Joe Klein writes the Sanity Clause newsletter on Substack.
The winter holidays of 1945-46 must have been a jolly time for the Greatest Generation. Many of them had just come home from the war and were reunited with honeys who had been waiting, hoping, delaying. A song from the era went, “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me … till I come marching home.” It was apple picking time. Spiked eggnog and pheromones were in the air. Fecundity was inevitable.
Three American presidents were conceived that winter. They were born the following summer: Donald Trump on June 14 (technically late spring but well past Memorial Day), George W. Bush on July 6, Bill Clinton on Aug. 19. (I, barely a footnote, came along on Sept. 7.) We were the advance guard of the baby boom, and this summer those of us who are still here will all turn 80.
It was a relatively quiet summer, except for all those new babies. Winston Churchill had already announced the next struggle — “an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent” — but that seemed a blip on the horizon. Colonies were becoming countries. The United States recognized the Philippines’ independence. Jewish terrorists bombed the British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem; Gandhi marched in India. The maps hanging in American schoolrooms — with vast pink swatches denoting British colonies and green for the French — were about to become obsolete. The sun was setting on those empires.
But the most important thing about the summer of 1946 was peace. It was, in fact, the beginning of the Great American Binge. What followed was amazing: Over the next 20 years, our parents’ generation succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, with even relative failures among them landing in the suburbs, in tract houses that they owned (that the government helped pay for). There was never a time like it, TV and frozen TV dinners and Little League. I was among the first to test the polio vaccine. It worked! And it presaged the end of the plague era, one of the great triumphs of our time.
The generation — we — who grew up in unprecedented prosperity and safety would become notorious in our own minds. We certainly talked, wrote and sang a lot about ourselves. Clinton, Bush and Trump would be our presidents (Obama, too, technically, but not really; Joe Biden was a few years too old to count, officially). And, because of our demographic heft, there would be an arrogance to us. Marketers would target us; they still do. All those pharmaceutical ads clotting the news programs are about us.
Above all, there was a freedom born from the absence of threat. The children of affluence would rebel, and then rebel against rebelling, and grow prosperous. They would be liberated by low prices and the birth control pill; they would excel at entertaining themselves — and the rest of the world. “Your generation taught us a lot about food,” said my mother, who never got over the Great Depression and was eternally amazed by the array at the supermarket. (Donald Trump’s father built one of the first supermarkets within New York City’s limits.)
Along the way, we would shepherd some of the greatest human rights advances in history — toward greater equality for Blacks, for women, for gays. We would become aware of the environment. Blue skies adorned formerly smoky cities; the river in Cleveland no longer caught fire. A new medical or technological marvel seemed to change our lives every week. We pretty much stopped smoking cigarettes; some of us started smoking marijuana. Seat belts were fastened.
But what more can be said about them — us — now that we approach the last, inescapable hurdles?
The three presidents who first opened their eyes during the summer of 1946, who graduated college in the hectic spring of 1968, are extremely different men. They have little in common. Bush is old money, reinventing itself in Texas; Trump is new money, living in Queens — where I was born — and pining for Manhattan. Clinton never knew his father; his stepfather was an auto salesman in the naughty town of Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Their moms were formidable keepers of the hearth (and, in Clinton’s case, bettor on the ponies). Their fathers were more problematic. They were harder to match.
George H.W. Bush was a war hero and, by all accounts, a lovely man — difficult to rebel against, though W. tried hard, at a time and in a class where a smidgen of rebellion was deemed necessary. Fred Trump had apparently been arrested at a Klan rally — in Queens — as a young man and had been investigated for profiteering in the housing market during World War II. But he escaped punishment in both cases, a lesson his son clearly learned about the slippery limits of the law. Clinton’s stepfather beat his mother; Clinton once broke down the bedroom door to protect her when he was a teenager. And yet he took the man’s last name. Absent a steady dad, he grew up flagrantly eager to please.
All three men indulged in the indulgences of the era. Clinton and Trump, famously so, with women, though both were, more or less, teetotalers. (Clinton, I believe, really didn’t inhale.) Bush reformed himself, finding religion after a period of excess, his subsequent discretion impressive. And all three avoided service in their generation’s war, Vietnam — a war of choice that could only have been undertaken by a prosperous nation. (I avoided service as well.) The lack of service, sacrifice and discipline may be the thing Trump, Bush and Clinton have most in common.
And what now? We boomers are pretty much done politically. I suspect the next turn will be a “kinder, gentler” Trumpism. The country hasn’t yet assimilated our immigrants — or caught up to the human rights advances that defined our generation.
We exit, less mature than we should have been, less responsible than our parents were. In some ways, we’re a flashy act to follow; in others, a historic disappointment, leaving our children a world less secure than the one our parents enjoyed as the New Year dawned in 1946.
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