It is true that there were a rising number of liberal voices during Kennedy's term in office. Among them were Al Gore Sr. and John Kenneth Galbraith. These are people who believed in the zero sum game, that if one person or nation becomes wealthy it comes at the expense of other people and other nations. So they supported redistribution of wealth policies to share the wealth.
The say rich people, and rich corporations, as greedy. They even saw the U.S. as greedy. The reason other nations are poor is because the U.S. is hoarding all the money. They saw all evil in the world as the result of America being a bully. They believed if we scale back our military, get rid of nuclear weapons, and get rid of guns, that we wouldn't be seen as such a bully and people of other nations would love us more and peace would ensue.
This comes contrary to the traditional view of love of country and peace through strength, something Kennedy championed for. In order to win the cold war, he wanted to make America stronger and prouder. This is why he increased military spending. He believed the stronger our military is the less likely we would be to use it. And this is also why he increased federal funding of NASA and championed for a trip to the moon. He wanted to showcase to the world, to the Russians, American Exceptionalism.
He did this at a time of growing liberalism within the United States. He knew there were liberal voices in his own cabinet. In fact, he had to ignore John Kenneth Galbraith and Al Gore Sr. in pushing forth his agenda. And he succeeded. And he was very popular for his efforts, and continues to be hailed as a hero to this day, as his popularity still lingers around 80 percent. He is still ranked as one of the best presidents of all time.
But those liberal voices gained credibility the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a socialist by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald. The moment Kennedy was pronounced dead, the liberal Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn into office, ushering in the era of modern liberalism.This was the day the democratic party went from being a mainstream, traditional American party, to a progressive/liberal/socialist/fascist party of nutcases who blame American greed for all the evils in the world.
Look! I wrote before on this blog how the first liberal president was Teddy Roosevelt, and how the liberal movement began with Woodrow Wilson, only to be put on steroids by FDR, Johnson, and Obama. Yet, as Rush Limbaugh discussed on his program on October 19, 2015, the modern liberal movement began with the death of Kennedy.
Here is what Rush said:
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There have been many times that people have called here and asked me, "When did this current liberalism start? Was it Woodrow Wilson?" they ask. "Was it earlier than that? Was it Civil Rights? When did this stuff all happen? When did it start? Was it the sixties? The Students for Democrat Society and the Vietnam War?" And remember my answer has always shocked people.... My answer is the incarnation of the modern left as you and I know it today is a direct result of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
And I remember the first time I mentioned this, people could not believe that I was thinking straight. "You mean to tell me, Rush, you think the modern era of liberalism began with the assassination of JFK?" Yes, it did. I'll give you a brief summary of why.
We know -- the evidence is conclusive -- that JFK was killed by a communist, Lee Harvey Oswald. He was not killed by the right wing. He was not killed by extremists in Dallas or in the South or anywhere else in this country. He was killed by a communist with ties to Cuba. Lee Harvey Oswald was an avowed socialist and communist.
He had traveled to the Soviet Union; he was disappointed. He was expecting utopia. He was flat-out disappointed with what he found, but it did not persuade him to change his thinking. He remained an ardent communist, and after his disappointment with the discoveries in Moscow, he became an acolyte of the Castro regime in Cuba. He had traveled to Mexico City in an attempt to get to Cuba. But the bottom line is... I don't know, Warren Commission.
I don't care about anybody else. But Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger. It was his gun. It was in the sixth floor window of what the Texas School Book Depository. He was nabbed. He was caught. There was no doubt Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy, and he was a communist. And what the left did, is they couldn't permit that. They couldn't allow that to be popularly accepted and understood. They could not take that chance whatsoever.
So in order to create the Camelot myth and to establish Kennedy as this mythical King Arthur-type character and his administration as Camelot, there was a calculated decision among opinion leaders of the day to blame America for it, to blame American cultural decay, American extremism -- John Birch right-wingerism and so forth. And that's the birth of the modern era of liberalism, blaming America. America got the blame for killing Kennedy, not an avowed communist, because they just couldn't abide that.
There's a great book out there. The guy is at the Manhattan Institute. His name is James Piereson. His book is entitled Shattered Consensus. And there's a chapter -- actually a couple chapters -- on the Kennedy assassination.
An ardent, full blooded, full-throated communist killed JFK, and the American left power structure of the time -- including Earl Warren at the Supreme Court, the New York Times, TIME Magazine, at the time the networks, three network news anchors -- just could not deal with it. They couldn't permit that to be the truth. There was an affection for the Soviet Union at the time. There was an affection for communism. But there was also an opportunity. They saw an opportunity to do what the left does best: Blame America.
I just want to read you these two excerpts from the book Shattered Consensus... "The widespread feeling that the national culture contributed to Kennedy's death encouraged an attitude of anti-Americanism that became a pronounced aspect of the radical and countercultural movements of the 1960s." Look, the simple fact of the matter is, for the longest time people would not accept that Oswald was the killer. It was too simple.
The KGB, by the way, was paying all these conspiracy... Not all. The KGB was paying a number of so-called conspiracy authors to write these alternative theories. The American left and Soviet Union, nobody wanted communists to blame for this. If a communist had killed "the most beloved president ever," what does that say about the left? It would have destroyed the modern-day Democrat Party. They couldn't allow that to happen. They made a concerted judgment. They made an effort to actually whitewash the assassination of Kennedy and blame people who had nothing to do with it in order to save their own skin.
And their own movement and then proceeded to cover all of that up by coming up with alternate conspiracy theories and an effort to blame right-wingers, gun-control freaks, John Birchers, and, you name it. And that is what gave birth to the modern left today, rooted in America is to blame for everything that's bad -- and the top of the list is, "America killed the most popular president ever." And by "America" they mean Republicans, conservatives, anybody that's not liberal...
So... "The widespread feeling that the national culture contributed to Kennedy's death encouraged an attitude of anti-Americanism that became a pronounced aspect of the radical and countercultural movements of the sixties. This was an outlook that never entirely disappeared from the worldview of the American left.
Now, by any logic the assassination of a popular president by a communist should have generated a revulsion against everything associated with left-wing doctrines. Yet something very close to the opposite happened in the wake of the JFK assassination, and for many of the reasons outlined. Within a few years, radical ideas and revolutionary leaders -- Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Castro among them -- enjoyed a greater vogue in the US than at any previous time in our history, converting college students by the thousands to an anti-American, anti-capitalist creed. Soon, those students were taking over campuses and joining protest movements in support of a host of radical and revolutionary causes.
"Socialism and revolution -- causes that Kennedy fought against -- were the watchwords of the new left that emerged within a few years of his death."
They could not sit by and have it known in a communist had killed JFK. So they had to create other assassins. They had to create alternative conspiracy theories. Whatever else anybody did or will come up with, it is fact that Oswald pulled the trigger and killed Kennedy. And if you don't believe it, it is a sign of how effective the plan has been to get you not to know what really happened. "In just a few years, from 1963 to 1968, the liberal movement -- under pressure from this new radicalism -- absorbed a skeptical disposition toward the American past and the major institutions of American society.
"It would not be an exaggeration to label this disposition, this new attitude of the New Left, as anti-American. Among those who maintained a foothold in the liberal camp, there was a tendency to accept the left-wing assessments of American society as vulgar, violent, and racist. The radicals and the liberals might differ on style and strategy, but they agreed that real change must come about not through programmatic reforms, but through cultural criticism that leads to a revolution in thought and conduct...
"Once having accepted the claim that JFK was a victim of the national culture, many found it easy to extend that metaphor into other areas of American life, from race and poverty to the treatment of women to the struggle against communism. These were no longer seen as challenges to be met and overcome but as indictments of the nation." JFK being assassinated by a communist was an unacceptable reality to the leftists of the day who had a love affair with the Soviet Union, who had a love affair with communism as utopia, as fairness, as all of these things that they claim that it is.
It's the birthplace of Che Guevara and Castro becoming heroes, and it was more than likely Castro who engineered, however he did it, the assassination of JFK, with a supporter, Lee Harvey Oswald...
What really has happened is this country was really severely, dangerously brainwashed after the Kennedy assassination, and it continued for decades. And what's happening now is an effort to cleanse that brainwashing and to unravel it, and the left has had a lot of success with it. Blaming America. Blaming the culture. Take any incident, any incident that happens in this country today, I don't care which. Name one. Name the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin thing, Ferguson, Baltimore, a school shooting. Name a thing that happens.
Whose fault is it? "Right wing culture! America! Bigotry! It's anti-gay, sexist, racism," what have you. It all... All of this got its energetic birth immediately after the Kennedy assassination, and they had such profound success with it following the Kennedy assassination that it simply became their identity. And in their minds it has stood the test. Well, JFK today would no more identify with the modern-day Democrat Party. He was for Reagan-like tax cuts and any number of other things.Rush said that he often gets blamed by the left for "brainwashing" people in favor of conservatism and against liberalism and socialism. Yet, in fact, he said, "it's the American media and the Democrat Party and the left that brainwashed this whole country after the Kennedy assassination."
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