“Camelot and the Cultural Revolution”

[rusty charly]

"Throughout, Piereson’s own real target is the left. He doesn’t like it. He draws a direct link between Lee Harvey Oswald and the 1960s radicals, observing, “Very few of those radicals understood ... that they advanced their cause in close ideological kinship with the assassin of John F. Kennedy.” The neoconservatives, Piereson says in summation, are Kennedy’s true legatees. Even as the left attacked liberal institutions as a fraud, he writes, intellectuals like Daniel Bell defended them. This is true. But Piereson goes astray in both tone and substance in describing these events.

For one thing, far from being Oswald’s ideological soul mate, the left espoused antinomian and inchoate impulses that looked back, as Samuel Huntington observed in his brilliant “American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony,” to older, idealistic strains in American history. While some radicals rejected America, most were demanding, however incoherently, that it improve itself. Nor does Piereson take into account that Hofstadter and other members of the so-called consensus school of the 1950s were never blind to the left. The fact is that they were all too familiar with it. They had emerged from the bitter factional disputes of the 1930s and were aghast that a new generation seemed intent on replicating the follies of an earlier one.

Piereson confidently concludes that Hofstadter might have “found his way into the neoconservative camp had he not died prematurely.” No, he wouldn’t have. Instead, Hofstadter, who described the 1960s as the age of “rubbish,” would most likely have used the same word about this book."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/review/Heilbrunn2-t.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/K/Kennedy,%20John%20Fitzgerald