Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up (13 page)

While these rival siblings had much in common, they would emerge from the fifties with very different perspectives. The teens of the era could still remember a world without television, transistor radios, or jet planes. The older teens could even remember the absent parents, ration coupons, and scrap drives of World War II, and some could even understand the difference between a gold star and a blue star in a neighbor's window. For these young people the magic of the fifties was the magic of transition from child to adolescent, or even from adolescent to young adult. It was the magic of huge pastel-colored cars with tailfins, a new form of music, and new fashions. Those transitions still lay in the future for members of the Baby Boom generation. The Fabulous Fifties were about to give way to what was predicted to be the Soaring Sixties, an era that promised more leisure time, huge communication breakthroughs, and jet airlines crossing the Atlantic. Soon the novelty of writing “1960” in notebooks and class assignments and admiring a new fifty-star flag would set the stage for the ascension of a handsome, incredibly youthful president who had Boomer children of his own exploring their new White House home. The world of Camelot was about to begin, and with its arrival the first postwar babies entered adolescence and their own new world.

FRIDAY MORNING
, January 20, 1961, dawned cold and blustery in Washington, D.C., as the nation's capital joined most of the Northeast in digging out from the third major snowstorm in as many weeks. Yet by noon the White House and the Capitol were bathed in radiant sunshine that produced an almost blinding intensity as it reflected off the new frozen mantle. Residential areas in the city and suburbs teemed with children taking advantage of a snow day to engage in sledding and snowball fights that were relatively unusual in the region. Not far from these frolicking youngsters, a dramatic national event was unfolding. Dwight Eisenhower, at that time the oldest man to serve as president, was about to turn over the reins of government to John F. Kennedy, the youngest man elected to that office.

The newly inaugurated president was a parent of Boomer children and the first occupant of the White House who had been born in the twentieth century. His exceptionally youthful good looks were enhanced by his even younger wife, Jacqueline. The new first couple could have fit comfortably into any gathering of young husbands and wives engaged in managing
their exuberant young children while socializing with other adults. As the president delivered his rousing, often-to-be-quoted inaugural speech that was noticeably pitched toward young Americans, the oldest Boomers were midway through their first year of high school while the youngest members of their generation would not be born for nearly another four years. Yet when Kennedy issued his clarion call for young citizens to consider what they could do for their country, not what their country could do for them, the message resonated through an entire generation, however many years they were from voting age.

John and Jacqueline Kennedy's thousand days in the White House would soon be compared to
Camelot
, the smash Broadway musical that chronicled the mythological world of King Arthur and his wife, Guinevere, and their attempts to secure decency and freedom in a barbaric and warlike world. Much like King Arthur's reign, the Kennedy years would emerge as a potent mixture of factual events, speculative theories, and near myth, in which the line between reality and fantasy seemed permanently blurred. For Boomer children this was an appropriate combination, for the first years of the 1960s would offer nostalgic memories and a seductive spectrum of possible alternate realities if destiny had not intruded on a Dallas motorcade.

Boomer families and the Kennedy family were entwined almost immediately. Images of John Jr. crawling under the Oval Office desk, Caroline hunting for Easter eggs on the White House lawn, the grim family vigil as newborn Patrick wavered between life and death—all resonated with young families in the early sixties. For Boomer children, the Kennedy mystique was furthered by photos of touch football on the Hyannis Port beach, presidential promotion of physical
fitness in schools, and Kennedy lookalike comedian Vaughn Meader's uncanny duplication of the president's vocal exhortations. Jacqueline Kennedy engaged millions of young mothers as she announced proudly that her children were “Spock babies,” and her traditional pillbox hats and bouffant hairstyles set fashion modes in even the smallest communities. Growing up in the Kennedy era would emerge as a major subset of the motion picture industry as Boomers replayed the sounds and the sights of that period in
American Graffiti, Animal House, Dirty Dancing
, and
Hairspray
.

Much of the aura of the Camelot White House was a product of the relationship of John and Jacqueline Kennedy and their Boomer children, Caroline and John Jr.
(John F. Kennedy Library)

While historians continue to debate whether the Kennedy era was the tail end of the fifties or the precursor of the more radical late sixties, many Boomers old enough to remember
those years would agree with neither premise; they would contend that Camelot was simply unique. It was the scariest part of the cold war, with the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it was also a time for new fashions, new music, and new ideas that extended beyond the political and economic aspects of the New Frontier. Somewhere between nostalgia and reality, the Kennedy era seems to provide a tangible bridge between the fifties and the sixties, especially in relation to the youthful concepts of the children who lived through the experience.

During the Kennedy years, postwar babies poured into the secondary school system and by 1963 occupied every grade level from kindergarten to senior high school. For the first time school officials could no longer transfer resources and personnel from less-crowded grades to overcrowded grades; now all grades were overcrowded. Even as new schools were built, finding teachers for them proved difficult as the average stipend of $4,000 a year was still less than enticing for a college graduate who could earn 50 percent more in the private sector. Harried principals played endless academic shell games in their attempts to cover all classes. When a new eleventh-grade English teacher was hired, the principal might shift the incumbent instructor to the still vacant eleventh-grade social studies slot because he or she had taken two or three history courses in college, and that experience might be just enough to keep ahead of the students. Young graduates with biology certification might find themselves teaching even more short-staffed chemistry courses, with vague promises that a certified teacher in that field might eventually be found.

The new president placed education among the top three or four concerns for his administration, and by 1963 school
spending had risen to 6 percent of the Gross National Product, compared to 3 percent in 1946. The knowledge industry now rivaled manufacturing as an American activity, as the 50 million students enrolled in schools nearly equaled the number of full-time workers. Beyond the formal classroom, the emergence of communications satellites, cable television, automatic copying machines, and touch-tone telephones signaled the beginning of a new communications revolution that would increasingly affect Boomer children.

Just as these children were offered tantalizing glimpses of a “Jetsons”-like future, they also encountered a glimpse of a possible Armageddon far more terrifying than even the worst days of the Sputnik crisis. Kennedy's predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, had countered the emotional shock of Soviet space spectaculars and the blustering threats of Soviet chairman Nikita Khrushchev with the calm demeanor of a former military commander who knew that his own country was far stronger. Khrushchev viewed the less experienced, younger Kennedy as more susceptible to threats and nearly ignited a nuclear holocaust. Few Boomers were old enough to understand the intricacies of East-West rivalry over access to West Berlin, the construction of the Berlin Wall, or the discovery of Soviet missiles based in Cuba. What they did see was massive construction of fallout shelters in new schools, national magazine and television features on how to turn family basements into shelters, and grim official hints that “duck and cover” in the classroom might be useless in a Soviet missile barrage that was calculated to kill more than half of all Americans instantly while leaving millions more to die slowly of radiation poisoning.

The classroom Civil Defense films of the fifties had focused on the terrifying but still somehow limited threat
of a handful of Soviet bombers penetrating a powerful air defense to drop relatively primitive atomic bombs. Now, as sabers rattled over Berlin or Cuba, even relatively young children were informed that there was simply no defense against an enemy missile that could reach the United States minutes after launch with a payload of death that surpassed that of a hundred 1950s bombers. A frightening film watched by more than a few children in its 1953 release was
Invasion USA
, which depicted a Soviet ground invasion and partial occupation of an unprepared America. A decade later, films such as
On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove
, and
Fail-Safe
implied that much or all of the nation might be annihilated in a nuclear conflict.

If there was a moment when Boomers who grew up during the cold war seriously questioned whether they would live to see adulthood, it was during the spectacular autumn of October 1962. Children and teenagers familiar with stark nuclear-test films and multiple episodes of television programs such as
One Step Beyond
and
Twilight Zone
, depicting the many terrors of nuclear war, now saw their nation reach the precipice. On Monday, October 22, with military mobilization and defense alerts as the backdrop, President Kennedy interrupted regular television programming to announce a naval blockade of Cuba and a strong hint that Soviet failure to remove their missiles from that nation might lead to a nuclear exchange. Younger children considering Halloween costume options and teenagers moving toward a driver's license, first date, first kiss, or first prom sat in stunned silence. With varying levels of comprehension, they realized that neither Halloween nor the homecoming dance might come this year, or perhaps ever again. American schools and civil defense agencies had done a comprehensive job of
alerting children to the dangers of nuclear war; now perhaps they thought they had done their job too well as World War III seemed to become an imminent possibility.

During the next few days the long-feared nuclear war very nearly happened, and as Soviet ships probed the American naval blockade, CBS anchor Walter Cronkite described a litany of probable moves and countermoves that he strongly hinted would end in war unless miraculously short-circuited. Then, as one Kennedy official noted, Washington and Moscow went “eyeball to eyeball,” and the other side “blinked.” Children across the nation took cues from their parents and collectively exhaled. Suddenly the failure to study for an upcoming math test would actually (and thankfully) once more have consequences. Now it again mattered whether your mother purchased a Casper the Ghost costume or turned you into a Halloween ghost with homemade materials.

None of the 76 million Boomers would see the cold war end during their childhood or even during their young adulthood. Soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the struggle between the United States and Communist powers would push the nation into the war that defined the Boomer generation and produced conflict at home as well as abroad. Yet once those October days had passed, and trick-or-treat and Halloween dances had pushed war fears into the background, the collective near-death experiences of Boomer children gradually returned to activities that would later reignite the nostalgia for Camelot. The United States and the Soviet Union quickly installed a “hot line” communications system that at least made accidental war less likely. In June 1963 the young president, in a dramatic commencement address at American University, emphasized the commonalities, rather than the differences, between the rival powers and set the
stage for a nuclear test ban. As young Americans watched their president mobbed by cheering Europeans from Dublin to Berlin, and meeting with leaders who always appeared much older, the link between the young leader and the Boomer generation seemed almost magical.