From Boys To Men
In a year that rocked America, two scions of famous families came of age
"Imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for. No religion too. . . . You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope some day you'll join us, and the world will live as one."
-"Imagine" by John Lennon, 1971
"You're built like a car. You got a hubcap diamond-star halo. You're built like a car, oh yeah. . . . Get it on. Bang a gong. Get it on."
-"Bang a Gong (Get It On)," by T. Rex, 1971
Few years in recent American history were as tumultuous as 1971. It was a period of political ferment and deep cultural schisms. The divides weren't just between young and old or black and white, but between dreamers and realists, between buttoned-down reformers and jaded young men and women who just wanted to be left alone. The fissures were reflected in the culture. For every socially conscious "Imagine," there was a headlong hedonistic romp like "Bang a Gong (Get It On)." Television reflected the zeitgeist in different ways, from All in the Family to Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In . In Washington, Richard Nixon was still aggressively pursuing the war in Vietnam--with an average of 200 American deaths a month--generating a ferocious antiwar movement and a backlash that tore America at the seams.
For two sons of privilege from storied American families, it was a year of testing, a formative time of change and challenge. George Walker Bush and John Forbes Kerry were both graduates of Yale, members of the elite and secretive Skull and Bones society, with Establishment credentials and family histories of public service.
Each man was searching for himself, but each dealt with his circumstances and the times in different ways. At 27, Kerry had already served in Vietnam, winning medals for valor and three Purple Hearts, but he had also already turned, very publicly, against the war. Married, serious beyond his years, he had begun actively assessing a future in politics. Bush, who turned 25 that July, supported the war in Vietnam but had doubts about the way Nixon's Pentagon was fighting it. The liberal counterculture, in his eyes, was elitist and hypocritical, a drain on the nation. But he didn't waste much time worrying about it. A fighter jock in the Air National Guard, he was a fun-loving party guy who bounced from job to job.
Kerry remembers the year well. "I think [1971] was formative for our generation," Kerry told U.S. News . "Most of the people that I know from our generation were deeply involved one way or the other--many of them, obviously, feeling deeply opposed to what was going on by 1971, and there was a great social consciousness. . . . There was a tremendous sense of being able to . . . affect the world around you."
President Bush declined to be interviewed for this story, but many of his associates from that time say he had little interest in taking the kind of leadership role that Kerry embraced. To some extent, both Bush and Kerry are still reliving those days and trying to justify the choices they made so long ago.
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