The Scowling Libs

The Rise of “Punitive Liberalism” in the Wake of the Kennedy Assassination

by George Will  [edited, truncated, partially rewritten with emphasis added by FT]

"Ex-Marine Asks Soviet Citizenship"

~ Washington Post, November 1, 1959 (re Lee Harvey Oswald)

"He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It's — it had to be some silly little Communist."

~ Jacqueline Kennedy, November. 22, 1963

She thought it robbed [her husband’s] death of any meaning, –– but a meaning would be quickly manufactured to serve a new politics. First, however, an inconvenient fact — Oswald — had to be expunged from the story. So, just 24 months after the assassination, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Kennedys' kept historian, published a thousand-page history of the thousand-day presidency without mentioning the assassin.

The transformation of a murder by a marginal man into a killing by a sick culture began instantly — before Kennedy was buried. The afternoon of the assassination, Chief Justice Earl Warren ascribed Kennedy's "martyrdom" to "the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots." The next day, James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that Kennedy was a victim of a "streak of violence in the American character," noting especially "the violence of the extremists on the right."

Never mind that adjacent to Reston's article was a Times report on Oswald's Communist convictions and associations. A Soviet spokesman, too, assigned "moral responsibility" for Kennedy's death to "Barry Goldwater and other extremists on the right."

Three days after the assassination, a Times editorial, "Spiral of Hate," identified Kennedy's killer as a "spirit": The Times deplored "the shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down" Kennedy. The editorialists were, presumably, immune to this spirit. The new liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people's defects.

Hitherto a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would now become a scowling indictment: Kennedy was killed by America's social climate, whose sickness required "punitive liberalism." [NOTE: That phrase is from James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute, whose 2007 book "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism" is a profound meditation on the reverberations of the rifle shots in Dealey Plaza.]

The bullets of Nov. 22, 1963, altered the nation's trajectory less by killing a president than by giving birth to a destructive narrative about America. ...

Punitive Liberalism preached the necessity of national repentance for a history of crimes and misdeeds that had produced a present so poisonous that it murdered a president. To be a liberal would mean being a scold. ...

Kennedy's posthumous reputation — Americans often place him, absurdly, atop the presidential rankings — reflects regrets about might-have-beens. To reread Robert Frost's banal poem written for Kennedy's inauguration ("A golden age of poetry and power/ of which this noonday's the beginning hour") is to wince at its clunky attempt to conjure an Augustan age from the blending of politics and celebrity that the Kennedys used to pioneer The Presidency-as-Popular-Entertainment.

Under Kennedy’s ... successor, Lyndon Johnson ... drove to enactment the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid — liberalism became less concerned with material well-being than with lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom.

The bullets fired on Nov. 22, 1963, could shatter the social consensus that characterized the 1950s only because powerful new forces of an adversarial culture were about to erupt through society's crust. Foremost among these forces was the college-bound population bulge — baby boomers with their sense of entitlement and moral superiority, vanities encouraged by [the] intelligentsia ...

... During the late 1960s, ... Americans' recoil from liberal hectoring, catalyzed the revival of conservatism in the 1970s.  ... “Puntitive Liberalism” created a void that would be filled by Ronald Reagan 17 years after the assassination.

The moral of liberalism's explanation of Kennedy's murder is found underneath the human instinct’s tendency to reject the possibility that large events can have small, often squalid causes; there is an intellectual itch to discern large hidden meanings in events. 

And meanwhile, political opportunism remains perennial.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/will101013.php3#.Ul3b2c3-3NR