1. 1968 - Born to be wild

Speaker A
The economist.

John Prideaux
Here'S a dirty secret about covering american politics. Most days it's the best job in the world, which is why I've been doing it for years. But the thing is, and I know I'm not alone in this, I've been kind of dreading this election. There's so much at stake, the most important election in a generation, as we newsfolk like to say. But this time that really feels true.

And yet it also feels like we've seen it all before.

For months, when people find out what I do for a living, I've been asked the same thing. How did two very old and unpopular men wind up running for the worlds most demanding job again? Why have they been so hesitant to let go of power and give someone younger a turn? And after Joe Bidens disastrous performance in the first debate of this campaign, those questions seem more urgent than ever. If he steps aside now, leaving it so late will have plunged the presidential election into chaos.

If Biden stays, Americans will choose between one president who will be 86 by the time he leaves office and another who will be 82. Why has this generation had such a grip on power? This podcast is my attempt at an answer. What I keep coming back to is it's objectively weird that every president since Bill Clinton in 1992, with the one big exception of Barack Obama, has been a white man born in the 1940s. America's population is younger than any other rich country, yet a guy born in the age of the jukebox could still be president at the end of this decade.

What's so special about this cohort of Americans born in the 1940s? It's a generation dealt pocket aces. Their parents defeated the Nazis and won the cold War. They hit the jobs market at an unmatched period of wealth creation and saw step changes in everything from antibiotics to air travel and personal computing. They've lived through giant leaps in gender and racial equality, and yet their last act in politics sees the two main parties accusing each other of wrecking american democracy.

Their journey began in a triumphant moment in american history, its ending in acrimony.

How come this cohort continues to define politics and in many ways, what it means to be an american?

I'm John Prudeau from the Economist. This is boom, the generation that blew up american politics.

To find some answers, I've been talking to dozens of american men and women born in the 1940s or thereabouts. Pedants, beware. This is a slight tweak to the precise definition of a baby boomer. I wanted to hear from people the same vintage as Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and the crop of senators and justices who still occupy the seats of power. I wanted to see american politics through their eyes.

My journey took me from waffle houses in Alabama to penthouses in Manhattan. Like most people in their seventies and eighties, they're busy with hobbies and tell stories about time spent with grandchildren. Which makes it all the stranger that two of them still want so badly to be president again.

One last thing before we get stuck in. To tell the story of a generation, to find out what it was like to live through the events, trends, and political currents that got us to this point. I've whittled eight decades down to six pivotal years that shaped them and America. And we're going to start with the year that changed everything. A year that can seem so familiar, yet in the light of what's happening now looks different.

A year that explains so much about this generation's journey.

Episode 119 68 born to be wild.

Speaker A
Post World War two, life in America was very romantic. We won the second world war, and we were a society that was on the move, and everybody felt that. Talk to someone born in 1940s America about their childhood and you'll get stories that make it seem pretty idyllic. But what's really striking is how much they mentioned the war. And of course, my father went to World War two and came back, and we were then the recipients of the generosity of the government with the GI bill.

Speaker C
And that sent my father to college. It meant that when I was seven, we moved into a little house. These kids grew up in the afterglow of a great, the greatest american victory my parents had. They would have dinner parties and, you know, so people, all of that generation, and they would talk about the war a lot. And us kids were sitting on the stairs listening.

John Prideaux
The boomers parents had won world War two by marshaling all of America's power and ingenuity, and ultimately a nuclear bomb. My father was a world War two veteran. My uncles were all world War two veterans. And so much of your social life in these little towns revolved around some veterans issue and the American Legion Club, or the american veterans of foreign wars, the FW Club. It was a righteous war where America was undoubtedly on the right side.

Speaker A
You grew up with a real understanding and sense of what happened in World War Two and why America's involvement was so important and so necessary.

So I went down to the general office and walked in with my orders and said, I'm private Hagel. I'd like to volunteer to go to Vietnam.

John Prideaux
In 1968. Chuck Hagel signed up for a different war. He went from small town Nebraska to fight his generations, fight in Asia, the war against the communist menace in the east. The army offered him a cushy job testing weapons in Germany, but he told them he didn't want it. I mean, the whole orderly room just went stunned silent when I said that.

Speaker A
And this young lieutenant said, well, why don't you go over there and sit down, private, and just let me talk to somebody. He wanted to serve on the front line just like his father and his uncles. Then the major comes out, are you feeling okay? You have a problem? You're not in trouble with the law, are you?

So I said, no, no, no. Well, I sat there for another hour. Then a catholic priest came out. The chaplain said, could we talk? And I said, sure.

So he gets into. You've not gotten any girl in trouble, have you, or any personal problems? And why would you do this? Why would you not go to Germany? That's pretty good duty.

John Prideaux
That same year, Thomas Vallely left the comfort of the Boston suburbs and signed up, too, another boomer inspired by his father's wartime service. And it was partially the fault of the flight jacket that he brought home from the Pacific. And I used to wear the jacket around the house thinking that, you know, that's what I wanted to do. And I would like stand in front of the mirror and say, you know, I definitely want to go to Vietnam and be part of this mythical idea that, you know, we were sold. We were going to go fight for freedom around the world.

Like so many of his generation, vallely had thought that Vietnam was a noble fight. So I blame the jacket, the leather flight jacket, for my getting wayward and going in the Marine Corps when I was 18 years old, 19 years old. America's leaders were telling these young recruits they were fighting another righteous war and that America was winning. What changed in 1968 is that people stopped believing them.

Speaker A
Columns of smoke rose skyward as block after block in the capital city burned with the fires of Viet Cong treachery. In January, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched a wave of surprise attacks against the US and its allies.

Government soldiers reacted quickly to counter the communist offensive and to protect civilian life and property. Americans and the South Vietnamese eventually fought off the Tet offensive, but it changed how people at home thought about the war. The attack had been planned with the aim of sapping american morale, and it worked. I grew up in southern California, Long beach. It was a beautiful place.

John Prideaux
Margo Alexander stayed in California for college. We started to lose faith in the government because of Vietnam. She was watching the progress of the war on television at UC Berkeley, and it all went wrong. Just as Americans started getting their news in the most vivid way possible. A.

Quarter of american households had a colored television. By 1968, Americans raised on breezy newsreel and radio bulletins were watching a real life horror show play out in their living rooms. They were saying, we were making progress, but we were getting television. Then that led you to believe that you didn't. An NBC report on the Tet offensive showed a Viet Cong soldier executed with a pistol to the head.

By the end of 1968, 1.25 million american men had been conscripted. There was a draft, so you knew people who came back, and what they told you is like, well, geeze, this doesn't seem quite the same. America's hopes of victory in Vietnam had crashed into reality. It was clear that there'd be no end to the war anytime soon. 1968 was the year many young Americans found out something that would stay with them for the rest of their lives.

The people in charge weren't really in control and were lying to them about it. You know, a few weeks, maybe a month. I realize this is something, something not right here. No one really knows what's going on. Thomas Vallelly was seeing all this for himself on the battlefield in a Marine Corps rifle company just south of the coastal city of Danang.

Speaker A
And we would go out on patrol. We would get a little bit of enemy contact, but you could see in the enemy contact, we did not really understand where we were.

John Prideaux
He also became disillusioned, and we had. Sort of a disdain for civilian life. The sort of bombing of fairly innocent villages for. For no particularly strategic reason. There weren't that many casualties all the time from it.

Speaker A
So it wasn't like, oh, we bombed the village and everyone died. But you could see that there was something that was not right in the sort of military doctrine about how it was. So I knew that very, very early. On, Chuck Hegel, who'd turned down that low risk job in Germany to go to Vietnam, changed his mind, too. As I watched, you know, we lost 58,000 dead Americans.

And it just. It got me because the dishonesty of it and what it did to the country. And so I just walked away from it and said it was a huge mistake.

John Prideaux
Not everyone in their generation shared the sense of duty that led vallely and Hegel to war. There was a desperation to avoid the draft. If you were at college, you could get a draft deferment to continue your studies. A middle class student from Delaware received multiple passes this way. And in 1968, Joe Biden was ruled out of serving in Vietnam completely because of childhood asthma.

A young tearaway from Queens had been sent to a military academy in upstate New York to learn some discipline. It was here that Donald Trump scored an early election victory, voted the school's ladies man. But even a product of a military academy could avoid the draft through college deferments. Then, like Biden in 1968, he got a medical exemption for bone spurs on his feet. A Vietnam veteran has never been president, and those who did serve on the front lines and later ran for the presidency all lost.

Before 1968, America largely conformed with a comfortable political aid and anti communism abroad, high tax and big government at home, bipartisanship in Congress, all underpinned by an economic boom.

Lyndon Baines Johnson, president as 1968 began, seemed to the boomers like a relic. Utterly ruthless in private, in public, he was America's stolid dad in chief, the epitome of centrist consensus. I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office, the presidency of your country. Johnson was committed to two hugely ambitious grand projects. At home, he was trying to build a more generous America, boosting public spending and bringing in civil rights.

And in Vietnam, he was trying to stop the communist advance. All that spending was fueling inflation. He was forced to make cuts and raise taxes. And no matter how many young boomers he sent into battle, it did no good. In March 1968, he gave up, felled by the Vietnam War.

Speaker A
I shall not see and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president. To many boomers, it was good riddance to an out of touch old man. Although at 59, Johnson was still younger than ex president Barack Obama is now, the old liberal centre that had dominated America since World War two was under attack from both sides. Johnson sensed that the best way to serve his country was to stand aside. But for the youthful left, Johnson's premature retirement was never going to be enough.

Kit Bak
We had nuclear air raid drills in my elementary school.

We ran out into the hall and lay down face first, head against our locker.

John Prideaux
Kit back. Grew up in Seattle. Hers was a happy childhood, despite the regular reminders kids of her generation were getting of impending nuclear confrontation. If an enemy attacks us with nuclear weapons, danger will come not just from blast or heat or nearby radiation effect. The only thing I could think, I guess us kids could think of was they would know who our bodies were because we were in front of our lockers.

By 1968, she had been to college on the other side of the country, in Pennsylvania. There were nearly 7 million undergraduates in America at this point, a vast new cohort brought into existence by the passage of President Johnson's Higher Education act and one ready to question the status quo. And for me, that meant, well, I'm certainly not going to graduate school. I got to get out there and save the world, or at least fix our country. Back had started a chapter of students for a democratic society.

SDS was the leading group of an emerging new left force that was putting pressure on the centrist status quo from the universities. What began as a movement of idealistic young boomers, pro civil rights and determined to refresh american democracy, became radicalised against the state by the Vietnam War. Kitbak had started out selling anti war buttons on campus. By 1968, SDS was talking about guerrilla action and organizing rebellion. A us soldier had pointed a gun at me and, I mean, it wasn't me in particular, it was many of us.

Back's own experience of the violence came on an anti war march in Washington. That's what really sent me over the edge, I think, in terms of how far I was willing to go. I said, you can't do that. I was pissed off. You know, you can't point a gun at another american citizen who's just standing there.

It was a turning point for her. I wasn't sure that the country was salvageable at that point, that it just had to go back. Went to work in SDS's national office in Chicago, writing their weekly newspaper. It was one of the ways the group organized their tens of thousands of members. At campuses all over America.

Speaker A
We call on all students, faculty, staff and workers of the university to support our strife. We ask that all students. In April, students at Columbia University in New York rebelled. They were angry at the university's plans to tear down part of a poor black neighborhood to build a gym and at its tacit support for the Vietnam War, into this cauldron of rebellion, leaders from SDS and the New Left and the Black Panther movement arrived. The police responded with force, beating protesters and dragging them away.

John Prideaux
It was one of many campus protests in 1968. All across America, something was visibly coming apart. It really seemed like the revolution was nigh. It was on the way.

Campus radicals were angry about Vietnam, but also about the slow pace of change. Their other great cause was civil rights. And in Alabama, where thered been encouraging signs that even in the south, progress was possible. Tensions were about to erupt. Mobile was certainly very much part of the status quo in the south, the racial status quo and all of that.

Fry Gilliard
And in the 1950s, when I was. A little kid, Fry Gilliard was a witness to it all. I met him at his house on the edge of a tidal river just off Mobile Bayou. His backyard runs into the marsh abundant with bird life. Gilliard grew up nearby in the segregated south.

I came of age in the 1960s, and so there were all kinds of reasons that kind of jolted some of us out of that complacency. Can you recall, were there specific things that jolted you, that made you think, hang on, something's really not right here? Yeah. The most important single thing along those lines for me, I was a junior in high school and went on a high school field trip from Mobile to Birmingham. Civil rights demonstrations were going on there, and Gilliard saw something that made him question the world he'd grown up in.

John Prideaux
Stepping out from his hotel one morning, he noticed two policemen arresting one of the protesters. And as they kind of shoved him along, they were not being. It was not police brutality, but certainly they weren't showing him much respect. They came within about 3ft of where I happened to be standing, just astonished at what was going on. And through no, you know, planning or premeditation of my own, I found myself looking into the eyes of Martin Luther King.

Fry Gilliard
His eyes looked very expressive, very sad to me. I don't really know, of course, what he was thinking, but it just kind of jolted me. It was like, something's wrong here, you know? The civil rights movement had asked white liberal America to look itself in the face. There had been progress in the years leading up to 1968, but as black Americans gained rights, many in white conservative America felt that theirs were being threatened.

John Prideaux
One man in particular took advantage of this at the ballot box. I knew him early on, and I met him and shook hands with him a couple of times because he was a judge in the adjoining counties to where my dad was the judge. During his childhood in southeastern Alabama, Bill Baxley knew a local judge named George. Wallace, and so they were friendly with each other. And being neighboring judges, I just knew who he was.

Wallace went into politics and after adopting a hard line on race, became governor of Alabama. And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.

In his inaugural address, Wallace vowed to defeat the civil rights movement. And it was not long before he had a chance to show the rest of the country he mentored. I was in law school on the second floor, in the open window wasn't air conditioned then. Baxley remembers watching as Wallace stood in the doorway of the main administrative building of the University of Alabama to prevent the first african american students enrolling. And I watched the spectacle, and I thought it was a disgrace to Alabama.

Speaker A
And I liked Wallace as a person, but I was very opposed to what he was doing. I thought it was wrong. I was wrong for the state, wrong for the country, wrong for everything that I believed. And I was very unhappy with him. Two black students were eventually able to enrol, but the stunt made him a national figure.

John Prideaux
And by 1968, Wallace was leading the attack on the center from the radical right. This is a national movement which can no longer be denied or brushed under the rug. In February 1968, Wallace announced he was running for president as a candidate for the American Independent Party. It is a true grassroots determination by millions of Americans and every one of the 50 states who, like you few, are tired of false promises and the ever growing centralization of governmental powers in Washington. Frank Gilliard understood why Wallace was so popular in the south.

Fry Gilliard
One of the things that he did was he taught America to think in code, to conflate, as Wallace did, deliberately urban crime with civil rights protests. Another thing they're going to have to be strong about and which people are concerned over this nation is the threat to the internal security of our country. By the breakdown of law and order in subsequent decades. Each time a police killing led to urban unrest, the same row over law and order versus legitimate protest would break out again. And I thought that was incredibly cynical.

And yet he had the ability to make people believe that their most fearful and resentful attitudes, that those were their best qualities. I mean, that the worst of who you are is the best of who you are. We're going to cut foreign aid off and ask you to pay back that which you've gotten in the past, because the average man, the average man in our country doesn't understand the paying of his money continuously to nations who not only won't help us, but even trade with the North Vietnamese. And we have defended Europe twice. The radical right had a champion, honing talking points that were picked up decades later.

John Prideaux
The center was vulnerable, attacked from both ends of the political spectrum.

One of the volunteers on Wallaces California campaign had never shown any interest in politics before. He was a bit of a loner, and it would turn out an escaped convict. By April 1968, James Earl Ray was in Memphis, Tennessee, where he fired a shot at a figure on a balcony across the street.

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Speaker A
Eyewitnesses to the assassination say that doctor King left his room 306 at the Lorraine hotel just before dinner to get some air, he walked over to the railroad. The loss of the most prominent voice of the civil rights movement was devastating for African Americans after years of peaceful protest, after being spat at and insulted and beaten up, after putting their faith in democracy against all odds, cities across the country erupted in riots.

I remember when I was told that Martin Luther King had been assassinated, and I just thought right away, I said, well, we're gonna have trouble. For James Baker, race had not been much of an issue growing up in integrated Ohio. But by 1968, he was in Wilmington, Delaware, with the domestic arm of the Peace Corps. Four days after King's death, a protest march to honor the fallen hero turned violent. And early afternoon, you could see the smoke rising in westerner city.

I had my black cashmere on with my black hat and my boots on. I met Richard Smith in a lush public park in Wilmington, not far from a church where he and other activists used to meet. He grew up in a poor black neighborhood in the city and was attracted by the approach of black power activists who rejected Martin Luther King's non violence, an approach that now made a bleak kind of sense.

I was a black panther. Tell me about that. It was just, we just seen things different. We didn't see things as peaceful. We didn't see things as not going after a piece of pie when we said we were black and proud, yes, we were proud to be in the community, we were proud to be in this country and everything, but we wasn't being treated right.

When the riots broke out, everybody took guns off against us and was scared that we was coming to the neighborhood, but we wound up burning our own neighborhoods down. For James Baker, the riots were terrifying. These guys are well organized because they had bricks up on top of the roofs, bottles, everything. And you couldn't hear the bricks because they would come and then they'd hit something and you'd hear the thud of. So you try to just be careful where you want, so nobody would hit you with a brick.

Cause you figure it would really kill you most likely if it would hit you from that distance. But the bottles was interesting because you could see the bottles, they would go by the streetlight and you'd see a flicker, so you knew a bottle was coming. The governor called in the National Guard to restore order. Armed guardsmen in military jeeps took over the streets of as they did across America that year, a headline in the Economist advised readers on learning to live with riots in most cities, the occupation was brief. In Wilmington, the troops stayed in the city's predominantly black neighborhoods for nine months.

It was at a concentration camp and we had curfew every day. That was 06:00 for nine months. So our freedom was taken away from us as black people because of stand up for our rights and stuff.

John Prideaux
Richard Smith had an unlikely ally, an irish guy whod been a lifeguard at his local pool and whod go on to be the best man at his wedding.

Speaker A
Doing the rides and stuff. He was there. He was at some churches that are sitting up in meetings with folks and stuff, trying to make a decision. Biden was all involved in that. He always was around someplace.

John Prideaux
Joe Biden had moved around a lot as a child, before his father became a used car salesman and settled in Wilmington. A door opened when he managed to persuade his dad to send him to a prestigious catholic private school. He worked as a groundskeeper over the summer to help with the fees. By 1968, he was at a city centre law firm, passing national guardsmen as he went to work. It was unfair, he would later write, that troops sent to protect him were effectively imprisoning Wilmingtons african american residents.

As he tells it, this was part of what drove him towards politics on the night Martin Luther King died. As Fry Gilliard remembers, Robert Kennedy, the senator from New York, was campaigning for the democratic nomination in Indianapolis, and he. Was scheduled to speak in the inner city in a black neighborhood. And he wound up being the person that told the crowd that Doctor King had been killed. I have some very sad news for all of you, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis.

Fry Gilliard
And police had told him, you can't go in that neighborhood. It's going to be too dangerous. And Kennedy made an impromptu speech to that crowd. What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred.

Speaker A
What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but as love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. And there were no riots in Indianapolis that night. You know.

John Prideaux
Young college kids were angry and frustrated. But Robert Kennedy seemed like he might be America's saviour. Perhaps he could reunite and redeem the centre, purge the country of racism, and end the war. Kennedy once spoke at Gilliard's university in Nashville. Then a skinny, earnest 21 year old with a short back and sides.

Gilliard went to ferry him from the airport. So I get in the backseat, and then Kennedy gets in to. And it's just the two of us in the car for 30 seconds or so. And he was very tired. It was his third or fourth stop of the day, and I was 21 years old and sitting with this charismatic presidential candidate, and I had this man bites dog sense that I need to say something here, right?

Fry Gilliard
And I happen to know, I don't remember how I knew that one of Kennedy's children, one of his sons, had been sick. And I just asked him how his son was doing, and he said, well, he's doing better. Thank you, but he's had a rough time. But we're feeling relieved. And Kennedy looked at me and said, thank you for asking that.

And it was like this small, human, ordinary moment, but it humanized Robert Kennedy for me forever, you know?

John Prideaux
Gilliard says that meeting was one of the most important of his life. And the other thing about that time with Robert Kennedy was the incredible urgency of hope that people found in hearing him. Even though the crowds were friendly, it did feel dangerous because there was such intensity, people wanting to reach out and touch him. I saw that in Nashville. It was even more clear in California when he would go through, you know, the ghettos of Los Angeles or wherever.

Margot Alexander had a comfortable upbringing on the California coast. When she went to Berkeley and got involved in student activism, her mother wanted her to come back home. But the girl from Long beach found herself in the ghettos of Oakland to see Kennedy campaign less than a week before she planned to vote for him in the California primary. And so I went. I don't remember how I got there, but I remember it.

Speaker C
It was mostly blacks downtown, a lot of kids. And he was in an open car, you know, not very far away. And I was thrilled to be in this crowd. The crowd was very responsive to him. It was a thrill.

And so that was my first vote. My thanks to all of you. And now it's on to Chicago, and let's win there.

And he died.

Speaker A
Senator Kennedy has been shot. Is that possible? Is that possible? Is it possible, ladies and gentlemen? It is possible.

He has not only Senator Kennedy. Oh, my God. So, you know, 1968 was a heartbreaking year, and we were left thinking, well, what do we do with the legacies of Doctor King and Robert Kennedy? And, you know, for me and for a lot of people my age, I mean, it just never left us.

John Prideaux
Kennedy matters because there's an alternative version of american history where he isn't killed, the Vietnam War ends sooner, there's no Watergate scandal, and America dodges the intense partisanship that would follow. Did you worry about getting beaten up yourself? Yeah, of course. In August 1968, a couple of months after Robert Kennedy's assassination kit back and her SDS comrades descended on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. What might have been Kennedys victory parade became one of the worst scenes in american political history.

The new left was furious about Vietnam. Democratic Party bigwigs anointed Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnsons vice president and a supporter of the war, as their presidential candidate, even though he hadnt stood in any primary contests. The fallout is still cited as a reason why Joe Biden shouldn't stand aside today. John Judas, another SDS member, was also in Chicago that summer. I have memories of going to Lincoln park and people training for, you know, what was going to be potentially violent demonstrations.

Chicago police clamped down on the protests, at times using tear gas and clubs. The writer Norman Mailer described the chaos, the noise of clubbing and cries, small sirens, the sigh of loaded arrest vans, shouts of police as they wheeled in larger circles. He called it a murderous paradigm of Vietnam.

Kip back and her friends felt it was all worth it. But this was the first time white kids were getting beat up, and that was, I think, an important thing for people to see. There had been times during the civil rights fight when horrendous acts of violence against protesters had brought sympathy and led to progress. Some hoped the terrible scenes in Chicago would do the same. The logic itself became somewhat twisted.

Speaker A
By the late sixties, you thought, well, we'll disrupt things and we'll do some violent acts and the police will come down and bust all our heads, and then we'll get sympathy. And to some extent it worked, but to some extent, in 1968, I think it backfired and helped elect Richard Nixon. As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night.

John Prideaux
A few weeks earlier, the Republican National Convention in Miami beach had been a much more orderly event. In his speech accepting the partys nomination, Richard Nixon presented himself as an alternative to the chaos gripping America, and as the candidate of what he would later go on to define as the silent majority. It is another voice. It is a quiet voice in the tumult of the shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non shouters, the non demonstrators.

It would turn out that Richard Nixon was not the answer to the silent majority's yearning for calm and stability. But it was he who America chose to take the country out of a cataclysmic year to be. The balm on the wound of assassinations, riots and division.

Alabama and four other Deep south states found their answer in a wildcard and voted for George Wallace. He was the candidate of backlash, a harbinger of a strategy that would go on to even greater success. As Fry Gilliard remembers.

Fry Gilliard
We knew Wallace wasn't going to be president in 1968, but, you know, those feelings that he began to stir with such skill, you know, those have been stirred and exploited ever since, in my view. So the election of 1968 was just another, to me, heartbreaking moment in a year of heartbreaking things. It just tore at your heart if you were a young and idealistic person, and maybe if you weren't, maybe for all Americans, it really did. As 1968 ended, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden were making their way in the worlds that would make them famous. Trump graduated and joined his dad's real estate firm, finding his feet in the outer boroughs but dreaming of Manhattan, Biden quit his corporate law firm in Wilmington and joined the public defender's office, the springboard, for a career in politics.

John Prideaux
A decade in which America had made a lot of progress, particularly over civil rights, was drawing to a close. But Gilliard says there's another way to look at it. And the other storyline was the opposite of that pushback against it, violent cynicism that came maybe partly because of the war in Vietnam, the protests against it, which put some people off the whole divisions of the country, the disagreement by the end of the decade about what we do about division. I mean, Robert Kennedy wanted to heal it, George Wallace wanted to exploit it. So I thought those two story arcs continued after the sixties, and I think they continue to be.

Fry Gilliard
To me, this is oversimplified, but the two story arcs of the american story, and right now, I don't know which one is stronger.

John Prideaux
Towards the end of 1968, a curious new movie appeared in american cinemas, Night. Of the Living Dead. Shot on a tiny budget with unknown actors and a complete novelty at the time, a black lead. It would go on to be a cult classic and one of the most profitable films ever made. At the time, Night of the Living Dead popularized the zombie genre, and it was really scary.

Children attack parents. Flesh is devoured noisily. The hero gets incinerated. I felt real terror in that neighborhood theatre last Saturday afternoon. Roger Ebert, a young critic from Chicago, wrote, the motion picture association rating system was not yet in place.

This was one of the last nasties to slip through.

Ebert was moved by the reaction of his fellow moviegoers. I saw kids who had no resources to protect themselves from the dread and fear they felt, he wrote. Night of the Living Dead was a metaphor for a country eating itself alive. The political consensus sustained through the boomers childhood was now a carcass. Decades later, in an elegant pitch for the presidency disguised as memoir, Barack Obama would sneer that presidential politics had been consumed by what he called the psychodrama of the baby boom generation, a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.

But in 1968, for the boomers themselves, it was visceral people's political views. Largely formed between their teens and mid twenties. The events of 1968 played out when they were at their most impressionable. So if it seems like american politics has been replaying the same set of arguments ever since, that's because it's true.

And to a large extent, the result is the horrifying prospect american voters have been faced with in this year's campaign, the political equivalent of a zombie apocalypse.

In the next episode of Boom, the generation that blew up american politics, we'll catch up with our boomers in the America of 1978. I was getting more and more involved in debating the equal rights amendment all. Over the country, as some of them challenge old constraints on what women could do. It was the first time I had seen women massively taking over the decision making that affected their own lives. While others smash old taboos, I wanted.

Speaker A
My own way of life, wanted to carve out my own niche, wanted to travel down my own road, march to. My own drum beat and others, overcome the limits on generating wealth. The first year I was at Goldman Sachs, he asked whether I was working for the mob when I got my first bonus. And throughout the rest of the six part series, I'll explore how Americans born in the 1940s have broken longstanding barriers for good and ill. This generation did usher in an awful lot of social changes that I think people will look back on and think that they were necessary and important.

John Prideaux
I'll take you into the mindset of a generation during four more crucial years, from the highs of 1987 to the lows of 2020, the baby boom generation. We got elitist and excessive, and wealth became a prominent feature. And sort of being out of touch with working Americans and being bicoastal and all that stuff, I think has been part of the problem. And that is in some ways I think the result of a lot of these movements that catapulted us forward in good ways. As the boomers near the end of their political journey, I'm setting out to make sense of their inheritance and their legacy.

Speaker C
I, of course, my parents terribly, they both passed away some time ago. But I have thought on occasion, is it better that they're not here to see this?

John Prideaux
Episodes will be out weekly on Thursdays. For exclusive access to all of this, you'll need to be an economist subscriber to unlock all the episodes of Boom, the generation that blew up american politics. Just search for Economist podcasts plus to discover our latest subscription offers. If you're already an economist subscriber, thank you. Your supports what makes this podcast possible boom is produced by Harriet Noble and Imogen Svotka, with research help from Daniel Duffy.

Phil Tinline is our story editor. Sound design is by Wei Dong Lin with original music by Darren Eng. John Shields is our executive producer. I'm Jon Prideau. This is the Economist.

Danny Pellegrino
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1. 1968 - Born to be wild

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1. Introduction

2. The Boomers' World

3. 1968: The Year of Change

4. Reflections and Legacy

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