Early reactions by the Center
(The few who wrote, kept their counsel and didn't blame
anybody)
Reactions of the Center
There were few centrist responses to the assassination during
the first years. This seems logical, because people who were
concerned enough to write articles or books about it so early must have had strong
opinions one way or the other, and most of these must have been responses
to preexisting world views than deductions from the facts, which were not yet
public.
There were of course the immediate newspaper reports and articles. As
representatives of these first few days, we present a series from the Providence
Journal and the Providence Evening Bulletin. Some days later came the
magazines. We include an early editorial from The New Yorker.
One interesting centrist account of the days immediately after the
assassination was written well after the fact. We include it here because it is so
interesting and forms such a good introduction to the rightist and leftist
responses as well. 'The Paranoid Style" is an account by Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, then in the
Department of Labor, of his feelings over the first few days after the
assassination. Although this article was written much later, in response to the
appearance of Oliver Stone's JFK film, it restricts itself almost totally
to those early days and presents Moynihan's insightful predictions about how the
U.S. people would come to embrace conspiracism unless the U.S. government
confronted that possibility head-on and investigated it directly and thoroughly (which the Warren Commission did
not do). From this point of
view, the Warren Commission was the source of some of its own lack of credibility.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was one of the few voices of reason immediately after
the assassination. History bears out his early
observations in a way that it does not for the left and right.
But we begin this section on the Center with a poetic tribute
to JFK from Wendell Berry. Although this poem appeared in The Nation, it
is decidedly centrist in orientation.
A Poem
"November 26, 1963"
(Wendell Berry, The Nation, 21 December 1963)
Editorial from The New Yorker
(7 December 1963)
"The Paranoid
Style," (Daniel Patrick Moynihan in The Washington Post,
reprinted in JFK: The Book of the Screenplay)