The popular understanding of the baby boom is that it was a function of the end of World War II. The piquant narrative of soldiers returning from overseas and getting right to work having families is a persistent one. It may be true in the cases of Bush and Clinton, both of whom had fathers who returned to the U.S. only as the war waned. (Trump's father Fred was in his mid-30s when the war started and was not drafted.)
But it's not true for most baby boomers. While the boom began a few months after the war ended, it continued for the next 17 years.
In the context of the presidents being born the summer of 1946, it's useful to remember that the boom didn't actually begin in January 1946 of the year. The first five months of the year saw few more births than there had been in December 1945. Only by July did the number of births explode.
Trump, in a sense, isn't a boomer at all while George W. Bush and Clinton sit right at the front edge of the surge.
I'm rehashing all of this primarily because it's an interesting historical quirk: that three presidents, particularly three presidents each of whom was elected to two terms in office, should be born in such a short period of time. But I'm also doing so because the occasion of each of their 80th birthdays offers an opportunity to reflect upon the significance of their lives and of the changes that the country has seen in the past eight decades.
For Politico magazine, John Harris did exactly that, going so far as to ascribe to these three presidents some culpability for all of the toxicity and coarseness that has emerged in American politics since Bill Clinton was first elected in 1992.
The men are "preeminent representatives of the generation that trashed American politics," Harris writes, "… central characters in a decades-long descent in which Americans have been progressively more tribalistic in their political affiliations; ever-more coarse and insulting in public discourse; more mystified by and contemptuous of those who disagree; less trusting in government and most other establishment institutions …" and so on.
Harris is careful (if not pointed) in assuring readers that the baby boom generation itself was good. It's just the politics that are a mess, a function of a politics that distilled to "Which side are you on?" This "moralizing brand of politics," he argues, "began on college campuses in the 1960s in arguments over Vietnam."
While this seems like a feasible argument, it's actually backwards. Harris is viewing the baby boom through the lens of politics, instead of viewing politics through the lens of the baby boom.
Consider the stories of each of these three presidents.