Don’t Trust Anyone Under 45

When Georges Clemenceau, the legendary World War I French Premier, was told that his son had joined the Communist Party, he reacted with sage imperturbability. “My son is 22 years old,” he said. “If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.”

Americans have never been able to respond to the misguided excesses of idealistic youth with a Gallic shrug. That is why the furor over Dan Quayle’s Viet Nam record has become such a polarizing issue. Once again the nation is reminded of all the unresolved passions of the 1960s, a time of both angry and antic generational rebellion, when national leaders were reviled, patriotism was mocked, and drug taking exalted.

That, of course, was then, and this is now. Twenty years later, almost every cause that animated the ’60s has been repudiated by the revisionism of the sedentary ’80s. The interplay between Ronald Reagan and shifting cultural attitudes has created a new orthodoxy of patriotism and restraint: Viet Nam (a noble if tragic cause), drugs (just say no) and sex (play it safe). As the pendulum swings to the right, woe betide any baby-boom politician who spent the ’60s doing anything more daring than swallowing goldfish and doing the Frug. Before the nation gives way to a new slogan, “Don’t Trust Anyone Under 45,” it is fitting to ask what are the appropriate standards by which to judge baby boomers who aspire to national leadership.

The Quayle quandary has led many to behave as though Viet Nam battle stars and scars should be an entrance requirement for public office. Not only is it a bit unfair to single out Quayle for taking refuge in the National Guard, but ; the belated embrace of combat chic, which now stretches from movie screens to comic books, seems a disturbingly one-sided way to redress the inequities of the Viet Nam-era draft. Away from the heat of political campaigns, many Americans acknowledge that the Viet Nam War was fraught with moral ambiguity and that honor could be found in either serving one’s country or protesting what one believed was its march toward folly. Says Sociologist Jerold Starr, the editor of a widely praised academic curriculum on Viet Nam, “The principled act was to make a choice about your commitment to the war, and not pretend it was just something happening in Washington.” Baby-boom politicians should continue to be questioned about Viet Nam, and deserve the consequences if it turns out that their primary response to the anguish of the age was self-absorbed apathy.

Last fall when the Supreme Court nomination of Douglas Ginsburg vanished in a puff of marijuana smoke, more than a dozen of his contemporaries, including Presidential Hopefuls Albert Gore and Bruce Babbitt, rushed forward to admit that they too had succumbed to reefer madness. Most confessions were formulaic: “I once tried pot as an experiment. I did not enjoy it, and I deeply regret my foolish behavior.” Few ambitious baby boomers are willing to talk honestly about what they learned from ’60s-era dabbling in soft drugs for fear of sounding as if they were about to check in to the Betty Ford Clinic.

William Scranton Jr., 41, the former Republican Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania, stresses this need for reflective candor. True, Scranton’s life- style in the ’60s contributed to his narrow defeat for Governor in 1986; he concedes with nary a tear that he was there in the mud at Woodstock puffing on a joint. “My generation has to recognize that we are going through a rite of passage,” he says. “These are litmus-test issues in the eyes of the country. It’s not whether we smoked marijuana or protested the war, but how we handle it today.” By that standard, the baby boomers have yet to come of age.