Oh Good Grief
Reader comment on item: Lee Harvey Oswald's Malign Legacy

Submitted by Jon (United States), Dec 14, 2007 at 12:28

It would make much more sense to argue that liberalism/progressivism's decline was already begun by the time of the Kennedy assassination (having been in power for decades), and that JFK's death was a violent symbol of the end of heroic liberalism. As the nation faced increasingly intractable foreign and domestic policy problems, the public grew fatigued with old -guard liberal remedies; within 5 years of JFK's death, the Left was splintered and Richard Nixon was elected president. The Left's turn toward socio-cultural issues should be seen as pragmatic, having lost credibility on the "harder" political issues of the day.

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