The left developed ambivalence about national power, in which the old liberal reformers had placed such faith. In the paranoid theories that sprang up in the wake of Kennedy's assassination -- many of them to avoid the simple, uncongenial fact that a lone communist had killed the president -- the seat of American government had been the locus of a secret plot to kill JFK. The conspiracy theories and anti-Americanism that had so appalled liberals about the far right in the 1950s had now gravitated to the left. Bizarrely, after a liberal hero was slain by a Marxist, communist icons and ideas became more fashionable on the left than ever before.
Other things were going on obviously, most importantly the Vietnam War. But the war was seen through the prism of American malignancy established by the Kennedy assassination. This downbeat and adversarial disposition is -- more than any specific policy weaknesses on, say, national security -- a drag on contemporary liberalism's long-term appeal. One day a Democratic politician will emerge who is compelling enough to vanquish the foul spirit of JFK's assassination from the left.
Until that happens, JFK has to be remembered, in Piereson's words, as "the last articulate spokesman for the now lost world of American liberalism."