Tuesday, July 24, 2007

JFK: Myth-making and the unmaking of modern liberalism



A good review of what sounds like an interesting book.

Trapped In Camelot

As James Piereson recently told me, "If Kennedy had been killed by a right winger with the same evidence that condemned Oswald, there never would have been any talk about conspiracies. It would have fit neatly into the moral framework of 1950s and '60s-style liberalism. And the liberals would have been off and running with it, and no one would have talked about conspiracies."

That's the subject of Piereson's new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, in which he argues both that Kennedy was a victim of the Cold War, and that the repression of his killer's ideology caused tremendous psychological damage to the collective health of the nation
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UPDATE:

Having now read it, I have to say that Camelot and the Cultural Revolution is a must-read. Not at all the usual JFK assassination book, it is a superb work of intellectual and political history.

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