Mark Steyn's song of the week is "Camelot" by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner. As Steyn writes, neither composer asked for the historical freight the song was forced to carry three years after their Broadway show first opened:

And then in November 1963 John F Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. A few days later, the President's widow gave an interview to Life magazine, to another T H White – Theodore White, the political analyst. This is what she said:

When Jack quoted something, it was usually classical. But I’m so ashamed of myself— all I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy. At night, before we’d go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were:

Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.

Once, the more I read of history the more bitter I got. For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But then I realized history made Jack what he was. You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table. For Jack, history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way — if it made him see the heroes — maybe other little boys will see. Men are such a combination of good and bad. Jack had this hero idea of history, the idealistic view:

Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.

There’ll be great Presidents again — and the Johnsons are wonderful, they’ve been wonderful to me — but there’ll never be another Camelot.

Life came out on Tuesday. On Wednesday afternoon, Alan Jay Lerner, Kennedy’s classmate at Harvard, was crossing the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, past the news stand. In headline letters above the masthead of The Journal-American were those lines from his title song. As he recalled it, “The tragedy of the hour, the astonishment of seeing a lyric I had written in headlines, and the shock of recognition of a relationship between the two that extended far beyond the covers of one magazine, overloaded me with confused emotions. I was so dazed that I did not even buy the newspaper.” At the time, Alan lived on 71st Street. He started to walk home, and was at 83rd Street before he realized he’d passed his block.

In his recent Commentary essay, (which we previously discussed here), James Piereson brilliantly noted that it wasn't just JFK's terrifying assassination that has had repercussions to this day, but how it was historically framed by his survivors:

Significantly, Mrs. Kennedy’s notion of Arthurian heroism derived not from Sir Thomas Mallory’s 15th-century classic Le Morte d’Arthur but from The Once and Future King (1958) by T.H. White (no relation to the journalist), on which the musical was based. White’s telling of the saga pokes fun at the pretensions of knighthood, pointedly criticizes militarism and nationalism, and portrays Arthur as a new kind of hero: an idealistic peacemaker seeking to tame the bellicose passions of his age. This may be one reason why Mrs. Kennedy’s effort to frame her husband’s legacy in this way was widely regarded as a distorted caricature of the real Kennedy and something he himself would have laughed at. Aides and associates reported that they had never heard Kennedy speak either about Camelot the musical or about its theme song. Some of Mrs. Kennedy’s friends said they had never even heard her speak about King Arthur or the play prior to the assassination.

According to Schlesinger, Mrs. Kennedy later thought she may have overdone this theme. Be that as it may, one has to give her credit for quick thinking in the midst of tragedy and grief—and also for injecting a set of ideas into the cultural atmosphere that would have large consequences. For not only did the Camelot reading of heroic public service cut liberalism off from its once-vigorous nationalist impulses but, if one accepted the image of a utopian Kennedy Camelot—and many did—then the best times were now in the past and would not soon be recovered. Life would go on, but America’s future could never match the magical chapter that had been brought to a premature end. Such thinking drew into question the no less canonical liberal assumption of steady historical progress, and compromised the liberal faith in the future.

Without intending to do so, Mrs. Kennedy had put forth an interpretation of her husband’s life and death that undercut mid-century liberalism at its core.

Earlier, Piereson notes how JFK's killer was similarly reshaped in the immediate aftermath of November, 1963:

Hence, when the word spread on November 22 that President Kennedy had been shot, the immediate and understandable reaction was that the assassin must be a right-wing extremist—an anti-Communist, perhaps, or a white supremacist. Such speculation went out immediately over the national airwaves, and it seemed to make perfect sense, echoed by the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who said that Kennedy had been martyred “as a result of the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.”

It therefore came as a shock when the police announced later the same day that a Communist had been arrested for the murder, and when the television networks began to run tapes taken a few months earlier showing the suspected assassin passing out leaflets in New Orleans in support of Fidel Castro. Nor was Lee Harvey Oswald just any leftist, playing games with radical ideas in order to shock friends and relatives. Instead, he was a dyed-in-the-wool Communist who had defected to the Soviet Union and married a Russian woman before returning to the U.S. the previous year. One of the first of an evolving breed, Oswald had lately rejected the Soviet Union in favor of third-world dictators like Mao, Ho, and Castro.

Informed later that evening of Oswald’s arrest, Mrs. Kennedy lamented bitterly that her husband had apparently been shot by this warped and misguided Communist. To have been killed by such a person, she felt, would rob his death of all meaning. Far better, she said, if, like Lincoln, he had been martyred for civil rights and racial justice.

Given her husband’s politics, Mrs. Kennedy’s comment might seem curious. For one thing, he had staked his presidency on mounting an aggressive challenge to Communism; for another, during his brief term in office the cold war had reached its most dangerous point in his confrontation with the Soviet Union over Cuba. From this perspective, it should not have been so jarring to learn that he was a casualty of the cold war. More significantly, however, the remark suggests that Mrs. Kennedy was already thinking about how President Kennedy’s legacy should be framed, and was sensing that the identity of the assassin might prove inconvenient in this regard.

"It is one of the ironies of the era", Piereson writes, "that many young people who in 1963 reacted with profound grief to Kennedy’s death would, just a few years later, come to champion a version of the left-wing doctrines that had motivated his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald". And perhaps, in order to justify this radical change in worldviews, invented the paranoid fantasies that drove Oliver Stone's 1991 movie, and continue to inspire the farther elements of the left today:

“We’ve been talking about Martin Luther King Jr this night. My son [Casey] was killed the same day he was killed, on April 4th. I don’t believe in any coincidences. Casey was born on John F Kennedy’s birthday. He was born on the day, and died on the day, of 2 people who were assassinated by the war machine in my country. ”

It's probably not entirely surprising that I don't agree with a few of the suppositions that Peter Beinart of The New Republic made when discussing his new book, The Good Fight : Why Liberals---and Only Liberals---Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again in his podcasted conversation today with Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith. But I admire his efforts to try to return the modern left to pre-Camelot liberalism. Will anyone listen?