Thirty years ago this spring,
Harvard members of Students for a
Democratic Society seized and occupied University Hall, the home to the
administrative offices of the college. Storming the building, they
forcibly
ejected Harvard deans and demanded that the university abolish its
ROTC
programs. A battery of tear gas-toting policemen was finally needed to
reestablish order.

Today’s Harvard is a much more peaceful place. The burning questions of the
Sixties have been settled, and students can concern themselves, by and large,
with more mundane matters. We give about as much thought to fomenting
campus revolution as the radicals of our parents’ generation might have
given to declaring celibacy and joining the priesthood.

Nonetheless, the current generation of Harvard students has not entirely
broken with the past.
The legacy of the 1960s lives on not in the
restless passion for social upheaval, but rather in the emptiness that
remains once traditions have been destroyed and histrionics abandoned for
the calm of middle age. Today we reject the rebelliousness of our parents’
era, but at the same time we’ve inherited their aversion to traditional
moral standards. Nowhere is this convergence of past and present more
readily apparent than in my generation’s response to the Clinton scandal.

President Bill Clinton is unquestionably the embodiment of the 1960s.
Vietnam protestor, sexual adventurer, and drug experimenter, he represents
much of what once went wrong with America. In defeating Bob Dole (not
incidentally a sterling representative of the World War II generation),