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First, Red, our resident historian, has written quite an exhaustive little dissertation on the history of the modern age in the comments to Plague Rats For a Better World, which has slipped off the main page. So I’d hate for people to miss it.

So, then, speaking of Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination…

Macleans – What rot — it was so not Camelot<br/> A new book claims Jackie Kennedy’s myth-making transformed modern liberalism, by MARK STEYN

Is that John F. Kennedy? On the leading domestic issue of his day — civil rights (i.e. for coloured folks, too) — he was decidedly not “idealistic” or “heroic” but ambivalent and tentative. On the leading foreign-policy issue — the Cold War — he was notably un-pacifist and, indeed, somewhat bellicose. On fiscal matters, he was a tax cutter to a degree today’s right-wing Republicans can only envy. But, as Merrill Peterson observed in his book Lincoln In American Memory, “The public remembrance of the past … is concerned less with establishing its truth than with appropriating it for the present.” What Kennedy did in those 1,000 days counted for less than what his widow wanted him to do in death. And from that appropriation all others followed.

Earl Warren, the chief justice, declared that “a great and good President has suffered martyrdom as a result of the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” But hang on: Kennedy was a Cold Warrior murdered by a Communist. A Communist who’d defected to the Soviet Union and on his return attempted to kill the head of the John Birch Society. That flat reality is astounding enough, but, alas, a Marxist assassin was insufficient to the needs of the myth: the facts of Kennedy’s death did not meet the historical burden assigned to them. For, if “there’ll never be another Camelot,” if Excalibur can never again be prised from the stone, then in a sense the entire kingdom is tainted. The New York Times editorialized about “the shame all Americans must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down President John F. Kennedy.” “A Portion of Guilt For All,” ran the headline on a column by its star analyst, James Reston. By the time the President’s brother was murdered, Jack Newfield’s assignment of blame to “poverty, lynchings, or our genocide against the Indians” had the tinny ring of boilerplate. For the record, Robert Kennedy was killed by a Palestinian angry over U.S. support for Israel.

But once the idealist-king-of-a-diseased-realm myth had advanced to that stage, it was but a hop and a skip to the next. Mr. Piereson contrasts pre-1963 Democratic optimism with what he calls “Punitive Liberalism,” a doctrine that “took as its point of departure the assumption that the United States was responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds.” JFK’s successor, Jimmy Carter, apologized to the world for America’s habit of crafting national policy from “an inordinate fear of Communism,” which, granted that it disdains all his predecessors, rebukes most explicitly his fellow Democrats Truman and Kennedy. To acknowledge that post-Kennedy American liberalism had rejected its mid-century antecedents would be to concede that the movement itself was flawed. Instead, the left found an alternative explanation: conspiracy. Not only is Camelot a sewer of bigotry, but no matter how noble the king is, wily courtiers and other shadowy interests are really running the joint. As Mr. Piereson points out, before Oliver Stone and Jim Garrison and all the rest set up tent on the grassy knoll, conspiracy theories were the preserve of the right. “By the late 1960s,” he writes, “the far right’s fascination with plots concerning fluoridated water, federal aid to education, or even communism seemed quaint in comparison with the fevered doctrines put forward by the denizens of the New Left.”

To repeat: a tax-cutting, trickle-down Cold Warrior was killed by a Communist. But two-thirds of the American people believe otherwise. And it’s hardly any surprise that more recent polls show there are those who believe (as the bumper sticker has it) “9/11 Was An Inside Job.” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann recently advanced the view that George W. Bush had Pat Tillman killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan because the celebrity soldier was planning to meet with Noam Chomsky. He said this in prime time on an NBC cable network. There too is the legacy of Camelot.

Great.