Those of us born circa 1960 are a distinct cultural generation with, sad as it may sound, Watergate, not Vietnam or sexual liberation, as the political moment that most sharply defined us.  Now that we have come of age, we may finally get a chance to explain how our experience growing up makes us approach politics and life differently than our Baby Boomer predecessors.  Yes, we know that the term “baby boomer” is accurately used to describe a birth demographic that covers almost twenty years.  But, it is most often inaccurately used to sweep all of us into a single cultural generation defined by the experience of Vietnam and being at least a teenager during the “Age of Aquarius”. 

Watergate made us care deeply about character and integrity.  As children, at the age when one begins to develop political consciousness, we clearly remember watching Nixon on television, “earnestly” announcing to the country that he was telling the truth, then watching him, back on the same television one week later, telling us that he had lied the previous week.  The lesson that dishonest leadership in government can have unforeseen and terrible consequences has sunk in deep with us.       

We learned other basic lessons, lessons that apply more than ever now, lessons that the Baby Boomers still do not seem to have learned.  At the same young age that we experienced Watergate, we understood that the Vietnam War had been a failure and that victory was not possible.  As flawed as Nixon may have been, we witnessed his pragmatism as he ended the Vietnam War.  We noticed that the same pragmatism, when combined with a willingness to engage our enemies, made it possible for him to open up relations with China and to begin the process of “détente” that lay the foundation for ending the Cold War.  In America’s current situation, we see the politics of fear for what it is and seek leadership that will make peace through pragmatism, not through “victory at all costs”. 

As the first generation that grew up with the newly established Baby Boomer values already in place, we saw what worked and what didn’t.
Affirmative action was firmly in place, and we women could not have had it better, with employers bending over backward to hire us.  We were not victims nor did we feel victimized.  Even the drug and sex liberation culture wasn’t exciting or exotic anymore; it was simply engrained, for better and for worse, in young society.

A negative was that many of us feared the repercussions of challenging Baby Boomer orthodoxy.  Political correctness had seized the nation, and Baby Boomer movers and shakers dominated the political and cultural agenda.  Shut out, we became and still are particularly sensitive to the need to hear and to consider both sides of every story.  Today, we seek to end the current division and disrespect for varying views.  We support leaders who know how to reach across the aisle to find shared solutions to shared problems.  The destructive dynamic of purposeful misrepresentation and polarization that characterizes Baby Boomer politics, with its excessive partisan ridicule so freely bestowed upon political enemies, has been too damaging for too long. 

Equally important, our generation has unique and valuable global acumen.  We are the first American generation to have lived for extended periods of time abroad at a young age.  The years of college and others spent overseas have added up and have equipped us to deal with international issues better than any generation before us.  We learned foreign languages.  We know how it feels to live in a city whose subways are being blown up by terrorists.  And we have seen up close how foreign governments dealt with these crises, successfully.

We also developed a more nuanced view of America’s role in the world.  We became sensitized to the dangers of empire building, often wondering whether the United States really was an agent of good in the world.  Our cynicism toward government may have begun with Watergate, but it hardened when we witnessed the detrimental effects of America’s often single-minded pursuit of its “interests” abroad.  To our dismay, America wasn’t always the good guy in real life.

As we now approach middle age, the Watergate generation is uniquely equipped to lead an entirely new twenty-first century world, where terrorism and war cannot be treated conventionally, where pragmatists, not partisans must solve genuine problems, and where our safety and economic livelihood depend upon our understanding of different cultures.  Cynical or apathetic as we may have felt in the past, we are now fully engaged, inspired, and ready to unite the country behind real change.