not even the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has cast such a long shadow over our national life. The murder of the handsome and vigorous president shocked the nation to its core, and shook the faith of many Americans in their institutions and way of life. The repercussions from that event continue to be felt down to the present day. Looking back, it is now clear that Kennedy's death marked a historical crossroads after which point events began to move in surprising and destructive directions.

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CAMELOT AND THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

Encounter Books

Chapter One

As the 1960s began, liberalism was without doubt the single most creative and vital force in American politics. The liberal movement was riding a wave of accomplishment running back to the Progressive era through the New Deal and into the postwar period. John F. Kennedy, the new representative of this tradition, had just been elected to the presidency, and though there were many doubts as to the depth of his commitment to liberal doctrine, there was little doubt that his administration would advance the still unfinished agenda of liberal reform. Liberalism owned the future, as Orwell might have said, which is to say that liberals looked ahead to a future defined by their ideas of progress through the expansion of democracy and the welfare state. They assumed that the United States would play a decisive role in the world in spreading these hopes and expectations to other lands. By the end of the decade, however, liberal doctrine was in disarray, with many of its central assumptions broken by the experience of the preceding years. It is still trying to recover.

The assassination of a liberal president, along withthe circumstances surrounding his death, challenged the assumptions of postwar liberalism as no other event could have done. It brought up, for example, the disquieting political question (raised just a few years earlier by Daniel Bell) as to whether the conventional reform agenda-either of the Progressive or the New Deal variety-was sufficiently compelling to give meaning to liberal politics or to public life generally. Conventional reform appears prosaic unless joined with a sense of historical movement that gives it broader meaning, purpose, and importance. It was commonly said, for example, that reform was a means of perfecting our democratic heritage or of delivering to everyone the promise of American life. Yet in many ways Kennedy's death severed the ties between reform and the idea of historical progress. Reform seemed to point in one direction: toward more hope, more democracy, and more justice and equality in American life; but Kennedy's death pointed in quite another: that is, toward a sense that public life is out of control or subject to direction by conspiracies or crazed individuals. Kennedy's assassination was so shocking and unexpected that to many it made the reform agenda seem small, insignificant, and meaningless.

This confusion was compounded by the peculiar character of postwar liberalism, which supplied the script, as it were, for the interpretation of Kennedy's presidency and his untimely death. By virtue of the doctrines and ideas they had absorbed, liberal Americans, and especially liberal intellectuals, were wholly unprepared to understand or to interpret Kennedy's assassination. Liberal thinkers in the postwar era were convinced that liberalism provided the only rational doctrine of progress available to the American people. At the same time, they were equally convinced that liberalism was under siege by irrational and atavistic elements in the American polity that would roll back the liberal achievements of previous generations. Kennedy's death, and the way it happened, had a shattering effect on this outlook.

Postwar liberalism, because of the new political context in which it operated, took on a somewhat different tone and emphasis from the Progressive and New Deal movements that preceded it. During the decade of the 1950s, thoughtful liberals came to understand that for the first time they represented the political establishment in the United States. Liberals had been in power for the two eventful decades from 1933 to 1953, and to them went the credit for the domestic experiments of the New Deal, the subsequent victory over fascism in World War II, and the creation of the postwar international order. Liberalism, as a consequence of these achievements, had earned the designation as the public philosophy of the nation. Even Republican leaders, like Dewey, Eisenhower, and Nixon, were obliged to accept the liberal framework of ideas, albeit with the hedge that they could carry it out with greater efficiency. The reformers and critics of the previous generation were now insiders placed in the position of defending their status and the achievements of their movement.

Liberalism, a doctrine of reform, thus began to absorb some of the intellectual characteristics of conservatism-a due regard for tradition and continuity, a sense that progress must be built on the solid achievements of the past, an awareness of the threat of Soviet totalitarianism, and a conviction that its domestic opponents were radicals at war with modernity and bent on undoing the hard-won achievements of the previous decades. Richard Hofstadter, Columbia University's prize-winning historian, expressed this mood very well in The Age of Reform (1955), his influential account of the reform movement from the 1890s through the New Deal. "For the first time since the 1880s," he wrote, "there are signs that liberals are beginning to find it both natural and expedient to explore the merits and employ the rhetoric of conservatism. They are far more conscious of those things they would like to preserve than they are of those things they would like to change."

The mood that Hofstadter described called forth a distinctively new chapter in the history of liberal reform that contrasted sharply with the ethos of Progressivism and the New Deal. Both of these earlier movements were confident that they represented the views and interests of a majority of Americans; both sought to mobilize the public against the special interests intent on taking advantage of the common man. The leaders of these movements were all too happy to embrace the labels of liberalism and reform. Woodrow Wilson was proud to call himself a liberal and claimed that liberalism was the philosophy of all thinking men. Roosevelt and Truman said much the same thing. These leaders never found it expedient, in Hofstadter's description of the liberalism of the postwar period, "to explore the merits and employ the rhetoric of conservatism." They accepted, albeit in different degrees, the revised idea of liberalism that developed late in the nineteenth century, which held that, in the struggle for liberty, the conflict between the individual and the state had been replaced by one that pitted the individual against the large corporation and the entrenched political machine. In this new struggle, it was argued, the state was obliged to take the side of the individual and the common man against these new aggregations of power.

The Progressives certainly believed that they spoke for the masses of Americans when they fought the trusts, the bosses, and the special interests that they claimed had insinuated themselves into the machinery of American government. Their reform agenda advanced from two distinct directions. There was, first, the presumption that the influence of special interests could be circumvented by returning power back to the people in the form of the direct primary, initiatives and referenda, and the direct election of United States senators. At the same time, they advocated a host of new regulatory bodies, such as the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Trade Commission, that would be administered by disinterested experts acting in the public interest. The first reflected a traditional theme in American life according to which nefarious interests had infiltrated the temples of government; the second reflected the reality of new industrial combinations that had to be regulated in the public interest. Thus liberal reformism began a century ago with the paired assumptions that the people must rule but that in many areas they can do so only through the agency of disinterested judges, commissioners, and regulators.

The Progressives were animated, as Hofstadter and others have argued, by a moral impulse that sought to restore the influence in American life of the independent worker, farmer, and businessman, which was being overtaken by the emerging urban political machines, labor unions, and large commercial enterprises. The nation had been built on its faith in the yeoman farmer and the independent worker and businessman, but such individuals acting on their own had little chance to compete successfully against such powerful new combinations. The sense among Progressives that they were trying to shore up the traditional foundations of American democracy gave to their movement a certain crusading and moralistic character. They disdained a politics of interest or faction because of its suggestions of partisanship and corruption. They followed instead a politics of moral uplift with appeals to democracy, law, and disinterested leadership. When the arch-Progressive Woodrow Wilson led the nation to war in 1917 he did so not on the basis of national interest but rather to make the world safe for democracy. As Hofstadter wrote in relation to the moralistic aspects of Progressivism, "It is hardly an accident that the same generation that wanted to bring about direct popular rule, break up the political machines, and circumvent representative government was the same generation that imposed Prohibition on the country and proposed to make the world safe for democracy."

The New Deal, however, introduced a different kind of reform politics to the American scene, one that was less moralistic and more programmatic than Progressivism. The New Deal, in contrast to Progressivism, developed in an atmosphere of profound crisis. Unlike Progressivism, which had friends and foes in both political parties, the New Deal was entirely associated with the Democratic Party, which henceforth became the vehicle for liberal reform in American politics. Because it was a response to crisis, FDR and his supporters were far less interested in process and procedural issues than the Progressives; the New Dealers focused almost entirely on substantive measures that might restore the economy to productive functioning and relieve the distress brought forth by the Depression. President Roosevelt, moreover, established a broad base of popular support for New Deal measures that would guarantee their survival far beyond his time in office. The New Deal represented the working man and encouraged labor unions, while Progressivism was more of a middle-class movement. The New Deal, in contrast to Progressivism, institutionalized itself in government and in the party system. As a consequence, a destructive world war, which killed the spirit of Progressivism in 1918, only augmented the appeal of the New Deal after 1945. In perhaps the most important departure from Progressivism, the New Deal accepted the reality of modern industrial organization and sought to respond to it, not by restoring the influence of the individual farmer, worker, and businessman, but by building a parallel capacity in the national government to regulate and direct it.

The New Deal represented a triumph of party politics and administration and to some extent a fusion of the two impulses that the Progressives had felt to be in tension. Party politics was viewed by the New Deal Democrats as a means of advancing and representing the interests of the broad public rather than as an avenue for corruption, patronage, and special interests. The spirit of New Deal liberalism was more administrative and experimental than moralistic; it sought more to establish new levers of power in the American system than to reinvigorate old ones.

In a matter of a few years, Roosevelt and the Democrats had built the foundations for the American welfare state in the form of old age insurance, bank deposit insurance, securities regulation, collective bargaining for unions, price supports for farmers, welfare for widows and orphans, and much more-all administered through a now vastly enlarged national government. When he was finished with his domestic agenda, Roosevelt next led the nation into a world war against fascist tyranny that ended with the United States as the undisputed leader of the democratic world. Most importantly, Roosevelt and the New Deal, in the minds of many, had saved the liberal order itself from the chaos of the 1930s and the totalitarian ideologies that claimed to own the future. By l945, liberalism, now identified with the Democratic Party, and personified by FDR, had guided the nation through depression and war, along the way laying the foundations for the welfare state and permanent American participation as the leader of the postwar international order.

Postwar liberals were influenced more by the programmatic ethos of the New Deal than by the more moralistic and procedural approach of the Progressives. Their champion in politics was FDR rather than Woodrow Wilson. Liberalism was now a philosophy more attuned to the challenges of governance than to those of opposition. It saw in the New Deal something to be defended and preserved, but also a roadway into the future through further acts of reform. Hofstadter put it well when he said that the liberals of the postwar period looked more to things they wished to preserve than to those they wished to change. Critics on the left, by contrast, denounced postwar liberalism (or Cold War liberalism, as they called it) on precisely these grounds as being too pragmatic and technocratic, as placing too much faith in incremental measures of reform as opposed to radical change, as far too detached from the struggles of the workers and the poor, and as inappropriately preoccupied with communism and the Cold War. In a word, the liberals of the 1950s and early 1960s were "too conservative."

The influence of FDR and the New Deal, along with the hopes and expectations of American liberals at the end of the war, were on display in The Vital Center (1949), by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., an early and influential liberal manifesto of the postwar era. Schlesinger's book, written before Joseph McCarthy appeared on the scene, urged a continuation of New Deal liberalism as the most effective alternative to communism abroad and stagnation at home. In his view, big-business conservatism, or "plutocracy" as he called it, had discredited itself in the 1920s because it placed private interests above the public interest, an attitude which led ultimately to the stock market collapse and to the Great Depression. The opposition of business interests to price controls and regulation, he wrote, continued to damn them in the eyes of the average citizen. As a consequence, business-oriented conservatism, with its faith in free markets and individualism, could not hope to govern effectively or win the support of a public that had enthusiastically endorsed the programs of the New Deal. On the left, Progressivism had discredited itself because it was soft and sentimental, because it sought to restore ideals now buried in the past, and because it tended to view politics as a stage on which to work out emotional grievances rather than as a means of developing practical programs that might make life better for the masses of citizens. Genuine liberalism, Schlesinger argued, requires both a vision of the possible and a practical sense of how it may be achieved.

Schlesinger's critique of conservatism and progressivism was particularly telling because it pointed in the direction of the kind of practical reform implemented so successfully in the New Deal. He wrote,

We are changing from a market society to an administrative society; and the problem is which set of administrators is to rule. If the decisions are to be made in a directors' boardroom or in a government agency, then the political process permits us a measure of access to a government agency. Big government, for all its dangers, remains democracy's only effective response to big business.

Here Schlesinger, no doubt exaggerating the responsiveness of bureaucracy to popular will, expressed some of the fundamental ideas of New Deal reformism-that large organizations are an inextricable part of modern life, that government must regulate private organizations in the public interest because government is responsive to the will of the public while business organizations are not. This was the "vital center" of American politics, an alternative both to self-interested conservatism and to sentimental progressivism.

(Continues...)

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