Them, Not Us

Stop singing Abraham, Martin & John. It's a myth. We didn't kill 'Camelot', Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated the President of the US because Kennedy had the nerve to stare down Cuba and the Soviet Union. It figures that a hippie song recorded five years after the fact of JFK's death would promulgate the false notion that a whackjob prejudiced America was responsible.

The NYT will charge you four bucks to see the rest of the article with the following headline from October of 1960:

CINCINNATI, Oct. 6 -- Senator John F. Kennedy linked Vice President Nixon tonight with a "glaring failure" in foreign policy responsible for Fidel Castro's rise to power in Cuba.

But when the director of the Manhattan Institute (my favorite think tank) says that Kennedy ran to the right of Nixon on anti-communism, he's not just blowing smoke. 

 

It has been a while since I've checked out videos from Hoover, and I think it's appropriate that I bring them back to Cobb. This is really the level of political, economic and historical intercourse that fits my style and interest. This particular video is important to me because it raises important issues about the directions that liberals took as the 60s went countercultural and took a reasonable liberalism into the tank that the Left is now in. My inherited black Nationalism was never countercultural or particularly revolutionary. It was a cultural nationalism that was easy to make sense of in those days - but where some went the direction of the Watts Poets, others went the direction of Stanley Crouch. The Old School of Cobb has been about recovering Jazz and the Crouch / Murray / Marsalis end of things. And I find it personally interesting that I courted my future wife to Clifford Brown, the jazz master who didn't dabble in drugs.

Of course many folks know that it was my abandonment of the self-centered nature of black progressive politics in recognition of the much greater moral battles against communist totalitarianism that moved me to Conservatism. And here Piereson is noting that Reagan took up where Kennedy left off.

It is logical that if you buy into the romantic notions of Camelot and that the domestic agenda is more morally weighty than foreign policy - that the Civil Rights Movement was more important than the Cold War - then you are likely to buy into the rhetoric that supports the kind of politics I find lightweight. You are likely to say that the Birchers were the real evil in the world and that Reagan's association with them destroys all his moral credibility implying that a race relations agenda is the most important agenda. Piereson makes a heavy-duty charge that the romanticism of Liberals killed it and took away its forward looking attitude, as well as its hard-nosed geopolitical positions against totalitarians. This explains a lot.