On the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination we are following the contretemps that has been ignited by the book “JFK, Conservative,” by our erstwhile colleague, Ira Stoll. It illuminates the fact that on religion and fiscal matters, foreign policy and monetary affairs, our 35th president was little like the liberals of today and was what we call a conservative. It has been met with condescension by the Left (a reviewer for the Nation declared he hadn’t read the book). Then, just this week, Gene Healy of the Cato Institute attacked the book under the headline “Kennedy Was No Conservative.” Mr. Healy, reckons that JFK’s “sordid legacy” is not anything “conservatives should seek to appropriate.” But he concludes that Mr. Stoll is “right that JFK doesn’t deserve the liberal adulation he still enjoys.”

That credits Mr. Stoll with, at a minimum, a nifty scoop, particularly in the spirit of the adage that a scoop isn’t a scoop until it’s played like a scoop. What has landed Mr. Stoll’s book at the center of the discussion on this anniversary is that he is the first one to draw out Kennedy’s conservatism in a quality book. He reminds us of JFK’s religiosity, his anti-communism, his supply-side tax cuts, and his promise that on his watch the dollar would remain as good as gold. His temperament may have differed from, say, Dwight Eisenhower. But Ike was no perfect conservative either (among other things, he abandoned his platform pledge to restore full dollar convertibility into gold). In any event, Mr. Stoll is on to a more strategic point.

This would be not whether the paleocons or the neocons are the true conservatives, which is what seems to obsess Mr. Healy. It is that the liberals have abandoned that for which JFK stood. There were hints of this even in JFK’s time. People may think of JFK’s inaugural speech, with its vow that we would pay any price and carry any burden in the cause of freedom, as a right wing speech. But what the New York Times took away from it was the part that amounted to an olive branch to the Soviet camarilla (“Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce”). Or, as the Times summed it up, “We do not scheme or plot to have Premier Khrushchev’s grandchildren live under capitalism.”

Would Kennedy have settled for that? He flinched with the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem. It’s an excruciating sadness for those of us who were inspired by Kennedy’s call that we will never know how it would have gone. It fell to a certain movie actor from California to act on JFK’s declaration at the convention of the Germany Building Trades Union Labor Federation, “Wherever there are men still enslaved, I am not free.” It was Reagan who cashiered the policy of peaceful co-existence with communism and reached for rollback. He liked to say that there was no limit to what one could accomplish if one didn’t mind who got the credit, something to think of in these years of retreat. The last person to sound Kennedy’s call was the president whose second inaugural was greeted in the Sun with the editorial “John Fitzgerald Bush.”