The Greatest rise to national leadership was shaped by the mission they recalled from their childhood: to clean up the squalor and decay left behind by the Lost Generation. Maxwell Taylor criticized The Uncertain Trumpet of Lost Presidencies, Eric Sevareid accused the "last generation" of "corruptibility" and a "lack of controlled plans," and John Kennedy complained that "what our young men saved, our diplomats and President have frittered away." When the watershed all-Greatest Presidential election of 1960 arrived, a mannish generation in its forties and fifties was determined to apply its "common political faith" to rebuild American "prestige," to make the nation (in Bell's words) "a world power, a paramount power, a hegemonic power."54
A few surviving Missionaries, such as Robert Frost at Kennedy's inaugural, heralded the coming of a new "Augustan Age." Having campaigned with the slogan "Let's Get This Country Moving Again," the new President declared that "the torch has been passed to a new generation . . . tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace." In office, he brought "vigor" to governance and assembled like-aged advisers whom the younger David Halberstam described as "a new breed of thinker-doers"--men like Bob McNamara ("the can-do man in the can-do society, in the can-do era") and McGeorge Bundy (possessing "a great and almost relentless instinct for power").55
Meanwhile, the Greatest literary and media elite joined in as team players (Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, Joseph and Stewart Alsop, Joseph Kraft, William Manchester, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Theodore White). In 1962, Richard Rovere christened a new expression, "the establishment," to describe the new power of midlife Greatest. John Kennedy's assassination hardly caused them to break pace. The ebullient Lyndon Johnson promptly declared: "This nation, this generation, in this hour has man's first chance to build a Great Society."56
In the ensuing 1964 landslide, Johnson's Greatest peers reached their pinnacle of power. The "Great 89th" Congress (74 percent Greatest) became what Theodore White termed "the Grandfather Congress of Programs and Entitlements." Greatest confidence--and hubris--was at an all-time high. The Greatest held the White House for 32 years, won eight Presidential elections, and ran on major-party tickets twelve straight times (spanning the 44 years between 1944 and 1988). No other generation except the Republicans in the early days of the republic comes close to any of these numbers.57
"Americans today bear themselves like victory-addicted champions," said Look Magazine in 1965. "They've won their wars and survived their depressions. They are accustomed to meeting, and beating, tests." With America now led by a generation intent on meeting and beating new tests, the word crisis (what Richard Nixon termed "exquisite agony") repeatedly energized the task of government. Three years earlier, the Cuban Missile Crisis had climaxed when, in Dean Rusk's words, we were "eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked." Next came Vietnam. Robert McNamara's new "controlled response" strategy replaced what had been known as the (Lost-era) "spasm" response.58
But Vietnam helped trigger an angry "generation gap" between Greatest parents and coming-of-age Boomers, along with urban riots, a crime wave, substance abuse, eroticism, and ideological passion--in short, everything hateful to the Greatest life mission. By the late 1960s, whatever the Greatest tried (whether "Model Cities" or "guns and butter" economics) began to sputter. From Johnson and Nixon in the White House to bosses on the job and fathers in families, Greatest men came under constant attack from juniors and, increasingly, women.
If the times were euphoric for youth, they were anything but for the Greatest: "Everything seemed to come unhinged" (James MacGregor Burns); "Something has gone sour, in teaching and in learning" (George Wald); "I use the phrase soberly: The nation disintegrates" (John Gardner). In words that revealed his peers' frustration, Richard Nixon despaired that America had become "a pitiful, helpless giant." Many (Rusk, William Westmoreland, Walt Rostow) refused to admit error. Others (McNamara, Bundy) came to share Milton Mayer's view that "we were wrong, and the new generation is right"--although, Mayer added, "the young terrify me."59