Parting shot

Interview: How Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated liberalism | Marvin Olasky

James Piereson served for many years as executive director and trustee of the John M. Olin Foundation. In the process he was instrumental in distributing grants to conservatives and neoconservatives not taken in by the cultural and political fantasies that emerged from the troubled 1960s.

Now a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Piereson has had time to research the origins of recent American radicalism. He has produced a thoughtful analysis of the event that, three years into the decade, truly began the '60s: the Nov. 22, 1963, Kennedy assassination.

Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (Encounter Books, 2007) shows how the assassination and its interpretation in media and academia led many Americans to begin looking for love in all the wrong places.