(I originally wrote this in June, 2004, on the occasion of the death of former President Ronald Reagan.)
I
This week my subscription to National Review magazine, ordered about two weeks ago, kicked in.
In yesterday’s mail I received NR’s special commemorative edition on the recent passing of Ronald Reagan.
I was reading it last night in class, to prevent myself from falling asleep out of sheer boredom during the first of a months’ worth of lectures on bankruptcy, the final section of a paralegal course I’m taking at the University of San Diego. Every essay in this issue is dedicated to some aspect of Reagan or his legacy.
I found something in one of the essays thought-provoking to say the least: I reflected on it in the car all the way home from school.
Among the authors who contributed encomiums to the late president was historian Paul Johnson, author of “Modern Times,” one of the best books on 20th Century history I ever read, by the way.
Describing the situation Reagan inherited when he was first elected president in 1980, Johnson wrote:
“The 1970s had seen a president forced to retire in disgrace, and an unelected president with no mandate, beaten in turn by a feeble Democrat from the south who had no obvious policy or coherent view of the world. In Washington, a triumphant but leaderless Congress usurped executive authority, allowing a triumphant Soviet Union, and its surrogates in Cuba and Vietnam, to do what they willed in Africa and Asia. America’s apparent decline as a great power was symbolized, in a terrible moment early in 1980, by a shocking military fiasco in Iran.”
I could add my own lugubrious memories of the 1970s to Johnson’s: gas lines. The Chevy Vega and the Ford Pinto. Stagflation. Unemployment soaring toward 10 percent. The U.N. transformed into a Third World debating society, with America blamed for every problem on earth. Mason Reese.
And Johnson didn’t bother to mention, but I will, the spectacle of Americans clinging to helicopters to get out of Saigon as the situation in Vietnam finally collapsed on April 30, 1975.
On that same subject, I also remember the 1975 Academy Awards show. The anti-American, pro-Communist film "Hearts and Minds" won the Oscar for Best Documentary. As if that weren’t bad enough, two of the American communist doofuses who had been involved in making it got up to accept the award, and they crowed to an approving audience of how South Vietnam was about to be “liberated.” In Hollywood anyway, little has changed.
As for roller disco, polyester leisure suits and big, ugly medallions, well, to paraphrase Mark Twain, we’ll draw the curtain of charity on that.
It’s hardly surprising that Jimmy Carter, when he sought re-election as president in 1980, had to resort to desperate scare-tactics: Democrats pitched a vision of Reagan as a bug-eyed, right-wing maniac who would abolish Social Security with one breath and mash his thumb on the nuclear button with the next. There wasn’t a single thing in his own record that Carter could point to as evidence that we should re-elect him, which left his campaign with no strategy except to demonize Reagan, which is all it did, and to no avail, because by 1980 America had clearly had enough.
In November, 1979, when our embassy in Iran was overrun, (it was just a month later, by the way, that Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan) things had been sliding steadily from bad to worse for six years, starting with the Watergate mess in ’73, and there was very little expectation amongst Americans that they would ever get better.
Tom Wolfe famously called the 1970s the “Me" decade, but the catch-phrase I remember much better from those years is “lowered expectations.” The Oscar for Best Picture of 1976 went to Sylvester Stallone’s "Rocky," a movie in which a from-nowhere prizefighter is offered a miraculous shot at the heavyweight title, only to realize before the fight even occurs that he has no chance of winning, and announces that he just wants to “go the distance,” in other words, he’s willing to settle for second best. Willingness to settle for second best had never been an American core value, and perhaps "Rocky" reflected the era’s malaise in much the same way that the film which followed it as Best Picture the very next year, "Star Wars," reflected a concomitant thirst for pure escapism. In 1933 Americans crowded into theaters to watch top-hatted Fred Astaire dance with slinky Ginger Rogers and thereby escape for a couple of hours the horrors of the Great Depression. In 1977 they crowded into theaters to watch Luke Skywalker dance with Darth Vader, probably for much the same reason. I remember well the fanfare that attended the appearance of "Star Wars," the runaway summer hit of that year: “It’s the return of...ENTERTAINMENT!” The reviews trumpeted, and all summer long, John Williams’ stirring orchestral prelude to the movie blared from radios all over the country. In the long view off the caboose of the train, all that hyperbole and fanfare seems a collective sigh of relief.
In short, the 1970s were a very bad decade for America, and Reagan, according to Johnson, affected an almost miraculous turnaround in the nationwide, and worldwide situation during his eight years in office. He restored our national confidence, stage-managed the destruction of the Soviet empire and brought America back to a role of pre-eminence on the world scene. The ‘70s were the disease and Reagan was the cure.
But here’s what got me thinking: those godawful ‘70s were also the decade in which I came of age. And despite all of the introspection I’ve been doing in my personal journals for more than 30 years now, I have never really made any serious attempt to come to grips with my own relationship to the era in which I grew up, and how it may have affected my entire life. I’ve written at length of how my father, who came of age during the Depression, let that traumatic experience shape his attitudes and behavior for the rest of his days, but I have written little or nothing of how my own experience of being a “‘70s kid” might have profoundly influenced the kind of man I became in the ‘80s, ‘90s and right up until today, as I write this at the age of 48.
Surely, some of the most important years of anyone’s life are the period between their teens and early twenties. Goals, dreams, ambitions and attitudes that will last a lifetime are forged between early adolescence and the time when you’re launching yourself on the great world as a young adult. On January 1, 1970 I was 14 years old. On January 1, 1980, I was 24. I graduated from high school in 1973, from college in ’77. If anyone can legitimately claim to be a product of the 1970s, it’s those of us who were born around the end of the first Eisenhower administration, circa 1955. Our parents came of age in a time of national economic disaster and psychological pain, and we in turn came of age in a period of national economic lassitude and psychological numbness. (By the way, I’ve mentioned the fate of the Soviets a couple of times; it’s a curious fact that Russians tend to view the 1970s in much the same way we do: the years of Leonid Brezhnev are referred to in post-Soviet Russia as “the period of stagnation.”)
It’s an accepted principle that our capitalist, free-market economy runs in cycles of boom and bust. Perhaps the national mood follows a similarly cyclical pattern. The malaise of the ‘30s was corrected by World War II, which in turn ushered in a period of such confidence that many were speaking of an “American Century” beginning in 1945. Our sudden postwar affluence resulted in a burgeoning middle class whose satisfaction with its newly-found prosperity shaped the 1950s, a decade (perhaps unjustly) characterized as a spiritual and intellectual wasteland, whose contrary symbols were the gray flannel suit and the beatnik T-shirt that was a response to it. The confidence in their own and America’s future which was instilled into babies born during the war and nourished by the optimism of the Kennedy years, led in turn to the waves of college-campus idealism of the early 1960s. That spirit promptly found fertile ground in the Civil Rights movement, and created a general confidence among the younger generation that they could change the world for the better, which was then dashed to pieces by the Vietnam war. In response to the war, the hippies, who were the younger descendants of the beats of a decade earlier, turned on, tuned in and dropped out as the country watched war, assassination and inner-city rioting explode all over its TV sets. My older sister once characterized the 1960s as a period when, for ten years, “the whole country threw up.” Pop culture, so often a good reflection of the time that produces it, telescoped the experience of the decade quite neatly as it came to a close: Woodstock engendered Altamont in short order. In the words of one commentator, the counter-culture “went from flower-power to death-tripping in a matter of months.”
Tired of the constant turmoil and upheaval that the years of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson had brought with them, in 1968 America turned to Richard Nixon, and the rest is not just history, it’s my personal history, mine and everyone else’s who was born about the same time I was. Nixon was elected for his first term on Nov. 4, 1968. Reams have been written about what a tumultuous year ’68 was; I won’t get into that here. The important thing is, on the night Nixon was elected, I had just turned 13. I was primed and ready to become a ‘70s kid.
I don’t even have to think very long or very hard to come up with an example of how I was sideswiped by the 1970s in a highly personal way.
As the decade began, I was a teenager with understandably little perspective on what was happening with the country or the world at large. We were Republicans and conservatives in my family; on the morning when Nixon was declared the winner of that very-close ’68 campaign against Hubert Humphrey, my father got up and hugged my mother. It was good news in our household: after eight years of chaos ruddered by Democratic presidents, the country would now get back to normal. So we thought, anyway. I was of course aware of Vietnam as a child, and at our house we supported the war effort; as a Republican family we believed that the crusade against world Communism was rightly America’s number-one priority. Social issues could wait until the Communist hydra had been slaughtered. Of course, as the war dragged on, even my parents’ perspective on it began to change. My father, as staunch a Republican as you could ask for, declared some time in the early ‘70s that he was “By-God beginning to understand how the young people in this country feel” about the war. Clearly, even his patience with it was beginning to wear thin, and My Lai certainly didn’t help, although my father was with those who felt that William Calley was just a patsy for the higher-ups. I had no inkling of it at the time of course, but I think now that, as 1973, the year in which I would turn 18 and become eligible for the draft approached, my father was beginning to worry about Vietnam getting its clutches on me.
As it turned out, I was spared by inches: the last American to be drafted into the armed forces was inducted on June 30 of that year. I turned 18 on October 12. Draft registration was still required of course, and I dutifully went over to city hall and filled out my draft form. I promptly received a notice in the mail that I had been classified “1-H,” a holding category. They were no longer drafting anyone. Two years later the draft was formally abolished.
In that summer of 1975, I was visiting Jim Provenza. These days Jim is a middle-aged lawyer with college-age kids, but in those days he was a young firebrand of the left, ardently loyal to and active within the Democratic Party, who dreamed of becoming the next John F. Kennedy and changing the face of America. It was Jim who informed me that summer day that I no longer even needed to carry my draft card in my wallet.
We quickly organized a little ceremony. "Hey, everybody!" Jim called into the house. "Come on out here! Kelley's going to burn his draft card!" To the huge amusement of Jim and his family, I took the card out into the Provenzas' driveway, got out my trusty Bic...and set that sucker aflame. Burning your draft card in 1970 would have gotten you tossed in jail, but by 1975 it was about as inflammatory an act (no pun intended) as saying “The south will rise again.”
My father not only changed his mind about the war, but as time went on, he changed his mind about Nixon. In fact, Richard Nixon accomplished something that I don’t think anyone else on this earth possibly could have: he turned my father into a Democrat, albeit for a short time. By 1974, with Watergate clearly about to become Nixon’s Waterloo, my father got so mad at Nixon that he went out and changed his voter registration to Democrat. He remained a Democrat for several years, in fact after his retirement from the Immigration Service, my father did a stint as an administrative assistant to a Democratic state senator in California. That turned him back into a Republican.
I had just finished my junior year of high school when the Watergate burglars broke in. Again, I watched TV news and read the papers now and then, so I knew what was going on in a general way, but I was too busy being a teenager to worry about it very much. In the summer of ’72 I was more interested in ogling Olga Korbut, the excruciatingly adorable little Soviet gymnast who was the darling of the Munich Olympics, than I was in anything I was seeing in the papers about Nixon or McGovern. (I signed up to do campaign work for Nixon that fall, but again, being a teenager won out: I think I only showed up at campaign HQ one time, then lost interest.) Come to think of it, the same was true of such issues as the energy crisis and the gas lines of 1974; by then I was using the family Chevrolet to attend junior college, but my dad was paying for all the gas: what did I care if it had just reached the outrageous price of 50 cents a gallon? (I pumped gas in high school for $1.50 an hour. At that time, gas cost about 32 cents a gallon. When I tell that story to today’s twentysomethings, their jaws drop at BOTH numbers.)
By 1976 I had finished community college and transferred to San Diego State University to do my upper-division studies. I loved history and wanted to make that my major subject, but I could see that my father was uncomfortable with my getting a liberal-arts degree. It was the Old Story of “What can you do with that?” Many of my classmates were struggling with the same dilemma: the Class of ’77 was loaded with Business Administration majors who would have preferred to be English majors but had to worry about finding a job. I had decided, early in college, not to major in English myself, though I had considered it. At 19, I allowed myself to be swayed by a purely romantic notion: I loved poetry and literature so much that I decided not to allow my love for these things to be poisoned by a lot of academic BS. Somehow I had the idea that a literary degree would take the fun out of reading Yeats, Shakespeare and Tolstoy, so I decided against it. History was a subject I also loved, but not with the level of passion I had for literature. Besides, history is all about scholarship: classrooms can’t hurt that.
Still, I had to face the Old Story, and so I struck a compromise with my dad and with myself. Since the age of 16 I had never wanted to be anything but a writer, so I decided that an acceptable halfway measure would be to double-major, in history and journalism. I entered the College of Liberal Arts to pursue a major in history, and then walked across campus to the College of Professional Studies to pursue a major in journalism. I had no notion of becoming a history professor; I simply liked the subject. After college, I figured, I could go to work as a reporter on a newspaper or magazine. What the heck, my 21-year-old self figured. It was all just time-serving anyway, until I managed to explode upon the literary scene with my first big novel. Yeah, right.
Setting aside the nonsense about big (or small) novels, little did I know that my decision to major in journalism had put me on a collision course with history, or at least with cultural trends. Talk about bad timing. And Nixon, appropriately enough, lay at the bottom of it all.
I made the decision about going for a journalism major during my junior year at State: 1976. The year of "Rocky."
But it was also the year of "All The President’s Men." The movie version of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s adventures as Washington Post reporters bringing down the President of the United States hit the silver screen that year, with rugged Robert Redford and handsome young Dustin Hoffman as their nowhere-near-as-good-looking real-life counterparts. (Why does Hollywood always do this, by the way? One thinks also of unbearably-glamorous revolutionaries Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton in "Reds." In real life, John Reed and Louise Bryant were a couple of two-baggers.)
I heard it said, back around that time, that at the moment in the film when Robert Redford bats his beautiful orbs inquisitively and utters the line, “Who’s Chuck Colson?” 250,000 college students immediately ran out and changed their majors. Suddenly, with "All The President’s Men," journalism became cool. Everybody wanted to be the hotshot investigative reporter who goes around pulling down the establishment. From the release of the film until the end of the decade and beyond, the nation’s journalism schools were chock full of wannabe Woodwards and Bernsteins, and I, who had no Watergatey pretensions at all, (remember, my plan was to become Scott Fitzgerald, not Bob Woodward) found myself standing in a field swamped by heavy traffic. Everybody and his dog wanted to be a reporter, and every newspaper opening in the country had 50 people (some still fighting pimples) lining up to interview for it.
Needless to say, it took me a long time to get my foot in any sort of door. In fact, it wasn’t until February, 1979, more than a year and a half after getting my B.A., that I managed to glom on to a tiny position with a tiny, independent news service in San Diego that was the very definition of “shoestring.” (In the meantime, I had worked at a series of minimum-wage jobs, including security guard and 7-Eleven clerk.) The County News Service of San Diego covered the city and county beats, and the courthouse, for subscriber weeklies countywide that did not have the resources to cover these beats for themselves.
How shoestring were we? The era was not only pre-Internet by more than a decade, but pre-computer by maybe three or four years. I would cover a meeting of the County Board of Supervisors, then type out my stories on an ancient Smith-Corona portable. At the end of the day, whoever’s turn it was to do the mailing that week would gather everyone’s copy, determine how many copies needed to be made using a chart of our client list, then drive over to radio station KGB-FM, with whom we had a trade-off agreement: in return for tip service, they let us use their Xerox machine.
Once the copies had been made, the “mailer” then had to drive them over to the main post office (not a branch, that would slow things down) and drop them in the mail to our clients. (Yes, we ran a news service using “snail mail.”) We had complimentary subscriptions to all the client newspapers, and once a month we would all get together with pencils and rulers and go through the tear sheets, measuring in inches how much of our copy they had used. We then billed the clients $1.00 per column inch. Each reporter got to keep 60 cents on the dollar for whatever we managed to get into print. The other 40 cents were set aside for overhead, basically envelopes and postage. No by-line, and 60 cents a column inch: that was payday. (We had a joke amongst ourselves: “Welcome to County News Service: 60 cents an inch and all the pride you can swallow.”)
For the rest of that year, I went back and forth between home and downtown San Diego, by car, by moped and sometimes by bus, to put in eight-hour days for what was usually somewhere between $250 and $300 a month. To supplement my meager newspaper income, I went back to minimum-wage work as a part-time security guard, spending my Saturday and Sunday afternoons and evenings walking a beat at a local tuna cannery. My father, who initially threw up his hands in despair at my 60-cents-per-column-inch gig, went along with this: I think he understood that I viewed this as my last chance, at age 23, to get into the newspaper business, and if I were willing to work seven days a week to do it, that meant I was serious.
By December, (just about the time those Soviet tanks were rolling into Afghanistan) I managed to land my first real newspaper job, on The Imperial Valley Press, a daily newspaper of about 15,000 circulation in El Centro, California. The “Woodstein” crowd notwithstanding, I got the job through an acquaintance who covered the county beat for the now-defunct Escondido Times-Advocate, had worked on the Imperial Valley paper previously, and still knew the managing editor. That inside track helped, as did the fact that nobody in his right mind would want to live in the Imperial Valley, where the average high temperature between June and September is somewhere between 110 and 118. (For my European and Russian friends, that’s 43 to 47 Celsius.) But I wanted to be a journalist, so off I went.
And that’s where I was the night in 1980 when Reagan was elected: I was living in a one-bedroom apartment in El Centro, for which I was paying $180 a month rent out of the roughly $850 a month which was my full salary. (I started at $720, but the managing editor liked the cut of my jib, so he gave me a raise.)
And I wasn’t expecting a whole lot more, which is my whole point in telling this story.
My father, who turned 20 in 1934, spent the rest of his life expecting the Depression to come back and pounce on him again at any moment, and he lived his life accordingly. He set his sights low, seldom dared to dream, and even when he did dream, for example of buying a farm, he talked himself out of it. He insisted, sometimes loudly, that job security and the guarantee of a retirement pension were the highest things anyone had a right to hope for. He worked 30 years for the Border Patrol and the Immigration Service, retired and spent his dotage sitting on the front porch watching the world go by, boasting of the size of his retirement income, but inwardly seething with resentment, convinced that life had somehow cheated him.
My outlook at 24 wasn’t as extreme as my father’s at the same age, for a couple of good reasons. For one, as bad as they were, the 1970s were not the 1930s, and for another, I had had the advantage of four years of college, something my father never got.
Still, like my father, I had come of age expecting little. The Nixon-Ford-Carter years were conducive to that.
Reagan and his team did, in eight years, gradually manage to turn things around. The change didn’t come quickly, in fact 1982, the second year of Reagan’s first administration, was a severe recession year, one in which I had the experience of being unemployed—for me, the ‘70s seemed to be continuing. But we all know that economic upturns and downturns both tend to lag several years behind changes in economic policy: the positive effects of “Reaganomics” didn’t really start to bear fruit until after he had left office, and after his successor, George Herbert Walker Bush, continued those policies into the 1990s. The Clintonistas tried to take the credit for the 1990s economic boom, but it was not theirs to take. They bashed the memory of Reagan’s administration while basking in the benefits of his economic legacy. (Later, Democrats tried to lay the blame for the 2000-2003 recession on George W. Bush, changing the subject when anyone happened to mention that it began in March, 2000, on Bill Clinton’s watch.)
The change in attitude between my generation and the one that followed it is hard to ignore. When I talk to twentysomethings, and even thirtysomethings, nowadays, I’m amazed at how high their expectations are. Babies born after 1970 have grown into adults who, I would not be at all surprised, scratch their heads in bewilderment at the willingness of Rocky Balboa to settle for second best in 1976. I was a federal employee from 1985 until 1999, and until I left the federal work force and went back to the private sector, I didn’t know what a corporate recruiter was. I’d never heard of one. Imagine my surprise when a corporate recruiter e-mailed me in 1999 and asked if I might be interested in a job writing for the marketing department of a custom software company. The idea that a company might hire people, and pay them salaries, simply to hire other people, was beyond anything in my experience. And yet when I talk to college students today, their expectation is that corporate recruiters will be looking for them upon graduation. Their expectation (happily unrealistic, even in today’s world) is that they’ll walk away from their college graduation ceremonies and be pulling down 75 thou a year the following week.
Talk about a generation gap. The war babies and their parents didn’t see eye to eye over Vietnam, long hair, rock music and drugs. Now the generations may differ over rap, tattoos and body piercing, but I think there’s also a divergence on something fundamentally more important, namely, what they expect as regards the quality of life. I don’t have any children, but friends my own age who do are amused—-and sometimes understandably annoyed—-by the way their high school and college-age children seem to expect so much more coming out of the gate than we did. We ‘70s kids, for the most part, expected to start out humble and slow. I don’t say that to try and make us sound more virtuous than our progeny, it was simply a fact, a reflection of the era in which we grew up. Today’s college grads want it all, and they want it now. And they expect to get it, too.
It all came along too late for me, unfortunately. I’m getting close to 50, and the idea of even owning my own home is something I have only recently begun to think about. When I was young during the Carter years, interest rates stood at 21 percent. I assumed you had to have a huge pile of money to buy a house, and since I never raised a family, I never really thought I needed a house, so my thinking on that subject never changed. By contrast, I have a 26 year-old acquaintance who is aggressively buying and selling one house after another even as I write these words, claiming he’s going to be “the next Donald Trump, but a nice one.”
A few weeks ago I interviewed an 82 year-old World War II veteran, a man who had been at Normandy, for a newspaper story. While he poo-pooh’ed Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” applause for himself and his contemporaries, he nevertheless echoed Brokaw’s implied message about today’s young: “They have too much stuff and they got it too damn easy,” he said with genial scorn.
Well, the grumblings of the old about how soft and easy the young have it are themselves as old as the pyramids and then some, I’m sure.
But after interviewing this friendly, loquacious old vet, and realizing that it was people his grandchildren’s age that he was talking about, I surprised myself by realizing that my own attitudes aren’t that much different from his. My 22 year-old nephew drives a teal 1994 Honda Civic, fully loaded and souped up for drag racing, (I hope the cops nail him) that his grandfather bought for him for $4,500. My niece, 21, has a late-model Saturn. The only time my father ever bought me a car, it was a ’72 Chevy Luv pickup that cost $1,300, and I had to pay him back. That same nephew, by the way, is talking about opening up his own business as soon as he finishes college. (At the rate he’s taking classes, this should be around 2023.) I saw a newspaper article a few days ago about students at an affluent high school in California whose parents reward them for getting good grades with Jeep Cherokees, Lexus sedans and the like.
Today’s kids have too much stuff, and they got it too damn easy.
Like it or not, Reagan lies behind all of this. When he was reshaping economic policy in the early 1980s, the lefty-liberal crowd alternately worked themselves into a state of high dudgeon, and when that didn’t convince the country that Reagan was evil, beat their breasts and moaned about how this non-compassionate old meany was taking money from the poor, unleashing the forces of greed, glorifying selfishness, etc. etc. Yes, this non-compassionate cowboy who didn’t love the poor was determined to change policies that had given us 21 percent interest, 13 percent inflation and 10 percent unemployment. The bastard. Because Reagan was sworn in as president the year he was born, my nephew can now go around talking about opening up his own business when he finishes college.
Oh, and by the way, like many of his contemporaries, my nephew proudly sports a Che Guevara T-shirt. Times may change, and attitudes may change, but kids will always be kids.
As for me, my editor at the newspaper, who is about the same age as me (and facing his fourth marriage) has his eye on a little fixer-upper over in National City. Three bedrooms, two baths. $350,000, as reasonable a price as you’re going to find in San Diego County these days. He thinks I should take the plunge, too. But I’m not taking that old fart’s word for anything. I think I’ll go and have a talk with my friend who’s planning to become the next Donald Trump. He’s 26, so I’m sure I can count on him to give me good, practical advice for the 2000’s.
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