Oswald's Gun and the Decline of American Politics
By Stephen L. Carter Mar 7, 2013 6:30 PM ET
Next week marks a much-overlooked anniversary: It will be 50 years since Lee Harvey Oswald, under the name A. Hidell, purchased the Italian surplus Carcano M91/38 rifle with which he would eight months later assassinate U.S. President John F. Kennedy ...
My father, a lifelong Democratic activist, was of that fabled generation that came of age in the Great Depression and World War II. I came of age watching him and his friends gradually lose their idealism. He used to say that Kennedy was the last president he truly believed in. He hoped that one day my generation would have presidents who sparked in us a fresh confidence that America could accomplish anything. That was Kennedy to him.
But his belief in the president was also a belief in the era. A wearying weakness of contemporary politics is its cruel cynicism, the tendency to believe that issues have only one side and that therefore the opposition can’t possibly consist of decent people acting from the best of motives. My father’s generation, by contrast, felt respect and often affection for those with whom they did ferocious battle ...
My father used to say that they killed all the leaders he believed in. Maybe what really destroyed the nation’s optimism was less the churning of economic and cultural forces than the string of political assassinations that took two Kennedys and a King in five short years. Perhaps we still feel the scars of that horrific wave of violence. All of which is to say that there may indeed be reason to date our decline from the day in March 1963 when Oswald bought that gun.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-07/oswald-s-gun-and-the-decline-of-american-politics.html