When Brian Weiss graduated from UCLA in 1968, he was portrayed in beard and mortarboard on the cover of TIME for a story that described the nation's college graduating class as "the most conscience-stricken, moralistic, and, perhaps, the most promising" in U.S. history. As an editor of UCLA's Daily Bruin, Weiss gained notoriety by writing a column calling the Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, "a liar." With the breathtaking cockiness of his class and era, Weiss breezily declared, "I can see myself as an excellent U.S. President."
Today Weiss's beard is flecked with gray, and he is less sanguine about his future. Since bouncing around academe for six years, he has held a variety of jobs, including a brief stint as executive editor of Playgirl magazine. Still single, he is a free-lance writer and editor living in a rented apartment in Santa Monica, Calif. He has an enviable view of the ocean, but what he really wants, he says, "is to settle down and have a family." He feels funny about turning 40 this year. "Middle age sounds a bit strange because many of us haven't attained the goals that our parents attained at that age. I mean, how can you be an adult when you don't own a house?"
The generation that wanted to stay forever young is entering middle age. This year the leading edge of the Baby Boom, the 76 million Americans born in the fecund years between 1946 and 1964, reaches mid-life. Former White House Wunderkind David Stockman and Actor Sylvester Stallone (Rocky, Rambo) turn 40 in 1986. So do ex-Mouseketeer Carl ("Cubby") O'Brien, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Director Kenneth Adelman, Real Estate Mogul Donald Trump and Comedian Gilda Radner. At the tail end of the boom, the last members of the vast litter are graduating from college this spring and stepping into a not notably waiting world. Members of a generation that has made a pastime out of prolonged adolescence are being forced by the biological clock to face up to the responsibilities of adulthood--to their parents, to their children, to one another.
Middle age is only the latest milestone for a generation that has been relentlessly scrutinized, dissected and classified. The Baby Boomers were the Spock generation, the Now generation, the Woodstock generation, the Me generation. Nor were they exactly shy about all the attention. Through high times and hard times, no other group of Americans has ever been quite so noisily self-conscious.
Better educated (twice as likely to go to college as their parents), idealistic and assertive, Baby Boomers were expected to remake the world. "We wanted to change it all, to do it our way," says Senator Albert Gore, 38, Democrat of Tennessee. In some ways the Baby Boomers have indeed turned old values upside down, revolutionizing the role of women and transforming American taste, music and sexual mores. "Because of their numbers and their approach to life, Baby Boomers are setting standards for the rest of us," says Jane Fitzgibbon, director of research development for the Ogilvy & Mather ad agency. But in other areas, a lot of shadows have fallen between the dream and the reality.