What Did You Do in the '60s?
By Fred Barnes

What did America’s leaders of the ‘90s do in the 1960s? Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was a cheerleader at the University of Mississippi. Republican Rep. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, a likely Senate candidate in 1998, was a major league pitcher who threw no-hitters in both the American and National Leagues. Bill Clinton graduated from Georgetown University in 1968 and became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he led antiwar protests. Pursuing a clever campaign, he avoided the draft. Hillary was more prominent in the ‘60s. At Wellesley College she participated in antiwar activities, got to know Robert Reich (later Labor Secretary), and appeared several times on College Bowl, an academic TV show. In 1969, her graduation speech chiding her elders (especially Sen. Ed Brooke of Massachusetts, who’d spoken just before her) drew national attention. In 1970, she packed off to Yale Law School, where she met Bill.

Here’s what sixteen other national leaders did in the ‘60s:

Buying Time for Asian Democracy, and American Business
FRED SMITH

’90s Fred Smith is founder and president of Federal Express.

’60s Raised in Memphis, Smith joined the Marines after attending Yale, class of ’66, and served until 1970. While in Vietnam, he says, "I had a chance to think a lot" about starting FedEx, which he first dreamed up while writing an undergraduate economics paper. In his first Vietnam tour, Smith served as a groundpounding platoon leader and company commander; in his second, as a forward air controller. He led troops against the North Vietnamese Army, not ragtag guerrillas. "They were uniformed, well-armed, and very disciplined," he says. "I had a great deal of admiration for them. They were probably the best infantry in the world." He won the Purple Heart.

Not politically involved, Smith occasionally dropped by the Yale Political Union, where he heard classmate John Kerry, now a liberal Democratic senator from Massachusetts, deliver diatribes "the same way he does now." Smith has a "contrarian view" of American intervention in Vietnam: He thinks it worked. The war was "absurdly prosecuted" by President Johnson, but "it probably bought enough time for the Asian countries to move toward democracy and capitalism." He’s "pretty confident" that absent the war, countries like Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines would have fallen to communism.

Terrified into Starvation
JAMES FALLOWS

’90s James Fallows recently took over as editor of U.S. News & World Report.

’60s At Harvard and holding a draft number that made him likely to be summoned, he starved his six-foot, one-inch frame down to 120 pounds and feigned suicidal tendencies in order to avoid military service. "To answer the call was unthinkable," he wrote some months after the fall of Saigon, "not only because, in my heart, I was desperately afraid of being killed, but also because, among my friends, it was axiomatic that one should not be ‘complicit’ in the immoral war effort." When the examining doctor announced he was unqualified, "I was overcome by a wave of relief, which…revealed to me how great my terror had been, and by the beginning of the sense of shame which remains with me to this day."

Today the Campus, Tomorrow the World
IRA MAGAZINER

’90s Picked by Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ira Magaziner cooks up a numbingly complicated and ill-fated plan to remake all U.S. health care.

’60s A civil rights activist in high school, Magaziner entered Brown University in 1965. He and a partner then wrote a 400-page report that criticized Brown’s curriculum for a lack of "meaningfulness," demanded students be allowed to construct their own course of study, and called for abolishing course requirements and grades. Magaziner eventually forced most of the program through in 1969. In his valedictory speech at graduation, he urged students to oppose the Vietnam War by turning their backs on Secretary of State Kissinger as he received an honorary degree. Most did. Magaziner then went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and was befriended by Bill Clinton. Upon returning to the U.S. in 1971, he and some colleagues decided to completely reshape the town of Brockton, Massachusetts—"a naive, ineffective attempt," he later admitted, because "we overreacted against big business." By the end of the decade he was earning $600 an hour as a management consultant and writing books with Robert Reich and others urging that the national economy be managed via government "industrial policies." One co-author describes him as "messianic."

Do-gooder, Thai-style
CHARLES MURRAY

’90s Charles Murray, a leading advocate of conservative welfare reform, has just published a libertarian manifesto, following on his book The Bell Curve.

’60s A 1965 graduate of Harvard, where he was DJ and president of the radio station, he joined the Peace Corps and ended up spending five years in Thailand. There, he observed that rural villages functioned best when outside entities refrained from excessive interference in their affairs. This began an interest in decentralism that eventually led him to lose "sympathy with the American Left."

Bell-bottom Business
TOMMY HILFIGER

’90s Tommy Hilfiger’s clothing can be found in nearly every department store and is popular with President Clinton, singer Snoop Doggy Dogg, and many other gangsta rappers.

’60s Born in upstate New York in Elmira, a town he calls "Leave It to Beaver-land," Hilfiger resisted his father’s entreaties to go to college, drawn instead to hippiedom. His sartorial entrepreneurship began after high school, when "everyone was listening to great music—the Stones, the Beatles, the Who." As he explained to one interviewer, "I and all my friends wanted to look like them. Problem was, in Elmira you couldn’t find a pair of bell-bottoms to save your life." So he went to New York City, picked up 20 pairs, and returned home to sell them out of his trunk. An empire was born.

Turbulence Sells
SAM DONALDSON

’90s Scourge of presidents, Sam Donaldson appears on abc-tv’s Prime Time Live and This Week.

’60s After growing up in El Paso, Texas, graduating from Texas Western University, and serving in the Army, Donaldson got his first tv job in Dallas. He quit to try his chances in New York. Jobless for 7 months, he gave up. Coming to Washington in 1961, he began as a summer relief announcer at a radio station. Though a local reporter, he covered national stories like the civil rights debate, Barry Goldwater’s campaign, race riots, and the election of Spiro Agnew as Maryland governor ("he was a good guy"). In 1967, Donaldson became a national correspondent with abc.

For him, the ’60s were one thing only—a great story. He covered Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and funeral and the 1968 conventions. "The ’60s were exciting, turbulent…. I thought that’s what journalism was." But by decade’s end, "I was one of those who thought you couldn’t trust anything [leaders] say."

"I did not partake"
COKIE ROBERTS

’90s Cokie Roberts hosts abc-tv’s This Week.

’60s Graduating from Wellesley in 1964, married by 1966, Roberts feels like she came of age just before the ’60s really mushroomed into existence. "Being at Wellesley in my era was no different from being there from 1914 to 1918," she says. "It was more like the ’50s than the ’60s. No sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. And everybody got married right away." The "real legacy of the ’60s" that turned her expectations "upside down" was the women’s movement, which was "terribly beneficial." But there was a downside, notably "the promiscuousness in which I certainly did not partake," and the loss of patriotism. "The people who prosecuted the war in Vietnam and protested the war both did a disservice in terms of patriotism," Roberts suggests.

From Hijacker to Wall Streeter
THOMAS W. JONES

’90s President of tiaa-cref, world’s largest private pension fund.

’60s In 1969, Jones became a national symbol of black student protest as he led more than 100 black students in the takeover of Cornell’s student union. One thing made this college protest different: the students brought in guns. As sheriff’s deputies gathered nearby, Jones, then 19, issued an ultimatum: "In the past it has been the black people who have done all the dying. Now the time has come when the pigs are going to die, too. We are moving tonight. Cornell has until nine o’clock to live. It is now three minutes after eight." Jones, brandishing a rifle and raising a clenched fist, was the last student to leave the student union when the takeover finally ended without violence.

No charges were ever filed against Jones or his cohorts, and Jones not only received his degree a few weeks later but stayed on at Cornell to earn a master’s in regional planning. Later he went to Wall Street, "a sellout" according to fellow Cornellian Edward Whitfield. Jones has since expressed regret over the armed takeover. Still, he says, "given the way things played out in that historical period, I made the best decisions I could make under the circumstances, and I will not repudiate that 25 years later." When named a Cornell trustee in 1993, Jones said he was "probably one of the most outstanding nominees the board could identify…. I’ve had an outstanding career."

Brick Throwers for Peace
AL D’AMATO

’90s Sen. Al D’Amato (R-N.Y.) chairs the Senate Banking Committee.

’60s After graduating from Syracuse University in 1961 with a B.A. and law degree earned in six years, D’Amato worked as a Long Island lawyer before his 1969 election as Nassau County’s tax receiver. The music, drugs, protests, and cultural changes of the decade angered him. In 1969, a Vietnam protester tore down the American flag out in front of his office and tossed a brick through his window. "I’ll never forget it," he says. "It left an impression on me." The ’60s were "nasty. It brought out the worst in people. It didn’t leave a mark on our country we could be proud of."

Our Panthers, Our Selves
CATHARINE MACKINNON

’90s Catharine MacKinnon, a prominent feminist law professor, crusades against female exploitation and "patriarchy."

’60s Daughter of a Republican politician who had advised the presidential campaigns of Eisenhower and Nixon, she graduated from Smith in 1969, then protested against the Vietnam War at Yale Law School, studied martial arts, and worked with the Black Panthers. She also created Yale’s first women’s studies course and co-founded a lawyer’s collective.

Losing our Compass
BRIAN LAMB

’90s Brian Lamb is founder of, and ubiquitous commentator on, c-span.

’60s Lamb grew up in Lafayette, Indiana, got into broadcasting as a high school DJ, and hosted a local tv dance show while at Purdue. Graduating in ’63, he went into the Navy. In 1968, he worked for the Nixon campaign, then returned to radio after the election. Concluding that too little news was being broadcast by the tv networks, Lamb set up a bureau to feed information programs to local cable outlets. But the project was ahead of its time; technology was lacking.

The ’60s were a "growing-up" period for Lamb. As a naval officer, he worked on the periphery of power, and what he saw disillusioned him. "We gave out a lot of misinformation getting us in [Vietnam] and a lot of misinformation getting out." During the ’60s the country "got out of whack. I tend to think they are when we lost our compass. A tremendous amount of distrust was created. I don’t think my generation will ever get over it."

Cajun in Uniform
JAMES CARVILLE

’90s Chief strategist in President Clinton’s 1992 campaign, James Carville still advises the President and tries to protect him from independent counsels.

’60s Carville says he did five things in the ’60s: "I went to school. I flunked out of school. I taught school. I was in the Marine Corps. And I got drunk." In truth, it wasn’t quite that uncomplicated. Carville grew up in a small Louisiana town and entered Louisiana State University in 1962. In 1966 he left, involuntarily and without a degree, for the Marines, with the blessing of his patriotic, pro-military family.

In his two years of service he never went to Vietnam. "By the time I got out of the Marines, I’d become pretty disenchanted with the war. It was a lyin’ ass war." Returning to lsu, Carville studied part time while working full time as an elementary school teacher. He views the ’60s as good and bad. Having been cured of racism by reading To Kill a Mockingbird, he believes the civil rights movement was the good part. The bad, he says, "was the start of family breakdown. That’s the worst thing that’s happened to America since I can remember."

The Square Hippie
SONNY BONO

’90s Member of the Republican tide of ’94, Rep. Sonny Bono commutes between Palm Springs, California, and Washington.

’60s Yes, Bono wooed, wed, and sang with Cher in the ’60s. But he also had a fleeting political career. In 1968, he mingled in Chicago’s Grant Park with antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic convention. Bono wanted to form a youth commission to encourage kids to reject drugs and respect institutions—an unpopular message in the park. "If I hadn’t gotten out of there, I’d have gotten a brick in my head," he says. That fall, he, actor Lee Majors, and singer Chubby Checker went on Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey’s campaign tour as "the token celebs." Later, he spoke at a youth rally in Los Angeles—Bono was 38—urging kids to work inside "the system." He was booed. And Jane Fonda interrupted his talk. "She just shot me down," he says. That ended his political involvement for two decades, until he was elected mayor of Palm Springs in 1988 as a Republican. "Even though I was a hippie then, I still believed in the system and right and wrong. I was always a conservative." Bono says the ’60s were great, but only musically.

Prep School Revolutionary
CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

’90s Editor of Forbes fyi, Christopher Buckley also writes novels and essays.

’60s Born in 1952, the son of conservative icon William F. Buckley, he claims he "missed the ’60s," though that’s not quite true. "I was locked in a Benedictine boarding school in Rhode Island…on my knees on a cold stone floor praying my soul would not burn in hell." But not all the time. "We were also smoking dope in the woods." He read James Baldwin and tutored inner-city kids too. And he chattered opposition to the war in Vietnam. That culminated in a protest of Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia in 1970. Students wore black armbands on their blazers, "one of the more pathetic scenes of class revolution," Buckley says. "All right, what exactly are you protesting?" a history teacher asked. When no one could give a good answer, the protest fizzled.

"People seemed to be having a lot of fun," but the ’60s were a "virus lodged most perniciously in academe. The frizzy hairs of yore are now the tenured professors." At 19, Buckley was delighted his asthma kept him out of the Army. Now guilt has set in. In 1983, he attended the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. He saw a Marine in ceremonial dress wander away from the crowd, take off his glasses, and weep. "I felt I had no business there," Buckley wrote, "so I left the grounds."

From Cells to Socialism
BARBARA EHRENREICH

’90s Barbara Ehrenreich’s left-wing essays appear in Time and elsewhere.

’60s Working on a doctorate in cell biology, she began protesting the Vietnam War in 1965. "I got swept up in the antiwar movement," she explained to an interviewer. "I went into college as someone who loved the existentialists, had a soft spot in my heart for Ayn Rand, had no social or political views of any kind. Then…the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, those got me involved." In 1972 she wrote Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. After divorcing her husband and moving to Long Island, she joined a group that later grew into the Democratic Socialists of America.

Right Turn at Harvard
WILLIAM BENNETT

’90s Former Education Secretary and drug czar William Bennett now does battle in the culture wars.

’60s At Williams College in the early ’60s, Bennett wanted to join the New Left group Students for a Democratic Society. "Don’t do it," advised his brother Bob (now President Clinton’s lawyer). When Bill asked why not, his brother answered: "Some day you may want a job when it’ll make a difference." Later, when he was nominated by President Reagan to run the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bennett visited Sen. Jesse Helms, who ran down a list of left-wing groups and asked if Bennett had been a member of any. "No, sir, not me," said Bennett proudly.

Not joining sds was the closest thing to a conservative act Bennett committed in the ’60s. He did graduate work at the University of Texas, having been recommended by leftie Rev. William Sloane Coffin. He taught for a year at the University of Southern Mississippi, where his contract was not renewed. "Go back to Moscow, you big radial," a student said in a note tacked to Bennett’s door. (No, he wasn’t calling Bennett a tire; the student mispelled radical.)

Out of work, Bennett went to Harvard Law School, where his views began to change. The intellectual turning point was the antiwar student strike at Harvard in 1969. "I realized these people didn’t want to change the country," he says, "they wanted to destroy it."

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard. In addition to personal interviews, this article is based on news reports and information from Current Biography.