WOODSTOCK NATION

Were you at the Woodstock music festival in 1969? Many baby boomers who attended that seminal ’60s event are happy to brag about it. In fact, if as many people who claim to have attended were actually there, Max Yasgur’s muddy farm fields would have sunk under the weight and ended up looking like the Grand Canyon.

But if you’re presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, eager to dispel any perception that like some fellow boomers, you indulged in promiscuous sex and recreational drugs along with rock ‘n’ roll during the 1960s, Woodstock is a land mine. Sen. Clinton learned that recently after she worked to include a $1 million federal budget earmark to help build the Museum at Bethel Woods, in Bethel, N.Y. Ridiculed by conservatives as a “hippie museum,” it is actually part of a larger development called the Bethel Woods Center for the Performing Arts, which includes a 16,800-seat amphitheater on the festival site. (Though planned for the town of Woodstock some 40 miles away, the festival was actually held in Bethel.)

During a recent Republican presidential candidates debate, Sen. John McCain took Sen. Clinton to task for the earmark, and in doing so, delivered one of the best lines of the debate season. Sen. McCain said he knew about the festival, but did not attend, because “I was tied up at the time,” a reference to being held captive in a North Vietnamese prison.

Setting aside the legitimate earmark issue, the spat over Woodstock speaks of a deeper conflict. Some 40 years after the term “generation gap” was coined to describe the divergent views of the older generation and boomers – born between 1946 and 1964 – it seems there is still a residual … something. Is it embarrassment? Fear of opening old wounds?

Maybe the next debate ought to include a “What I did during the ’60s” segment. Almost all the 2008 presidential contenders hail from the generation that experimented with sex and drugs, formed communes and tried meditation, grew their hair long and wore flowers in it. Some of it was fashion, some of it seeking to shock, and much of it self-indulgent, but some of what that generation did changed America for the better: ending a failed war, extending civil rights to blacks and women, and launching the environmental movement, to name a few.

Sen. Clinton, as was revealed when some letters she wrote during her college years were published recently, was hardly a hippie flower child or radical activist. Does she suffer lingering shame in being a boomer, perhaps because her generation enjoyed unprecedented affluence and opportunity, with very little sacrifice?

The museum which Mrs. Clinton quickly distanced herself from is actually dedicated not to the festival, but to the broader topic of interpreting not the 1960s as a political, social and cultural phenomenon. She – and the other candidates – should reflect on, not sidestep for political expediency, the times that shaped them.