"We've done the work of democracy, day by day, President George H. W. Bush [41] proudly declared of his generation in 1989. Whatever the Greatest touched, they made bigger--and, in their eyes, better. Their accomplishments were colossal. The Greatest patiently endured an economic despair that might have driven another generation to revolution. They had ably soldiered the one war America could not afford to lose. Thanks to their powerful work ethic and willingness to invest, they had produced a postwar economic miracle that ultimately outperformed their communist rivals.79
Their massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons had preserved an enduring if expensive and unnerving peace. They were a truly great generation of scientists, landing men on the moon and cracking the riddles of human longevity. Their women might have been the most dedicated teachers and the most skillful mothers in American history.
The Greatest won more than a hundred Nobel Prizes, roughly two-thirds of all the Nobels ever awarded to Americans. They thoroughly dominated the prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine, and (through 1989) won all of America's fourteen economics Nobels. However, other generations have eclipsed the Greatest in literature and peace prizes.80
In countless ways, from transistors and satellites to spacious family homes and a bouyant "GNP" (a term they invented), the Greatest gave institutional firmament to the "Brotherhood of Man" envisioned by their beloved Missionary fathers. Over the past few years, the news of the retirement or the death of Greatest notables has often prompted remarks from Americans of all ages that no one will be able to replace their competence.81
Yet their final ledger must also include colossal debits: unprecedented public and private liabilities, exported assets, depleted resources, harms to the global environment. The generation that had inherited so much excess economic capacity and harnessed it to so many public purposes has bequeathed to its successors a fiscally starved economy unable to afford a new national agenda. For a while, the offspring of the soldiers the Greatest had conquered--the Japanese and the Germans--were outcompeting the Greatest's own children and eclipsing American economic might.
The powerful Greatest sense of exceptionalism made them think that their constructions could last forever, that Reaganomics-style optimism could produce its own reward. But those early-in-life virtues--selflessness, investment, and community--gave way to the repetition of old habits without the old purposes and without the old focus on the future. To the Greatest, Tomorrowland once meant monorails and moonwalks; in the 1990s it meant space-age medicine in the intensive-care unit.
Their time coming to a close, the Greatest had difficulty articulating what Bush [41] called "the vision thing"--setting directions for a new century that most of them would not live to see. From George Kennan to Lillian Hellman, Eric Sevareid to Theodore White, Ann Landers to Ronald Reagan, elder Greatest voiced distress over the steady loss in the American sense of community in the hands of the young. Back when they had run the "general issue" culture, everything in America had seemed to fit together constructively. But in the 1990s, to their eyes, it did not. And they worried about how they would be remembered.
In It's a Wonderful Life, a Lost Generation--directed testimonial to the Greatest, Jimmy Stewart despairs at the worthlessness of his deeds until an older man shows him how, had he never lived, his town would have sunk to "Pottersville"--a corrupt, pleasure-seeking, Lost-style abyss. Returning home, Stewart saves his government-subsidized savings and loan business thanks to gifts from young and old, repaying him for all the wonderful things he has done over his life.82
Contrast this with the Greatest image in the Boom-directed Cocoon: senior citizens draining the strength of unborn aliens, and then flying off to immortality while leaving their own children behind. Yet Cocoon presents the Greatest in such a warm light that this ghastly behavior seems perfectly natural, as though such friendly people deserve special treatment no matter what it costs the young. No one liked to think of the Greatest senior citizens as selfish, least of all themselves. They would have rather just stood firm in the "collective positiveness" suggested by Hubert Pryor of Modern Maturity in his 1989 essay "Goodbye to Our Century."83
On May 5, 1990, Bob Gilbert and other seventyish veterans rode a motorcade down the streets of Plzen past thousands of Czechs waving American flags under a huge banner reading THANK YOU BOYS. As Gilbert's peers left us one by one, many Greatest probably wished they didn't have to go that way, but would have preferred to go together in some heroic D-Day redux--one last civic ritual to remind everyone what they once did, as a team, for posterity.