Noemie Emery: JFK and George H.W. Bush, the beginning and end of a great generation

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The Greatest Generation really was great. Two presidents show it.

George H.W. Bush and John F. Kennedy were born to rich, well-connected, and powerful families, yet they couldn’t wait to risk everything. Bush enlisted on June 13, 1943, the day after he turned 18.

Kennedy failed his first physical test, but he didn’t give up. He exercised for over a year to build up his body. He shopped around for a doctor willing to lie and say he was fit to serve.

During former President Barack Obama’s first run for office, a supporter of his said on TV that he was the first candidate from the Pacific. The late Charles Krauthammer had to explain that Bush and Kennedy had been in the Pacific, splashing around in Japanese waters after their vehicles sank underneath them. Bush had to wait four hours until a submarine found him. Kennedy organized a three-mile swim to the closest island, pulling a burned shipmate behind him with a strap that he held in his teeth.

Each man lost two of his crew and never forgot it. In the following nights, Kennedy made numerous swims into the ocean to try to find help, until an islander appeared and carried a message carved on a coconut to the nearest American base. That was it for Kennedy, who was not only ill but whose back had been ruined. Bush, on the other hand, executed even more bombing runs before the war ended.

This was the first world war that these people helped win, but they and their generation were only beginning. Put together, their post-war political lives would encompass the entire span of the Cold War that followed, from 1947 when Rep. Kennedy cast his first votes for the Truman agenda, to November 1989 when, in Bush’s presidency, and due not in a small way to the Bush contribution, the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe collapsed. The Cold War, from beginning to end, was bracketed and contained by these people’s exertions.The Great Generation won not only the war that it fought in; it won the war that came after that, too.

What is a “generation,” and how long does it last? It is a shock today to realize that only seven years separate Kennedy, born May 29, 1917, from Bush, born June 12, 1924.

Kennedy, in his family tradition, went into politics straight from the war (if not from the cradle), whereas Bush, in the tradition of his own family, made money first. This is why Kennedy appears to be so much older — why his career was contemporary with that of Prescott Bush, Bush’s father, when both represented neighboring states in the Senate in the New England caucus. Only five years after Kennedy died would Bush first run for office.

Bush would live a lifetime of 55 years beyond Kennedy’s murder. And the political worlds they served in were entirely different. Kennedy lived in a world where he and former President Dwight Eisenhower defined politics, whereas Bush would enter an era in which George McGovern and Barry Goldwater were the loudest of voices, and the more extreme visions held sway.

Domestic politics never thrilled either: Both were happy instead in their preferred roles of defenders of freedom and order against chaos and evil. These were the roles they took on in their teens and their twenties, and they never relinquished them. We owe them and their cohort our lives and our freedom. If Kennedy was, in Dean Acheson’s words, “present at the creation,” Bush was at the helm of the nation when the ship steered for home.

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