In 1898, when the 42-year-old George Bernard Shaw stepped down as drama critic of London’s Saturday Review, he introduced his successor, Max Beerbohm, 26, with these words: “The younger generation is knocking at the door, and as I open it there steps sprightly in the incomparable Max.”
I was reminded of this famous line when, earlier this month, 83-year-old Sen. Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, ended speculation by announcing that he would not seek an eighth term. Hatch, who was once an amateur boxer, explained that “every good fighter knows when to hang up the gloves.” But he might also have been thinking of the future: first, that at the end of his next term, Senator Hatch would be 90 years old; and second, that in opening this particular door, a rising generation of Utah Republicans could squeeze through for a shot at the title.
As if on cue, there stepped sprightly in the incomparable Mitt Romney, whose candidacy for Hatch’s seat now seems inevitable. But the fact that this generational changing of the guard would involve a man in his eighties making room for a 70-year-old went largely unremarked. And why not? Romney was the Republican presidential nominee six years ago, and his age at that time was never an issue. Nor is it now.
This is an extraordinary development in American politics. Not so many decades ago, Romney’s age would have discouraged his candidacy and certainly scuttled his chances for success. Now it is neither whispered nor mentioned out loud, but wholly irrelevant. And yet as recently as 1952, when 62-year-old Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected to the White House, he became the oldest person in almost a century to be elected president.
By the time, eight years later, 70-year-old Ike laid down the burdens of office, he had fully earned his status, in the public’s mind, as elder statesman, a distinction magnified by the relative youth (43) of his successor, John F. Kennedy. Indeed, in that same year (1960), so geriatric was Western democratic leadership that influential journalists, such as the New York Times’s James Reston, routinely complained about the antiquated quartet of elderly gentlemen—Eisenhower, Britain’s Harold Macmillan (66), Konrad Adenauer of West Germany (84), France’s Charles de Gaulle (70)—charged with fighting the Cold War.
In retrospect, of course, led by the likes of these giants, the Western world enjoyed an embarrassment of riches, especially in comparison to the genuinely sclerotic leadership of the Soviet Union. But retrospection is not one of journalism’s habits, any more than youth is a virtue in itself. It is worth noting that both major-party nominees for president last year—Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump—were approximately the same age as old Ike when he retired. So, for that matter, was Ronald Reagan when he was sworn into office (1981).
Of course, the obvious explanation for all this is that, thanks to advancements in medicine and pharmacology, people are living much longer than they used to. And that, combined with the natural inclination of politicians to hog the limelight, has led to a governing class largely dominated by senior citizens. The chief of the executive branch, Donald Trump, will be 72 years old this year. Two of the nine justices of the Supreme Court are in their eighties. In Orrin Hatch’s Senate, fully one-quarter of members are above the age of 70, and of those, eight senators are in their eighties—including 84-year-old Dianne Feinstein, who has yet to decide whether or not she will seek reelection this year. The great left hopes of last year were 69-year-old Hillary Clinton and 75-year-old Bernie Sanders; the great left hope of 2020 will be 71-year-old Elizabeth Warren.
To be sure, and apart from the extension of human longevity, this is not necessarily a bad thing. In the mid-20th century, when the Progressive-era reform of seniority ruled Capitol Hill, the liberal complaint about Congress was that power rested disproportionately in the hands of conservative southern Democrats, who tended to keep their House and Senate seats for decades and (by the standards of the day) lived to advanced age.
Depending on your viewpoint, however, the tendency to hang on either thwarts rising aspirants or allows the wise and experienced to flourish. In any case, the length of political careers is permanently altered: Robert Taft, Ohio’s “Mr. Republican,” aspired to the presidency three times in midcentury while serving a total of 14 years in the Senate. When Robert Dole won the GOP nomination in 1996, he had been a senator for just under 30 years.
In my youth, I used to catch an occasional glimpse of the skeletal, eightysomething Sen. Carl Hayden (D-Ariz.), who remained in office until he was 91—and had represented Arizona in Congress since it had gained statehood. At the time, from my perspective, that seemed an impossibly lengthy tenure, hard to grasp. Now, not so much.
