Non-Traditional Class of 1950 Is an Intellectual Catch Basin

There was never another class like the Class of 1950 at Harvard and there never will be again. The essential ingredient needed to produce one is a major war, one which we both win and survive, and the two together are hardly likely. It wasn't a class in the traditional Harvard sense--a class with its roots in the Yard--but only a system of categorizing students. It was more of an intellectual catch basin of all the talent and non-talent that happened to arrive, sometimes in the most preposterous ways, in Cambridge after the war had ended.

"Well, I'm labelled class of '50 but my real class should be '48, I think," could be called a generic statement of the time.

In my own case I had been out in the world and at work for half a year when a diploma arrived announcing that I had just been graduated from Harvard in the Class of '50. I hadn't known that. As best as I can recall no one ever invited me to any graduation exercises and if they did the summons was so muted there were few who heard the call. I never met anyone in my class who went to his graduation. My suspicion is that the administration didn't know where to put us all. And I think they were glad to see us go and get back to normal again. People were always talking about that. They even thought the waitresses with their menus might come back to the dining halls.

One of the peculiar aspects of this war-dominated class was, of course, the war itself. One would have felt there would have been a sharp, even hostile line drawn between the returning veterans and the unsullied arriving from their preparatory and high schools but, if there was, I failed to notice much of it. What little there might have been disappeared quickly. Very few of the ex-G.I.'s wore any parts of their old uniforms or gave any overt signs of expecting or getting any preferential treatment or respect. One fellow went around with a chestful of fruit salad, as we used to call decorations, and he wore his uniform for about a year. He is now an avowed homosexual and I suspect he was going through a fierce identity crisis. Uncertain of his masculinity, he was compelled to display it on his chest. Frank Cabot used to go around in his old army coat over Brooks suits, very pre-hip, but it wasn't seen as flaunting the military but as Boston eccentricity. Only a Cabot could pull it off.

The absence of the War as a controlling force in the class was odd in a way and I've often wondered if it was simply Harvard. After all some of our class were less than two winters away from huddling in foxholes around Bastogne with their commander, in a very un-H-way, replying "Nuts" to the Third Panzer Army's demand for surrender. And some--of them had even seen Patton, plain. Or though a glass, darkly, pear-handled pistols, white bulldogs, boots, spurs and all, depending on how you saw the man. They don't have this kind around anymore, which is all part of what I am getting at. There is a myth that soldiers don't like to talk about their experiences and it is just that--myth. But as hard as I can remember, no one ever asked me one word about my war. In sardonic moods I used to go to Cronin's, when Cronin's was where it should be, right smack in the heart of things, and ask people in booths: Hey, wanna hear some good war stories? Not one taker.

I suppose this has to be seen as a tribute to Harvard and the intellectual purpose and power of the institution. The war was taught there, for example, as if no one had ever been in it. It wasn't the experience that mattered but the ideas behind it. One got put in one's proper place. I recall being annoyed at spending a week on the finer points of the Thirty Year's War, people going on about belting each other with pikes.

"What in the hell is all this about?" I wanted to cry out, "none of it matters any more, not after the Big War," but I didn't and the reason was that a very subtle transformation was working in me, exactly as it was in everyone else I knew in the class. I came back from Harvard thinking of myself as an ex-soldier, a returned veteran of infantry combat, and two years later I had been transformed into something that in reality I was, a sophomore at Harvard. There were times, exam periods for instance, when I could barely remember having endured the war. The war, the most endlessly earnest, realistic experience of my life, had become fantasy. Harvard was the reality. Harvard owned me now. Harvard had won. She had beaten us all.

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I am enough of a writer to know I should end the piece here; it is what is known as a good closer. You can hear everything but the chapel bells ringing at the end of the hour. But I want to go on to one thing else that needs saying and is peculiar to this strange, huge, shapeless class. Someone at CBS, talking about the intramural struggles taking place there, said. "What you're observing is not a war of liberation or even a drive for power itself, but a war of dislodgement."

What he meant was this: The oncoming generations and classes, while making their mark individually, have not been able to dislodge the WW II breed, call it the Class of '50 if you want, from the ultimate domination of things.

It is difficult to say exactly why. It may, in the end, rest in an attitude engendered by the last complete American success. More and more I see the war and the class and the time as a watershed era in American life and history, and I think younger Americans sense this perhaps even more deeply. All those who survived the last days of the Great Depression through the Great War and that time of great optimism that followed it are coming to represent some old America, a gone America, an American attitude denied the generation following them. Can anyone think it is more happenstance that this class produced Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger, who together form the sum of our foreign policy and our national security. It is breathtaking and scary as hell. Maybe it is time to be represented by people who don't think in such terms when there are no victories left for anyone anywhere. A society that feels itself called upon to go shouting into the streets for the victory in the Mayaguez campaign is surely in need of a hard second look.

But the Fact of Fifty remains. There is still no politician of viable stature in our national life who is not one of us, products of the Good War generation. There are some who would say that Ted Kennedy was not in the war and not of the Class of '50 kind, but I think the very intense and personal involvement of all his family in the war and aftermath place him in the category of the last of the generation's by products.

I remember my last year at Harvard. I had come up early for some reason and was sitting behind those huge vulgar cream pillars at Memorial Church or Appleton Chapel. Some new boy came across the Yard with an armload of records and a German helmet on his head. A group of freshmen were on the other side of the pillar.

"Look at that," one said, "I think that's one of those German helmets."

"No, no, you got it wrong," a second freshman said, "the French wore those."

Oh, for Christ's sake. I thought, what was wrong with these people? What was it all for, anyway. Who was this kid to be wearing a German helmet? Who were they not to know what it was?

They began talking about where they had been when the war began and then began arguing about when it had, in fact begun. These people were at college with me, they were my college mates. I was furious with them and filled with a bitter sarcasm and I got up to give them some lessons about American history when I sat down again.

They had been 8 and 9 when one war had begun. Children at little desks they cleared away for creative play time in elementary school. This fast had it come, they were here, another generation upon us. I was history to them already, silent, and invisible behind the pillar.

They had come but they haven't yet arrived because '50 has not let go. This strange class.

Not yet, let go.

But they tell me time will see to that. We'll see. We shall see.

Robert Crichton '50 is a writer living in New York.CrimsonBob Ely