A Political Journey: Protest to Perestroika

Former Democratic Senator of Colorado Gary Hart talked about the odyssey of a generation - those born in the mid- to late- 1930s. He said this generation had, as its first recollections, memories of the Great Depression, and then growing up with the trauma and drama of World War II. He referred to the Eisenhower years of the 1950s as the “happy days.” The generation really came of age politically with the 1960s presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy. He said that he characterized this generation as seeing “the assassination of innocence and hope.” The 1960s brought the assassination of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It also saw the birth of protest movements with civil rights struggles and the Vietnam war. Since then, this generation had continued to see unrest through the last 25 years as it had come to learn of the limitations on American political, economic, and military power. He chronicled the specific events which had brought America and the world to the end of the close