". . . the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace . . ." -- John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 1961
These stirring words commemorated the last time that one generation ceded power to the next. The 22-year age chasm between President-elect Bill Clinton and George Bush is the second largest in U.S. electoral history, surpassed only by the 27 years separating Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower. But this generational conceit is unlikely to be updated as a theme for Clinton's Inaugural Address. Imagine a hapless Clinton speechwriter struggling to reduce the baby-boomer life experience to tough-minded Kennedyesque cadences. No way would the incoming President dare tell the unvarnished generational truth: "Again, the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born after World War II, nurtured in prosperity, aroused by Vietnam, sustained by rock 'n' roll, tested by drugs and promiscuity, embraced by the media and belatedly betrayed by the nation's decline in living standards."
At 46, Clinton will be the third youngest President in history, out-youthed only by Kennedy and Theodore Roosevelt. For 40 years, World War II was a dominant life experience for eight Presidents in a row. All of them served in uniform -- even Ronald Reagan, who sometimes also projected the fantasy that he had seen the horrors of combat. Clinton was not born until a year after Japan surrendered. "World War II is as far away from Bill Clinton's generation as World War I was for George Bush's generation," observes Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University. "What is happening is that the first half of this century is receding in our institutional memory."
As the nation's first baby-boomer President, Clinton will bring to the Oval Office a fresh mental map of generational impressions. Gone are the Andrews Sisters, Kilroy and the Berlin blockade. In their place come Father Knows Best, Elvis, 1960s folk music (Chelsea Clinton was named after the Joni Mitchell song Chelsea Morning), Vietnam protests, the 1972 George McGovern crusade and Watergate. Despite the politically exaggerated privation of his childhood, Clinton came of age at a moment of exceptional national privilege, when a studious young leader from Hot Springs, Arkansas, could aspire to an elite educational odyssey that carried him from Georgetown to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship to Yale Law School. America of the 1960s worked for Clinton in ways that many children of today's hard-pressed middle class can scarcely imagine.