When the Young Teach and the Old Learn

AFTER the murders, the accidents and Chappaquiddick, it was only a minor footnote. But for the Kennedys, bad news never ends. Into the old courthouse in Barnstable, Mass., last week marched the vanguard of the next Kennedy generation: Robert Jr. and his cousin, Robert Sargent Shriver III, both 16. The charge: juvenile delinquency by virtue of possessing marijuana.

On July 10, the sons of Robert Kennedy and Eunice Shriver allegedly joined several other boys at a small pot party in a garage near the Kennedy family compound in Hyannisport. Those present included an undercover agent, reportedly a young state trooper posing as a local cab driver named "Andy." He was only doing his job; the drug problem in Cape Cod's Barnstable County has reached the point where the court hears three or more such cases a day. Based on Andy's evidence, the Kennedy boys faced a bleak possibility: a maximum five years' confinement in the state house of correction.

Fortunately for them, Judge Henry L. Murphy granted a continuance of the case. After one year, said Murphy upon emerging from the closed hearing, the charges will be dropped unless the boys "have difficulty of some kind."

Class Warfare

Such difficulties are fast becoming a grim routine for parents across the land. (The latest statistics show 120,000 arrests for pot possession and sale in 1969.) It was all part of a typical week in what sometimes seems to be the true class warfare: the strain between the young and the old. In Massachusetts, on the Cambridge Common last week, for example, 100 white youths staged a raucous celebration of Black Panther Huey Newton's release from prison. Police ended the party with tear gas. In Oklahoma, hundreds tried to attend a banned rock festival in Turner Falls Park. Worried about "drugs, nudity, free love and lawlessness," Governor Dewey Bartlett blocked the kids with 300 National Guardsmen. In Anaheim, Calif., about 300 garishly garbed Yippies "liberated" Disneyland. Before the cops arrived, the raiders hoisted a Viet Cong flag atop a fort on Tom Sawyer's Island and yowled slogans like "Free Mickey Mouse!"

The "youthquake" is likely to roll on even if the Viet Nam War ends tomorrow. In Jacques Barzun's phrase, the young are battling "the whole of modern life"--what they regard as meaningless work, abuse of the environment, the dwindling opportunities for adolescent self-definition at a time when puberty arrives earlier than ever. In recent testimony before Congress, France's Journalist-Politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber argued that the revolt of the young is aimed at the "excesses of economic competition" and cannot be "eradicated by the elders in a fit of blind rage." Businessmen themselves, he said, "know the sincerity of their children's concern. They get it at the breakfast table."

Testifying before the President's Commission on Campus Unrest last week, Columbia University's President-elect William J. McGill estimated that as many as 50% of all collegians now belong to "an alienated culture, hostile to science and technology, which is growing at a very rapid pace." McGill's solution is to speed up education and get collegians into full-time jobs faster--an effort to promote earlier independence. But that idea will have to compete with the alternatives that young rebels have already devised--the drug culture, group-marriage communes, "free universities"--many of them a courageous if mindless search for competence and humanity.

The picture is grim--and it is accurate up to a point. But it is far from the whole picture. In the war between the young and the old, there is far more communication across the lines than is usually assumed. Part of the reason is that the alienated young, while a significant and inescapable group, represent only a minority. And even within the minority, the beginning of a new rapport between the generations is taking place. The phenomenon is still scattered but nonetheless remarkable. It involves a mutual search for understanding in which it is the young who influence and even instruct the old.

What Gap?

"What generation gap?" asks University of Michigan Psychologist Joseph Adelson, who argues that "an overwhelming majority of the young--as many as 80%--tend to be traditionalist in values." Much evidence suggests that youth's politics and passions still largely reflect those of their parents. Even the most radical student protesters tend to act out the ideals of their politically liberal parents, who often approve the goals if not the tactics of their activist children. The biggest gap may be between different groups in the same generation. Collegians who pursue vocational courses like engineering seldom display the Weltschmerz that afflicts liberal arts students, who worry about the contrast between U.S. ideals and realities. This is even truer of youngsters who still go straight from high school to work, war and marriage--certified adults at 18 or 19. To be sure, the children of blue-collar workers increasingly diverge from their parents over hair, dress and the use of pot, which is spreading in hardhat high schools. But politics is another matter: blue-collar children seem to be just as "conservative" as their parents.

Harvard Psychiatrist Robert Coles, who has studied ego strength among working-class children, is fed up with scholars of "alienation," who "never analyzed Mexican Americans, kids from Montana, black kids or those from Appalachia." If they did so, he says, they would find that "the old-fashioned family pulling together is by no means extinct in this country." Coles is delighted to meet "16-year-old men and women growing up with a definite sense of identity, just working hard and trying to get a paycheck, somehow being responsive to their parents--and not going to a shrink five times a week."

Prefigurative Culture

It is among many middle-and upper-class Americans that the estrangement of the young is strongest, but the influence of children on parents is also most evident. Parents who lose control of their children are usually confused about their own values and identities. Lacking authority, such parents cannot provide the key ingredient of growing up: a loving force to rebel against. Psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch believes that many parents themselves are still emotional adolescents, and it is evident not only in their adoption of youthful dress and fads but in a lack of inner maturity as well: "In giving their children freedom and independence, they are pushing them out at a time when these children are still in need of parental guidance and protection." The familiar results are youthful rebellion, contempt and charges of hypocrisy.

It is the pain of such conflicts that increasingly drives parents to special, even desperate attempts to understand. Those who truly make the effort also find that in a strange way the parent becomes the child's pupil; that in guiding his father through the country of the young, the son becomes the father. Psychologists like Berkeley's Paul Mussen predict that this phenomenon may become common in U.S. life, at least among middle-class parents. As Mussen puts it, "We are going to see a period in which the young will be our teachers."

Anthropologist Margaret Mead goes further. In her view, the advent of the atomic bomb in 1945 split humanity into rival camps: the old are "immigrants" in a world they control but do not understand; the young are natives but still lack power. United by instant communications that dramatize crises everywhere, the new youth international views its elders as irresponsible--insensitive to global dangers like nuclear holocaust. In this situation, Miss Mead argues that much of the world is on the verge of a "prefigurative" culture in which "the young, free to act on their own initiative, can lead the elders in the direction of the unknown."

Whatever the merits of this theory, the young have not automatically gained moral authority. But parents are discovering that they cannot re-establish their own moral authority merely through laying down the law by fiat. The troubled parents of troubled children have only one real choice: listen.

What the kids say may be silly, impractical or illusory. To listen to children is like watching the film Rashomon: participants in the same event see it in drastically different ways, all "true." But listening pays--especially in an era when rapid social change is creating roughly one new U.S. generation every five years.

Fathers who listen--and then act in some public way--are more numerous than many imagine. When Interior Secretary Walter J. Hickel wrote his famous post-Cambodia letter to President Nixon, his plea for more understanding of the young was based not on impulse but on his long experience with his six sons, aged eight to 28. Jack Hickel, 19, a biology student at the University of San Francisco, defines his relationship with his parents as "super-good." Hickel never indulged in what Jack calls "fairy tale" moralizing. When Jack sampled the "weekend hippie" scene in Haight-Ashbury several years ago, Hickel was troubled but not surprised to learn that the sampling included marijuana. He merely asked his son what it felt like, then suggested that it would be "foolish to take chances with the law and health." Jack quit. Today he has no qualms about criticizing the war policies of his father's boss. According to Jack, "It's up to the parents to open the lines of communication, and up to the kid to join in and keep them open."

Taking a Lonesome Step

Sometimes it takes a shock. Howard Samuels, who made his millions in the plastics business, is full of reformist ideas partly gained from family policy meetings with his eight kids, aged eleven to 27. Last winter, while campaigning for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in New York's primary, Samuels received a blow: his son Howie, 17, was arrested in Greenwich Village for possessing hashish. Instead of cringing in embarrassment, Samuels called a family confab, took his children's advice and came out for liberalized marijuana laws. (Last week the charges against Howie were dropped.) Something similar befell Oregon's Republican Governor Tom McCall, whose son Sam, now 20, has battled heroin addiction since the age of 15. McCall still takes a dim view of all drugs. But now he feels "charitable" toward draft resisters and recently blasted Oregonians for refusing to lower the voting age to 19. He called the refusal a "tremendous victory for the S.D.S." Until recently, Ohio's Republican Senator William B. Saxbe viewed most antiwar dissenters as "crazies." In June, he changed his tune after receiving a jolting letter from his "most conservative" son Charles, 23, a Marine lieutenant. Charles movingly asked his father to fulfill his campaign pledges and help end "a war that is contrary to everything I've been taught to believe about America." The letter and Saxbe's impressed reply were duly inserted in the Congressional Record.

No doubt such incidents are relatively rare in the current climate of adult dismay over youth's excesses and eccentricities. And yet fathers who have been influenced by their children--and have influenced them--can be found at almost every level of U.S. life. At times this may suggest confusion on the part of parents who are, above all else, eager to keep their families together. More often, perhaps, it suggests the kind of strength that is required to change one's mind. Some examples:

> Democratic Congressman Thomas P. ("Tip") O'Neill, 57, of Massachusetts' Eighth District, has good reason to heed the young. His house in Cambridge teems with five concerned children, aged 18 to 26, plus a constant dozen or so of their friends, all forever debating political issues. "At our house," says Susan O'Neill, a 23-year-old teacher, "you sit down to dinner and get up two hours later." Her father "always asks our sources, where we got our information, how reliable it is." A few days ago, the O'Neills had a long discussion about hair; the Congressman duly assigned an aide to do some research. "We discovered that since the time of Christ, the male species has worn long hair and beards about 90% of the time. The Western world turned to short hair and clean-shaven faces only after the Prussian victory over France. All the great heroes of America have worn long hair. It's nothing for Americans to get alarmed about."

What makes O'Neill listen extra hard is the fact that he represents not only working-class voters but also 200,000 students on 34 campuses in the Boston area--the most collegiate district in Congress. The Johnson Administration got his early support on the Viet Nam War. Then, in 1967, O'Neill made a hawkish speech at Boston College, his alma mater, to a hostile young audience that included two of his children. Irked by one student questioner, he exploded: "I've had 43 briefings on the war from all the experts--Johnson, Westmoreland, Abrams, Bunker, Lodge, Rusk, McNamara--and I think I know more about this subject than you do." Replied the student: "Have you ever been briefed on the other side of the issue?"

Later his children besieged him with antiwar arguments. Back in Washington, O'Neill interviewed top officials off the record and found all of them privately opposed to the war. As a result, he took the then "lonesome" step of breaking with L.B.J., and became the first outspoken dove among New England Congressmen. He has not wavered. In a recent House speech, he urged his colleagues to "change the perilous course of this nation." And he added: "Truly, my children awakened me three years ago to the realization of how great the concern is, how deep the love of country and the desire to protect it."

O'Neill's children have converted him on other issues: against the SST, for the 18-year-old vote. He blasts campus violence as a sure way to anger Middle America, a theme he pounds in campus speeches. But rational dissent is something else: "There is no comparison with the knowledge of this generation and that of my own at that age."

> Edward H. Harte, 47, is a rich, urbane Texan who got "my big awakening" majoring in philosophy at Dartmouth. Today he is co-owner of the $27 million Harte-Hanks newspaper chain, publisher of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times (circ. 107,000) and the most liberal press tycoon in Texas. A key cause of that superlative is his son Chris, 22, a political science major at Stanford, who has taught Harte to "admire the gutsiness of this generation."

It has not been easy. "In 1967, Chris called me from Stanford to say that he thought the U.S. was behaving almost as badly as Nazi Germany. I was shocked. I hung up." Chris persisted with dozens more antiwar calls from college, where he was managing editor of the Stanford Daily. "He took an almost Toynbee-esque line about the U.S.'s moral bankruptcy," says Harte, who stoutly resisted partly out of respect for his fellow Texan, Lyndon Johnson. "But finally my son got through to me. I realized that I didn't understand this war or believe that it was serving the nation's vital interests." So Harte did a hard thing in hawkish Texas: he openly opposed U.S. policies in Viet Nam, and even supported Eugene McCarthy in 1968. "I'm fairly certain that we were the first and only paper in the state to editorialize against the war," he says proudly.

Harte and his activist wife Janet, a New Englander who serves on the Texas Civil Rights Commission, have gone on to espouse locally unpopular causes like pollution control for oil companies. "That paper is the Pravda of South Texas," snorts one conservative lawyer. Harte has even recovered from his initial dismay at discovering that Chris played a major role in persuading Stanford to create a coed dormitory. "The kids were more orderly and serious about their studies, so I've changed my mind." Even so, Harte is still cool about some of Chris's other passions, such as the film Easy Rider. "I thought it was just corny as hell," he says. As for Woodstock: "If you don't dig that music --and I don't--it's a long three hours, I can tell you."

> Harold Willens, 56, started as a $10-a-week grocery clerk to support his parents in East Los Angeles, served as a Marine intelligence officer in World War II, later worked his way through college and eventually became a millionaire developer of shopping centers. A few years ago, he says, "I was a tennis player, a moneymaker and a knee-jerk Democrat." His life centered on Palm Springs weekends and boosting his fortune to $10 million. Then something happened: his two youngest children (a third is 30 and less influential) "transformed me from a clod into a citizen."

It started with his son Ronnie's intense grief over the assassination of John Kennedy: "I suddenly realized that my concentration on acquiring material goods for my children had been a total waste of time." Soon Willens began worrying about pollution and the Bomb, watching new movies, and listening to the kids' records (Dylan, Ochs, Simon and Garfunkel), which seemed "awful" until he studied the words--youth's plaintive indictment of a nihilistic world.

Ronnie, now 24, later chose not to join his father's "irrelevant" business, won a conscientious-objector status after a harrowing legal battle, and started writing a novel. Meantime, Willens experienced the even more intense grief of Michele, now 21, over the assassination of Robert Kennedy, for whom she had worked. When Michele also quit college, says Willens, "I decided that I had better get off my assets and not let my children become totally disbelieving." As a result, he supported McCarthy and helped organize a group called Business Executives Move for Viet Nam Peace, which partly financed last fall's Moratorium. Much of his time is now spent touring the country recruiting executives for the antiwar cause.

As Michele puts it, "Dad just woke up one day and said, 'I know I've waited 50 years too long, but now I'm going to do something.' He did."

> John B. Davis Jr., 48, school superintendent of Minneapolis, has lately awakened to the fact that "I am not only influencing but being influenced" by his eight children, aged seven to 25. The kids helped turn him against the war --and then challenged his whole profession. His son John dropped out of high school at 17 and now runs the experimental Cambridge Free School just off Harvard Square. Dismayed at first, Davis now proudly views John as one of the country's emerging "humanists" in avant-garde education.

Susan, 18, the family activist, has just graduated from one of Davis' high schools--much to his relief, she thinks. "I had constant run-ins with teachers and principals about student rights, and he got calls from them. One day I didn't salute the flag in school and someone complained. He got a lot of backlash, and I'm really grateful for his tolerance."

Davis finds it "very impressive that the young are relentless in their pursuit of what they feel is reason; they're not dissuaded." Thus, instead of going to college, which she considers unnecessary, Susan is working for YES (Youth Emergency Service), a telephone referral service for troubled kids, which she helped start in Minneapolis this year. Later she hopes to study in Europe. Says Davis: "You can't dismiss them as young, ethereal dreamers. Their premises, whether right or wrong, are based on homework. They make them in a logical, sequential way, and you can't discount them." To ensure this in his own family, Davis always questions his children closely about the facts or non-facts that underlie their assertions. This used to be tough on Susan. "In the beginning, when we talked about student rights or the war, I'd get emotional and forget all the facts I had. There were a lot of angry, slam-the-door incidents. I used to be really upset because he was my father and he was supposed to listen to me. But he'd stay very calm and say, 'Come back when you can talk rationally.' Now there is a feeling that we are all individuals and I can talk to my parents as I would to any other person. I think that's a really important relationship to have with your parents."

> David E. Callison, 46, a Portland, Ore., cop for 22 years, has spent hours nose-to-nose with campus protesters and watched many a truncheon thudding against student skulls. So one day last spring Callison was both alarmed and relieved to learn that his 22-year-old daughter Liz, a senior at the University of Oregon, had just survived her first sit-in demonstration unscathed and spent a night in jail for trespass. "All we wanted was a chance to talk to the president of the university," she said. "We waited peacefully for 36 hours. When the police came, one asked me if I was going to force him to arrest me. I thought for a few seconds and said 'Yes.' If I had left, I would never have escaped judging myself for lacking the courage of my convictions. It was an opportunity to begin defining myself."

The eldest of six children, all nurtured in Catholic schools and reared in a close-knit family, Liz is a shy girl who hardly looks like a revolutionary. "What did you prove?" her mother asked about her arrest. "Not much," she replied, "but it was all I could do."

The trouble is that Liz yearns to bring "the system" to a screeching halt at once. After her arrest, she told Callison: "We have to close down the university and start all over." Callison good-naturedly threw up his hands: "Wow, Liz, are you dumb! Just like that, huh? Close the university. Wow." She told her father that he and his fellow cops ought to be out cracking the heads of industrial polluters, not the young. He replied that "a policeman has to enforce the law that the majority approves." At one point, he said wearily, "If you only knew how much time I spend trying to keep police from swinging to right-wing extremism." But she persisted: "Shouldn't we be on the same side?"

In a sense they are, and in the case of the Callisons, the father has just as much to teach as the child. A rare cop, Callison attended the University of Portland for three years before dropping out in order to support his family by pounding a beat. As president of the 655-member Portland police union, he knows precisely how to use power to effect change. In a recent display of leadership, he coaxed and pressured Portland officials into giving the cops higher pay and better working conditions. At any moment, a word from him would have triggered a police strike. "Liz may not believe it yet," Callison says, "but I'm a better revolutionary than she is."

> New York State Assemblyman George Michaels, 59, is a tall, aggressive Democratic lawyer who often conducts heated discussions with his three sons until 4 or 5 a.m. at his home in Auburn, N.Y. The talk has pushed Michaels from hawk to dove, but as a political realist he has a healthy respect for backlash: "Many people in my generation thought that the National Guard should have killed ten more at Kent State, and I am afraid they're expressing the majority view."

Michaels was long opposed, at least in public, to liberalizing New York's rigid abortion law. Last spring his sons and a daughter-in-law cited numerous horror stories about the grim effects of the law on pregnant girls, many of whom they knew personally. They begged him to support a perennial reform bill. Michaels sympathized, but when the bill came up in the legislature last spring, he was prepared to vote "nay"--especially in an election year.

After Michaels voted against the bill, one of his sons angrily called him "a whore," and at that point he began to have second thoughts. Furthermore, only one more vote was needed to pass the bill. After hours of angry debate, Michaels rose with tears in his eyes and switched his vote--thus giving New York the most liberal abortion law in the U.S. The young, the press and most women cheered, but Michaels knew what was in store. Roman Catholics were incensed; even fellow Democrats denounced his action. In the June primary, Michaels' constituents erased him from the Democratic ticket, virtually denying him a sixth legislative term.

In fact, Michaels is now relieved. "It cost me my political career," he says, "but I made the right decision. The important thing is that I can face my family." Many people agreed: he has since received 9,000 letters from all over the world. Says Michaels: "Thank God my sons put me on the right track."

> Clarence A. Robinson, 43, vice president of Seattle's Tally Corp. (electronics equipment), had long tried to put his wife and three children ahead of his work. "At Tally," he said, "we take the position that a guy who works a 60-hour week is just plain inefficient, unorganized, or out of balance at home. We give him demerits for it, not merits. I quit that sort of thing years ago.

When the kids were in junior high school, we went camping a lot, did things as a family. So we had a foundation, and when the crisis came, I had time to cope with it."

The trouble began two years ago when Robinson's eldest child, Sue, then 17, took to things like going downtown barefoot and mixing on the fringes of the drug-rock scene. Despite the family's supposed closeness, Sue began drifting away. She scorned values that Robinson took for granted. She accused her father of "just not listening," he recalls, "and I would say, 'The hell I'm not. I understand.' She was right."

Hard Responsibility

One day the Robinsons were shocked to find a bag of marijuana in Sue's room. In Seattle, parents have turned kids in for that. Instead, says Robinson, "we began to adjust, to really listen for the first time." They interviewed Sue's friends, discussed Viet Nam, gradually accepted ideas that had formerly incensed Robinson, "a child of the Depression" and a veteran of World War II. In fact, he says, "I have enjoyed talking to some of these kids more than their parents have. I think that's sad."

By now, he says, "I find that I have to be careful what I say in my own world. I'm having trouble communicating with adults." All the same, the Robinsons have achieved a bigger goal: saving their relationship with Sue, a sophomore at the University of Washington, who now abhors most of the drug scene, especially "the dealers, who don't care about the poor kid on the street who gets a bum tab of acid." Who educated whom? The kids led the way, says Robinson.

"You've just got to get into their camp. There is no way to beat them." But Sue puts it another way: "You can't make it without your parents--you just can't."

Sue's discovery is echoed by others, including Margaret Mead. "The kids do not understand about social organization, whatever it is," she says. "The older people know how to do it, but the kids must use the expertise they have around them because they have no methods, and methods are not born overnight." In a speech she has elaborated the theme: "The older people have the tools--the doctors, lawyers, scientists. The young people must learn to work with them, just as the older people must learn to understand the rebellion of youth."

In fact, getting along with parents has never been easy in the U.S. America has almost begged for trouble by expecting children to out-achieve their parents, yet wanting them still to look up to them. Now that many refuse to do either, the task is even harder. One who has thought a lot about the subject is Tracy I. Gray Jr., 16, who will be a senior this fall at Evanston (Ill.) High School. Though Tracy is black, and the strain between the generations is often especially acute in Black America, he gets along extremely well with his parents, who operate a family upholstery business in Evanston. He understands that he must educate them, but also that they must educate him.

"For a period, every child thinks he knows more than his parents," says Tracy. "From the insight teen-agers gain today from their contact with the outside world, they easily see parents' faults. But instead of saying, 'Oh God, I see that you are not as smart as I am,' 'Oh God, I see that you can't see about the war,' 'Oh God, you are a person who doesn't change,' the kids should look at the parents objectively. This is a hard responsibility for the teenager. Take my mother. I like her as a person. I'm sure I would like her even if she weren't my mother. She gets upset--very easily sometimes. But outside of being my mother, she is also being herself. Mrs. Gray. Of course, my mother doesn't think as I do. She's constantly talking to her child, her baby. I don't let it stifle me. I accept it. I still try to talk to her and we get through to each other."

Back to Wisdom

Tracy feels that when he needs advice on practical matters, he must often turn to others. "A teen-ager today can't expect his parents to know everything, or know enough to answer all his questions. There may be a drifting away from the parental information center, but I don't think the parent as the parent will disappear. He will have a different role. In the future, parents will be helping the kids more in their beliefs and attitudes. Kids will go to their parents not for just pragmatic advice and information but also for guidance and understanding in the art of becoming a person. They will learn not only how to make a living but also how to live."

The most striking aspect of Tracy Gray's advice to his peers is of course that he is rediscovering the role that parents used to play in the pre-technological era--moral guidance. Today's stress on technical knowledge has undercut that role; yet knowledge is multiplying so fast that parents might well return to teaching wisdom rather than facts that soon become obsolete. Tom Winship, father of four and editor of the Boston Globe, believes that for the past ten years the nation's children have provided the "energy and courage" for most social progress: civil rights, campus reform, ecology, withdrawal from Viet Nam. But many have also been stunningly naive about drugs, the dangers of violence, the values of work and excellence. "It's fun to be responsive to our kids," says Winship. "They can teach us something--but so can we teach them a hell of a lot."

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