DALLAS -- The "generation gap'' is really about the inability of one age group to empathize with another.
At 33, I'm just one year older than the memory that haunts Bob Kerrey. The haunting concerns the night of Feb. 25, 1969, when the former Navy SEAL lieutenant initiated the killings of more than a dozen unarmed women and children in the Vietnamese hamlet of Thanh Phong.
Along with others in "The Gen'' (the generation formerly known as X), the Kerrey episode -- like the controversy over former President Bill Clinton's evasion of military service and other recurring Vietnam-era flaps -- leaves me feeling like I walked into a movie theater during the closing credits.
Every middle-aged man who considers a run for the presidency has to answer the question: "Where were you during the Vietnam War?''
Those of us who were in diapers during part of it wonder why it still matters.
Why is it that, a quarter-century after the fall of Saigon, a generation of American men still feels as if their manhood was defined by the lot they drew -- and the choices they made -- as boys in the 1960s and '70s?
Why did John McCain, who spent five and half years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, begin his quest for the Republican presidential nomination with what political observers called a huge head start in capturing the public's imagination, while his opponent, George W. Bush, had to defend his stint stateside in the Texas Air National Guard?
I don't understand it. Just as baby boomers never "got'' what their parents went through as part of the celebrated World War II generation, today's 20- and 30-somethings will never decipher why boomers and pre-boomers (those born during World War II) can't get beyond Vietnam.
Kerrey, 57, tried last week to get in front of a story about to be broken by journalist Gregory L. Vistica. It was in a series of interviews that Kerrey granted Vistica that the former presidential aspirant acknowledged his role in the massacre at Thanh Phong.
The story appeared Sunday in the New York Times Magazine, and it was featured on the CBS television news program, "60 Minutes II.''
For those who have long held up Kerrey as an honorable man in a profession that lacks honor, the revelation was less disappointing than the political spin that came with it. The defense was of the actions of a young and inexperienced warrior, but the person who staged it was an old political pro.
Speaking to reporters, Kerrey made it seem that he was coming clean because he could no longer keep the truth inside. He said he was tired of being revered as a "hero'' -- a title he didn't shy away from when running for Nebraska governor in 1982 and U.S. senator in 1988 -- when he knew that some of the behavior for which he was decorated in Vietnam was less than heroic.
OK, this is where those of us in The Gen came in. The fact that the story was about to explode had nothing to do with Kerrey's pre-emptive confession? Just like the surfacing of a famous blue dress had nothing to do with Bill Clinton's belated admission of a liaison with a White House intern?
Those baby boomers who rush to forgive Kerrey, perhaps because of their own lingering insecurities about Vietnam, miss the point. Even if Kerrey can be forgiven for what he did in Vietnam in the line of duty 32 years ago, he should still be excoriated for what he has done here in his own country in the name of ambition since then. He withheld the truth from voters for decades, and he went along as romantics in the press unknowingly constructed a myth that launched a storied political career. He held himself up as something rarer than war heroes -- an honest politician -- and fed that image by labeling (quite perceptively) Bill Clinton as a gifted liar while he himself was guilty of deceit by omission. And, when found out, he used his honed political skills to spin the tale as a need to unburden himself when it was really just an attempt to steer the story.
For a generation whose political education has been framed by Richard Nixon going on television to deny the truth about Watergate and Bill Clinton going on television to deny the truth about Monica -- one that can tell when a politician isn't telling the truth (his lips are moving) -- this finally makes sense.
We may not know Woodstock from blue-chip stock, but we know a lot about lying.