Yesterday being the 48th anniversary of the JFK assassination – James Piereson author of a book which I have read and recommend Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism uses a recent idiotic article by Frank Rich (a redundency I know) to revisit the insane conspiracy theories regarding the JFK assassination and how the Left has tried to shift the blame to the Right over that horrible Friday in Dallas. Rich has written an execrable piece claiming that Obama’s life is in danger by the Right when it was the Left that wrote novels and produced movies about the assassination of George W. Bush. Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist through and through – an admirer of Castro and proficient with a rifle. Kennedy was killed by a communist not by some “climate of hatred” in the United States. It seemed that the liberals in 1963 (including Jackie Kennedy) were disappointed that it was not a John Bircher but instead (in her own words) “a dirty little communist”. By the way earlier that year Oswald actually tried to kill Gerneral Edwin Walker (a real Bircher) in Dallas.
by James Piereson
It has now been 48 years since President John F. Kennedy was cut down on the streets of Dallas by rifle shots fired by Lee Harvey Oswald, a self-described Marxist, recent defector to the Soviet Union, and ardent admirer of Fidel Castro. The evidence condemning Oswald was overwhelming: the bullets that killed President Kennedy were fired from his rifle, the rifle was found on the sixth floor of the warehouse where he worked and were he was seen moments before the shooting, and witnesses on the street described a man firing shots from that location. When a policeman stopped Oswald on foot to question him about the assassination, Oswald pulled out a pistol and shot him before fleeing to a nearby movie theater where he was arrested, still carrying the pistol with which he had killed the policeman. Two days later Oswald was himself assassinated while in police custody by a night club owner distraught over Kennedy’s death. For understandable reasons, these events had a disorienting effect on the public mind.
For many who came of age during that era and were taken with Kennedy’s style and idealistic rhetoric, his very public murder, recorded in amateur films and news photos, was a shock that they could never quite get over. Returning to it again and again as the years passed, they could not help but feel that the disasters that followed — the war in Vietnam, the urban riots, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Nixon’s election — were somehow connected to that irrational act of violence that claimed President Kennedy’s life. If somehow the act could be undone or understood, or blame for it fairly apportioned and punishment meted out, then the world might again be set right, or at least partly so. But it could not be undone, and it proved nearly as difficult to understand or explain, at least in terms satisfactory to the assumptions of the age. And so before long the JFK assassination came to be encrusted in layers of myth, illusion, and disinformation strong enough to deflect every attempt to understand it from a rational point of view.
[…]
This explanation for the assassination did not drop out of thin air but was circulated immediately after the event by influential leaders, journalists, and journalistic outlets, including Mrs. Kennedy, President Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, James Reston, Russell Baker, and the editorial page of the New York Times, columnist Drew Pearson, and any number of other liberal spokesmen. Mrs. Kennedy took the lead in insisting that her husband was martyred by agents of hatred and bigotry. Within days of the assassination, she elaborated the symbolism of Camelot and King Arthur’s court to frame the Kennedy presidency as a special and near-magical enterprise guided by the highest ideals. The eternal flame she placed on his grave site invokes King Arthur’s candle in the wind as imagined by T. H. White in his Arthurian novel, The Once and Future King, later the basis of a Broadway musical that was popular during the Kennedy years.
These were the myths, illusions, and outright fabrications in which the Kennedy assassination came to be encrusted. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they are still widely believed. In fact, the Kennedy legend, incorporating the myths about his assassination, is closely intertwined with the history of modern liberalism: JFK has come to represent a liberal ideal and his assassination the threat posed to it by the forces of the far right.
It is hard to fathom, in this age of secular rationality, that so many people can believe a tale so obviously contradicted by the facts. President Kennedy, to the extent he was a martyr at all, was a martyr in the Cold War struggle against communism. Oswald was not in any way, shape, or form a product of a “climate of hate” as found in Dallas or anywhere else in the United States. Nor was Oswald a bigot; he supported the civil rights movement and attended meetings in Dallas of the American Civil Liberties Union. Seven months before he shot President Kennedy, in April, 1963, he took a shot (and missed) at retired Gen. Edwin Walker, the head of the Dallas chapter of the John Birch Society. He married a Russian woman, and longed to return to the Soviet Union. In the months leading up to the assassination, he was active in a front group supporting Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba. Two months before the assassination, he travelled to Mexico City to visit the Soviet and Cuban embassies in pursuit of a visa that would allow him to travel to Cuba. In one of those visits he threatened the life of President Kennedy. His motives in shooting President Kennedy were undoubtedly linked to a wish to protect Castro against efforts by the Kennedy administration to overturn his government. It was not publicly known in 1963 that the Kennedy administration (in an expression of hard-headed real politik) was trying to assassinate Castro. But it is possible that Oswald was aware of these clandestine plans.
In the latest effort to recycle the Camelot myths, Frank Rich has published a delusional article in New York Magazine under the title, “What Killed JFK: The Hate That Ended His Presidency is Eerily Familiar” in which he draws a straight line from Kennedy’s assassination to imagined threats against President Obama arising from conservatives and the tea party movement. The occasion for Mr. Rich’s ruminations is a review of several recently published books about President Kennedy and the assassination, including one by Stephen King in which the novelest dispatches a time traveller on a mission to intercept Oswald before he can commit his deed so that history might be redirected on a more hopeful path. Mr. King, however is a writer of fiction and thus entitled to invent his facts. Mr. Rich, as a journalist, does not have the same license.
His tortured logic runs like this: President Kennedy was a victim of hatred coming from the far right; President Obama ran for election in 2008 as a reincarnation of JFK, supported by surviving members of the Kennedy family; his mission was to restore the ideals of Camelot, and thus to reinvigorate liberalism; now he is the target of the same vitriol from the right that brought down Kennedy. Therefore, the tea party movement, the far right, and conservatives in general are dangers to the public welfare. It is probably useless to point out to Mr. Rich that none of the things he believes about Kennedy or the Kennedy assassination is remotely true so that none of them has anything to do with the politics of the present time.
The late Richard Hofstadter, writing about the Kennedy assassination in 1964, coined the term “the paranoid style in American politics” to describe a mindset prone to concocting conspiracies and to connecting events by tenuous threads of logic and evidence. Hofstadter was thinking primarily of the far right, mostly anti-communists, when he developed this insight, though he cited applications to the far left as well. In retrospect, the Kennedy assassination was an event though which the paranoid-style was grafted on to modern liberalism, thereby giving to it a conspiratorial, and irrational outlook, particularly where “the right” is concerned. Mr. Rich’s depiction of “the right” as a menace and a public danger is not that far removed from the portrayal of communism as a threat to the republic among the followers of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. In keeping to this script, Mr. Rich invents a series of “facts” about the Kennedy assassination and then lists them in an indicment of conservatives as parties to the crime. It is a near textbook application of the paranoid style.
It was wrong for national leaders in 1963 to fabricate a tale of President Kennedy’s assassination that deflected responsibility from the real assassin to a group of Americans who had nothing to do with the event and who played no role in the president’s death. In concocting a story that fit comfortably with the assumptions of the time, even though it was at variance with the facts, they sowed the seeds for distrust and division in the body politic that are still with us today. Mr. Rich is only rewriting and revising a script that was first written in 1963.
Read the rest here: Revisiting the Kennedy Assassination: Frank Rich and the Paranoid Style
