Permanent adolescents.(The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy )(Book review)

The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy Leonard Steinhorn St. Martin's Press, 336 pages, $24.95

When I was a law clerk to a federal judge in 1970, I often engaged him in discussions about current affairs. I remember arguing that the Vietnam War, then ongoing amid great controversy, was a uniquely unjustified and therefore evil war. The judge, a veteran of World War II, said that all wars were horrible and tragic. Then I countered by saying that the college students and other young people of the Baby Boom generation then demonstrating against the war were acting out of idealism. The judge thought not; he predicted that once the draft was abolished, the demonstrations would end. I disagreed and predicted that the demonstrations would go on. As was often the case, the judge was right and I was wrong. What looked to me like principled action on the part of Baby Boomers now seems more like an effort to delegitimize a war they did not want to fight.

This brings us to Leonard Steinhorn's The Greater Generation, an encomium to the Baby Boom cohort--or, more specifically, to the liberal half of the Baby Boomers. "What gives this generation its identity, what makes it cohere, what makes it more than just another age cohort," he writes, "is a shared sensibility, a unique worldview, a series of historical memories, and from these common touchpoints a set of norms and ideals to which most of its members generally subscribe."

Most? Maybe, but by only a small margin, and maybe not even that: voters 45 to 59, a category that includes most Boomers, went 51 to 48 percent for Bush in 2004. While Bill Clinton (b. 1946) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (b. 1948) are Baby Boomers (generally considered those born between 1946 and 1964), so are George Bush (b. 1946) and Dan Quayle (b. 1947). The Baby Boom generation produced a lot of liberal law professors (many of them overlapped with me at Yale Law School from 1966 to 1969) but it also produced Chief Justice John Roberts (b. 1955) and Justice Samuel Alito (b. 1950), who in his confirmation hearing unfavorably compared the privileged students he encountered at Princeton with the ordinary middle-class folks he had grown up with in Hamilton Township, New Jersey.

Still, Steinhorn is on to something. The Boomers were born into an America characterized by conformism, by a universally acceptable popular culture ("Farewell, Donna Reed" is one of Steinhorn's chapter titles), by the "organization man" mentality so memorably described by William Whyte. And yet as adults they have been a generation of diversity, partaking of niche popular cultures, many of them scathingly critical of each other, in an economy whose growth has been generated not by giant organizations but by individual entrepreneurs and small, agile firms that satisfy desires the big corporations never understood. Steinhorn notes that the Berkeley student rebellions of 1964 were a revolt against giant organizations. The sons and daughters of conformist America proved to be (in different ways, as the examples of Clinton and Bush suggest) nonconformists, or rather catalysts in creating an America where conformism to one universal culture is no longer the norm.

It's also true that the liberal Boomers Steinhorn celebrates played a role in changing some features of American life that most people took for granted in the 1950s, but which almost none of us would like to see return today--features like racial segregation, enforced by law and local terror. But it wasn't primarily Boomers, but rather their elders, who persuaded Americans to tear that system down: civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King (b. 1929) and Rosa Parks (b. 1913), politicians like Hubert Humphrey (b. 1911) and Jacob Javits (b. 1904).

Steinhorn also celebrates "women's liberation" as a great Boomer cause. However, leaders like Betty Friedan (b. 1921) and Gloria Steinem (b. 1934) were not ...