defined an intellectual ideal of open-mindedness and an ethical ideal of tolerance, mutual respect, and suspended judgment. If the "moral perspectives" typical of authoritarianism rested on "crude and mechanical assumptions about human behavior," as Robert Endleman argued in a "composite portrait" of blue-collar workers, then a more enlightened morality had to rest on the academic and therapeutic virtues. It had to rest on a respect for human potential, an aversion to pain and suffering, a critical attitude toward authority, a refusal to be governed by traditional precepts, and a belief that most conflicts could be resolved by submitting them to the arbitration of knowledgeable experts. By reformulating these values as psychological norms, the professional-managerial class made it possible to dismiss dissent from the educated consensus as evidence of emotional and cultural backwardness. Members of the educated elite upheld open-mindedness as the supreme political virtue but refused to debate their own idea of the good life, perhaps because they suspected that it could not withstand exposure to more vigorous ideas.

"Civilized" liberalism reached its high point in the administration of John F. Kennedy and in the retrospective idealization of Kennedy as its quintessential embodiment. In liberal mythology, Kennedy's assassination became a symbol of thwarted promise, of "excellence" overthrown, of the American dream in decline. The political turmoil that followed his death, even more than McCarthyism, convinced liberals that governmental authority represents a delicate and vulnerable structure of civilizing constraints superimposed on seething popular emotions—racism, violence, vindictiveness, envy of distinction and success. The legend of "Camelot" sheltered the New Frontier and the political tradition behind it from reappraisal. Since the towering stature assigned (both in life and in death) to Kennedy as the symbol of liberalism's finest hour rested on images rather than substance—Arthur Schlesinger's case for Kennedy over Nixon in 1960 having consisted largely of the claim that "Nixon

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