It is now a half-century since President John F. Kennedy was cut down by rifle shots on the streets of Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Few events in the postwar era have cast such a long shadow over our national life.
The murder of a handsome and vigorous president shocked the nation to its core and shook the faith of many Americans in their institutions and way of life. In the process, it split the Democratic party into warring factions and embittered many liberals who blamed the nation for the loss of their leader.
When President Kennedy embarked on his fateful trip to Dallas, the United States was a stable and prosperous nation with a population generally supportive of private enterprise, the nation’s political institutions and America’s role as leader of the free world. Though his domestic program was stalled in Congress, Kennedy was a popular president with approval ratings in the polls hovering around 60%. He was likely to be re-elected in 1964.
One would not know it today, but JFK was a moderate and cautious leader who was reluctant to get very far out in front of public opinion. He was slow to embrace a civil-rights bill. His main domestic priority was a 30% across the board tax cut to stimulate the economy — a measure that inspired a similar move by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
He was a hardheaded cold-warrior who confronted the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba plus sent advisors to Vietnam and badly needed weapons to Israel. He called America “a city upon a hill,” a model for freedom to the world.
Though Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone communist, shot JFK, many Americans nevertheless blamed themselves for the death of the president. There was a sense that Americans had been too tolerant of violence and bigotry in their midst.
“My God! What have we come to?” cried Speaker of the House John McCormack when he heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., noted historian and speechwriter for JFK, reported that his young daughter tearfully asked him that evening, “Daddy, what has happened to our country? If this is the kind of country we have, I don’t want to live here anymore!” A prominent clergyman in Washington lamented that, “All of us have had a hand in the slaying of the president.” Many felt that there had to be something profoundly wrong with their country for such an event to have occurred.
Friends and loyalists soon portrayed President Kennedy as a liberal hero who (had he lived) might have led the nation into a utopian era of peace and understanding. Though in life a pragmatist and a moderate, Kennedy was transformed in death into a liberal idealist and the model of a liberal statesman. Jackie Kennedy contributed to this portrayal by identifying their White House with the legend of King Arthur and Camelot.
Numerous books published in the months after the assassination elucidated these themes. Theodore Sorensen, JFK’s key assistant, wrote that President Kennedy was the equal of any of the nation’s previous presidents and a leader impossible to replace. Schlesinger went further to write that, “He re-established the republic as the first generation of our founders saw it: young, brave, civilized, rational, gay, tough, questing, exultant in the excitement and potentiality of history.” There was a sense in these tributes that with the loss of President Kennedy the nation itself had also lost its way.
Within a few years the nation would be divided by riots in the cities, protests on college campuses against the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the rise of a counterculture that rejected everything about American life that most had accepted without question just a few years before. By 1968, the optimistic politics of John F. Kennedy had given way to a spirit of doubt and pessimism about the nation’s future, its key institutions and its role in the world.
The Kennedy assassination was the first occasion in which Americans blamed themselves for an event that was not in their fault. Soon the “blame America first” pathology would become a common theme in the nation’s political discourse. Critics from the New Left began to describe the United States as an out-of-control colossus, a world power that despoiled the environment and oppressed poor people abroad and minorities at home.
There was a bitter irony in all this because the spirit of national self-condemnation turned loose by the assassination was something that President Kennedy never would have countenanced.
Five decades later, the Kennedy assassination has almost receded into history. Yet it is still an event that gnaws at the American soul as the occasion by which the nation lost its innocence.
James Piereson is president of the William E. Simon Foundation and the author of “Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism” (Encounter Books).