BY MICHEL JACQUES GAGNÉ
IN HIS 2007 BOOK CAMELOT AND THE CULTURAL Revolution, the political scientist James Piereson made this insightful observation about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy:
The assassination of a popular president by a communist should have generated a revulsion against everything associated with left-wing doctrines. Yet something very close to the opposite happened. By 1968, student radicals were taking over campuses and joining protest demonstrations in support of a host of radical and revolutionary causes. It is one of the ironies of recent history that many of those young people who filed in shocked grief past the president’s coffin in 1963 would just a few years later embrace as political activists the very doctrines that led Oswald to assassinate him.