1968: The Year That Changed Everything

These were noble questions. The debate they brought on was not. Rather, it was personal, hysterical and often terrifying. Father fought with son, black fought with white, the young fought with the old. By the end of the decade, consensus was clearly not possible, and simply restoring civilization became the goal. Subsequent generations would have to answer those essential questions.

And so the cycle has repeated itself, almost every four years. "America is back," Ronald Reagan promised in the 1980s. Blessed with the can-do attitude of the Greatest Generation and a congenital optimism, Reagan was well positioned to move the country beyond the '60s. But baby boomers saw only the Reagan who served as California governor in the 1960s, hated by young liberals, worshiped by young conservatives. Reagan and his successor as president, George H.W. Bush, ended the cold war, making the '60s dream of a peaceful world seem, for a moment, possible. But the vernacular of the 1992 presidential race, the first election after the fall of the Iron Curtain, was vintage '60s: marijuana, draft dodgers, trips to the Kremlin, San Francisco gays.

Assuming the presidency from Bush, the last of the World War II presidents, Bill Clinton promised that a "new generation" was ready for "new responsibilities." His message: the strife of the '60s was over, the decade's promises finally could be fulfilled. But it wasn't and they weren't. For the next eight years, Clinton and a cast of conservative boomer antagonists ensured that the first child of the '60s in the White House would be remembered as a '60s caricature: ambivalent toward the military, sexually promiscuous, wrapped up in himself.

In George W. Bush, Republicans found their own boomer ideal: a reactionary child of Yale in the '60s who despised that decade's elites. But he, too, promised a new way forward—a compassionate domestic policy that sought conservative means to achieve some of the '60s idealists' goals. Abroad, he promised a foreign policy that learned the lessons of Vietnam. Instead, he has delivered only divisive cultural conflict at home and a war in Iraq that miraculously managed to make every Vietnam mistake over again.

Already, the old '60s fault lines are emerging in the 2008 campaign. Earlier this fall, Mitt Romney released a Web advertisement starring the candidate's wife, talking about the trials she faced as a stay-at-home mother to five sons. "Sometimes I'd be home with those five boys, and it was rough," Ann Romney says in the ad. "He'd call home and remind me that what I was doing was much more important than what he was doing." The ad was meant to introduce Republican primary voters to Romney's family, but it shows what could be a compelling narrative for a general election campaign: family values versus free love, the order and comfort of the '50s versus the trauma and extremism of the '60s.

This old choice will not be hard for Republicans to revive if the Democratic candidate is Hillary Clinton. Clinton's '60s baggage is all around her—her 1969 Wellesley commencement speech, the pictures of big glasses and love beads, the libertine husband, the daughter they named after a Joni Mitchell song. Fifteen years in the national spotlight has taught Clinton to be wary of invoking the '60s, lest she seem like the feminist agitator her critics have made her out to be. But when provoked, she, too, falls back on '60s vernacular as she demonstrated earlier this month, when she called presidential politics an "all-boys club" after a weak performance in a Democratic debate.