Events Detail

    Hon. Robert Bork, James Piereson, M. Stanton Evans

How Camelot Shattered Liberalism

Featuring

James Piereson

Author of:

Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism

Wednesday, November 28

                        James Piereson

12:00 – 2:00 PM

In his new book James Piereson examines the aftermath of President Kennedy's assassination and its effect on American culture and politics, especially the role it played in the rise of radical liberalism and the culture wars.

Piereson explains, "The assassination of a popular president by a Communist [Lee Harvey Oswald] should have generated a revulsion against everything associated with left wing doctrines. Yet something close to the opposite happened. In the aftermath of the assassination, left wing ideas and revolutionary leaders, Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Castro foremost among them, enjoyed a greater vogue in the United States than at any time in our history."

"James Piereson has written an idiosyncratic, provocative, and quite brilliant book. He puts the Kennedy assassination—or, rather, the left's rewriting of history occasioned by the Kennedy assassination—at the center of liberalism's crackup in the 1960s in a way that no one, so far as I know, has done before," writes Weekly Standard editor William Kristol of the book.

Discussants included M. Stanton Evans, former editor of the Indianapolis News and syndicated columnist, and recent author of Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against Americas Enemies.

Moderator: Robert Bork, Distinguished Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute

James Piereson is a Senior Fellow and Director of Manhattan Institute's Center for the American University and president of the William E. Simon Foundation. Mr. Piereson's research focuses on the importance of the classical liberal education, and he has published articles and reviews in numerous journals, including Commentary, The American Political Science Review, The Public Interest, the Journal of Politics, Philanthropy, The American Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard.

For more information please contact Ioannis Saratis at isaratsis@hudson.org or call: (202) 974-2403

Location: Betsy and Walter Stern Conference Center
Hudson Institute
1015 15th St, NW, 6th Floor
Washington, DC 20005