By ignoring evidence that called into question the official explanation of the assassination, Kennedy's admirers made it unnecessary to ask themselves whether the unfulfilled "promise" of Kennedy's presidency was misconceived to begin with. What is now known about Kennedy's life and death prompts the conclusion that imperial grandeur and cosmopolitan "style" were poor substitutes for the original promise of American life: the hope that a self-governing republic could serve as a source of moral and political inspiration to the rest of the world, not as the center of a new world empire. Kennedy and his friends dismissed this earlier vision of America, in effect, as a vision suited only for a small, backward, provincial nation. If Lawrence Goodwyn is correct in his assertion that "progress" and the "people" symbolize conflicting rather than complementary versions of the American dream, the New Frontier—as the image implied—came down squarely on the side of progress, a rather tawdry conception of progress at that. The New Frontier stood for the precarious ascendancy of a civilized, forward-looking minority over popular backwardness, and the legend of Camelot, as it took shape in retrospect, enabled liberals to blame popular bigotry and "paranoia" for Kennedy's death and for all the troubles that followed, including the disastrous decline of their own influence.

It is time we found a better explanation of those troubles, one less flattering to the vanity of the educated classes but more consistent with the historical evidence.

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