Who Killed JFK? The Conservative “Climate of Hate”!

According to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and other Kennedy-friendly biographers, the young president was a victim of the political atmosphere, not Marxist Lee Harvey Oswald. Conservative criticism of Kennedy led a disturbed young man (Oswald) to kill Kennedy and The Dream. Man, this is an old left-liberal script:

Go straight to Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965).

He quotes a local: “’the spirit of assassination’ had pervaded the city.” Dallas was inhabited by ‘”people who have hate in their hearts and who seem want to destroy.”

For other sixties-era, “conservative hate killed Kennedy” accounts see here.

Search this book for “hate” and you’ll find other biographers echoing the theme.

This fit with the Liberal Establishment’s psychoanalysis of conservatism: Richard Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style in Politics found paranoid conspiracies under every conservative bed (to steal the phrase about communists under every bed). Yet left-liberals seem to possess their own paranoid style, not that they would ever admit such.

At any rate, here is today’s history lesson:

Oswald did not kill Kennedy, “hate” in Dallas did!

Jonathan Bean is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Professor of History at Southern Illinois University, and editor of the Independent book, Race & Liberty in America: The Essential Reader.
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