“The essay not only reveals Obama’s position on nuclear disarmament. It also offers a glimpse of the milieu in which a president came of age. Most of us form our political identities in young adulthood. Our attitudes, judgments, and preferences are shaped by political circumstances when we are 18 to 25 years old. Obama is no exception. As he reached maturity, the Cold War approached its climax. The most divisive issue in American politics was Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy. The belief that Reagan was a warmonger was deeply held by many people on the left. Obama was one of them.
The trendy idea at the time was support for the “nuclear freeze.” “
This is only half true. I was in HS and college at the same time, and the “no nukes” people were on the outside fringe of hippy throwbacks who still wore tie-dye clothes and long hair with headbands. They were nice people, but they tended to do protest walkouts just so they could go outside and smoke. They were in a teeny, tiny, laughable minority that had no traction whatsoever among their peers on campus. The only adults they impressed were hippy era teachers that resembled Donald Sutherland in “Animal House”.
It is accurate to say, that at that time, some people between 18-25 were on the left and shared young Obama’s views. But it was such a small minority of anachronistic throwbacks that it shouldn’t even be considered a group with any influence whatsoever. They were more like a campus joke with their badly outdated attitudes and dress.
I know because I was there: the vast majority of 18-25 yr olds at that time were embracing Ronald Reagan and the new American prosperity.
I was a senior in Air Force ROTC (six years prior enlisted) at the same time at a large Big Ten school.
This was the time they started deploying one of the Trident series missile boats with the D5 (I think). Some idiots decided to protest in front of the ROTC building by stretching out a string with 240 small strips of cloth on it, representing a piece of cloth for each warhead carried on the boat.
The biggest joke was they did this in front of the AFROTC detachment because there was no Navy unit on campus. As I walked by them I heard regular students deride them and call them idiots.