George Bush's 60's Were Real, Too

In the spring of 1968, the same season in which George W. Bush graduated from Yale, the university's blue-collar workers went on strike. Similar strikes would shut down the school's dining halls later on, but not this time, thanks to students who crossed the picket lines to keep the kitchens cooking. Remember those students the next time somebody suggests that there was something odd about George W. Bush's noninvolvement in the student militancy of the 1960's.

The 60's were indeed a time of radical ferment. But that ferment was the work of a relative minority, larger at Al Gore's Harvard, smaller at George Bush's Yale. Richard Nixon and George Wallace together won almost 60 percent of the vote in 1968. Astute Democrats likewise knew which way the wind was blowing: Jimmy Carter, the lone Democrat to reach the White House in the two decades between the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton, defended Lieut. William Calley when he was tried for the My Lai massacre, calling him a scapegoat. As governor of Georgia, Mr. Carter even asked motorists to drive with their headlights on in daylight hours to show sympathy.

Young people, too, were more conservative than they are usually depicted. Indeed, polls during the Vietnam War consistently showed that young men, 18 to 24 years old, were the most hawkish segment of the population.

College students, it's true, hewed further to the left than did their non-collegian peers. But even on campus, the radical explosion of the 1960's gathered steam later and ended more abruptly than is usually recalled. Pick up a yearbook from any of the Ivy League colleges and look at the photographs of the class of 1968. With rare exceptions, you will see row after row of neatly shaven, short-haired, necktied young men. When Tom Wolfe visited the Yale campus a year or so later, he was startled by the sudden proliferation of overalls and blue jeans. He later observed that the whole place looked like a mining camp circa 1934.

What happened between the taking of those yearbook photos, sometime in 1967, and the spring of 1969? A change in the draft law exposed undergraduate men to a heightened risk of being sent unwillingly into the military. Until 1969, an educated man could feel reasonably sure of avoiding service. The huge size of the baby boom cohort offered the military many more 18-year-olds than it needed. In fact, a man's odds of being drafted in 1968, the year of the Tet offensive, were actually lower than in 1959, a peacetime year. Abundant manpower in turn made possible a generous system of student deferments.

After Tet, however, President Johnson -- motivated either by populist outrage or by vindictiveness against what he saw as his pampered critics -- severely limited student deferments. Suddenly students faced a real prospect of being sent to war. They reacted with fury.

Their fury lasted only as long as their exposure did. By fall 1971, President Nixon had withdrawn most ground combat units from Indochina, and radicals on campus and off were already lamenting the deflation of their "movement." Within 18 months, a peace pact was signed with the North Vietnamese. By then, the student protests seemed as distant to the newest Yalies as the world of Dink Stover.

So George W. Bush, Yale '68, is not clueless when he tells interviewers that he didn't see much of the radicalism of the 1960's. He is accurately representing the experience of his micro-generation.

His answer is telling in a more profound way as well. As posed by most journalists, the question -- "How could you have been untouched by the campus activism of the 1960's?" -- has a disingenuous edge to it. It pretends to be asking for information, but it conceals a reproach. The question assumes that any thoughtful, decent student ought to have been caught up in that radicalism -- as were Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton (albeit in his characteristically self-protective way) and, perhaps, the journalist himself or herself.

And what kind of assumption is that? The 1960's radicals were wrong about cutting off American arms and aid to South Vietnam, wrong about the larger struggle with the Soviet Union, wrong about the harmlessness of drugs, wrong about eliminating freshman composition from the college curriculum. Even Mr. Bush's rival for the presidency understands that, which may explain why he begins his Internet campaign biography with the arresting sentence, "Al Gore served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam."

Back in the 1970's, some French intellectual quipped that it was morally finer to have been wrong about the Soviet Union than to have been right. American politics, though, has less room for that kind of intellectual frivolity. It is not better to have been wrong than to have been right. Isn't it long past time that our memories of the 1960's accept that truth?