Editor's Letter

In an influential essay in the December 2007 Atlantic Monthly, Andrew Sullivan argued that the youthful Barack Obama, who celebrated his seventh birthday the same summer that chaos engulfed the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, “could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the baby boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.” Last week, we were reminded of just how difficult generational transcendence can be. In a startling admission, 91-year-old Morton Sobell affirmed that he and Julius Rosenberg had spied for the Soviet Union, putting a muffler on a combustible dispute that’s been firing at odd intervals for five decades.

Will quarrels over the Rosenbergs’ guilt finally end? Who knows? Even if they do, much larger debates about the nature of the Cold War and its prosecution are sure to continue. Not long ago, Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s reputation (liar, demagogue, drunk) seemed a settled matter, nailed shut by facts as compelling as Julius Rosenberg’s guilt. Then conservative provocateur Ann Coulter answered a bell few had heard, jumping into the ring to defend McCarthy as a national savior. Like our Cold War conflicts, the visceral squabbles over the 1960s endure because they’re as much about the present as the past. Choose your ’60s poison—lawless Dick Nixon or criminal campus radicals—and you all but announce your presidential preference in this year’s election. Obama and his generational cohort, both Right and Left, might transcend the 1960s personally, but they can only escape them politically if we allow it. They’d best be patient. We’ll call them after we’ve resolved a few outstanding matters concerning the Civil War. Or, as a Mississippian I know calls it, the War of Northern Aggression.