Most of the leaders of the radical student groups were
"red" or "pink" diaper babies,
Maybe the leaders, I didn't know any of them personally. But not the people I knew personally. Many of them were children of upper middle class affluence quite explicitly rebelling against their parents' values. They saw their parents as having "sold out" to the establishment and leading valueless lives, and tried to get as far from those values as they could.
And not surprisingly, given that most of the student protesters against the Vietnam War were baby boomers, a large number of them were children of men and women who had served with distinction in the military and, particularly in the early days of the protests, supported the Vietnam war to contain Communism. From what I saw from inside the anti-war movement, it was the young folks who changed their parents values rather than accepting what they had been taught.
If you have access to my FBI file, you will find at least some aspects of my anti-war position, which varied significantly from the values my parents taught me, detailed there. I assume the FBI still maintains those files, since it seems never to throw away any negative information (or what it perceives as negative information) about anybody. |
