In the fourth segment of the Uncommon Knowledge interview with James Piereson, why it proved a terrible and insidious error to associate the Camelot legend with JFK. “With the Camelot image,” explains the author of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism,
Mrs. Kennedy introduced a sense of nostalgia into liberal thought—that the best of times are now in the past. That the Kennedy years were the best that we could ever hope for—but that they were now gone. If your party is based upon the idea of progress, that is very much an undermining assumption.
How Camelot turned the liberal imagination from the future to the past.
