The Summer of '46

The meme about the origin of the Baby Boomers goes like this: all the men in America were off fighting bravely in World War II, keeping the world safe for democracy. In 1945, the Nazis surrendered and then Japan got nuked and surrendered and the world was saved and the boys came home. And since the war was won and the Axis was defeated and the world was safe, it was okay to make babies again. So there was a boom, a big boom, starting about nine months after the end of the war.

VE Day was May 8, 1945, marking the end of the war against Hitler. VJ Day was a season later, August 14, 1945, though Japan didn't formally surrender for another two weeks. VJ Day is the day that produced that iconic photo you associate with the end of the war, where the navy sailor hears the news and grabs his main squeeze for a passionate, tilting kiss. Never mind that this kiss is actually a #MeToo story, that the woman being kissed didn't know the guy and never consented. "And then I was grabbed," Greta Zimmer told an interviewer decades later. "That man was very strong. I wasn't kissing him. He was kissing me."

George Mendonsa, the guy in the photo, was home on shore leave. He didn't go home and make a Baby Boomer with Greta like so many of us were left to presume. He married Rita, the woman standing behind him, over his shoulder in the picture, with whom he'd been on a date when the movie was interrupted to announce Japan's surrender. They married in October 1946, but didn't have their first child until 1953.

Had they conceived a child that night, the child would have been born in May 1946. But George was home on shore leave. It took a while to get the millions of men deployed in the Pacific back from the theater. So it's safe to say that the summer of 1946 is the real start of the Baby Boom as a cultural phenomenon.

Donald Trump was born in June 1946. George W. Bush was born in July 1946. Bill Clinton was born in August 1946.

For five of the last seven Presidential terms, spanning what will be, as of the forthcoming election, twenty of the last twenty-eight years, the US hasn't just been led by Baby Boomers. It's been led by tip-of-the-spear Baby Boomers whose birthdays embody the meme that gives the generation its name.

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This level of clustering of Presidential birthdays is not only rare, it's unique. Four other pairs of Presidents share a birth year, but none of their birthdays are closer than three and a half months apart. George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter were both born in 1924, Richard Nixon and his pardoner Gerald Ford in 1913, U.S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes in 1822, and Andrew Jackson and the man who beat him while losing the popular vote, John Quincy Adams, in 1767. None of those pairs combined to serve more than twelve years as President and none shared their birth year with a third President.

Trump was born on June 14, W. Bush on July 6, and Clinton on August 19. The three Presidents were born in a span of 67 days.

Both Clinton's and Bush's fathers fought in World War II, while the older Fred Trump, a real estate developer, built barracks and apartment buildings near stateside naval bases. And since you're probably wondering, none of the other candidates for President in 2020 were born in 1946. The closest is Elizabeth Warren, born in 1949. Hillary Clinton was born in 1947.

Barack Obama was born in 1961, technically placing him in the Baby Boom generation, which most people close three years later in 1964. That year, our Summer of '46 trio reached the age of 18 just as the Gulf of Tonkin incident was opening the Vietnam War. All three enjoyed student deferments from the draft from 1964-68...