Vote Marks Turn in Nation’s Direction--and Consciousness : Politics: Clinton may be latest reformer to arrive at White House in roughly 30-year cycles. Election mirrored shifts in society on many levels.

WASHINGTON —  For Americans, the election of a President is more than a choice of one candidate over another: It is a poll on our national self-image, a vote on what direction we want our self-invented history to take.

“The President we get is the country we get,” the novelist E.L. Doctorow wrote recently. “He is the artificer of our malleable national soul.”

This week’s election of a 46-year-old governor of Arkansas to the White House thus reflected more than just a popular desire for change in the federal government’s economic policies.

It marked the turn of a roughly 30-year cycle in American history that has brought reformers to power three times in this century--Theodore Roosevelt in 1901, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, John F. Kennedy in 1960. And now, it would seem, there is a fourth, Bill Clinton in 1992.

And it coincided with a set of basic shifts in American society, on three levels: psychological, political and generational.

In psychological terms, this was the first election after the end of the Cold War--and the first vote in an uncomfortable new age of global economic competition.

“The end of the Cold War was a definable moment in our history,” Stanford University historian David M. Kennedy said. “But we still don’t know what comes after. We don’t even have a name for it yet.” Among the results, he said, are a deep anxiety about our future--and “a thirst for leadership.”

Recent polls reflect that diagnosis. When 75% of voters told The Times Poll that they believed that the country was “on the wrong track”--an unprecedented high--they were thinking not only of the current economic slowdown but of the nation’s long-range prospects as well.

In political terms, Clinton’s election marks the end of the Ronald Reagan Era, the 12-year Republican reign formed in the 1980 campaign, its promise of unlimited optimism and its commitment to shrinking the role of government.

Reagan and his successor, George Bush, stigmatized the federal government as “the problem,” not the solution, in Reagan’s words. Both Clinton and independent candidate Ross Perot, who between them won 62% of the vote, advocated a more activist federal government to treat the nation’s domestic problems.

And in generational terms, Tuesday’s vote marked the final act for the generation of national leaders who served in World War II--and the rise of a generation whose formative war was Vietnam, a trauma whose lesson was that American power is not unlimited.

“What we’re witnessing is the arrival of the baby boom generation,” Harvard scholar Richard Neustadt said. “Everything it’s touched has never been the same since, and it is finally coming to power.”

The fact that these three big shifts are happening at once may not be a coincidence. Some historians argue that history tends to move in rough step with demographic generations, and that the advent of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, 44--or someone like them--could have been predicted well in advance.

“At some point, shortly before or after the year 1990, there should come a sharp change in the national mood or direction,” historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. predicted in a 1986 essay. “The 1990s should be the turn in the generational succession for the young men and women who came of political age in the Kennedy years.”

Schlesinger noted with satisfaction this week that his prediction of a return to liberal activism 30 years after Kennedy had hit the mark. “The rhythm is evidently holding,” he said in a television interview.

“There’s no mystery about the 30-year period,” he added. “Thirty years is the span of a generation. . . . John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy were the children of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton and Al Gore are the children of Kennedy.”

Schlesinger noted that as early as 1889, the historian Henry Adams noticed that American history seemed to follow a regular cycle of reform and reaction, of increasing federal power and retrenchment. Adams estimated the cycle at 24 years; Schlesinger, applying the theory to this century, found a roughly 30-year rhythm.

Not all historians agree, of course. “It’s a little too mystical to have much explanatory power,” said Stanford’s Kennedy. “It’s a little like (psychic) Jeane Dixon: Anything will come true some day, if you only wait long enough.”

Even so, Kennedy, too, sees a clear line of succession running from Clinton back to J.F.K to the two Roosevelts.

“It is true that these four presidents share a strenuous and repeated commitment to the idea of public service, and to the utility and necessity of the federal government,” he said.

“And it is true that the first three inspired entire generations of young people,” he added. “I remember when Kennedy came to Stanford in my freshman year, during the 1960 campaign; it was electrifying. . . . And T.R. had the same effect on people at the turn of the century.”

During this year’s presidential campaign, Clinton deliberately cast himself as the political heir of J.F.K.--quoting Kennedy’s speeches, echoing his rhetorical style and even, Bush aides charged angrily, imitating his choppy hand movements.

Democratic aides scoured the National Archives to find film of young Bill Clinton meeting Kennedy in 1963 and they showed the clip over and over in an effort to offer documentary proof of a torch being passed in advance to a new generation of leaders.

But then, J.F.K. and F.D.R. did the same. In 1960, Kennedy cited Roosevelt, the great leader of the generation before, as his model of presidential leadership. And in 1932, Roosevelt cited his progressive Republican uncle as the model for the kind of presidency he hoped to have.

Clinton, of course, used the memory of Kennedy for practical as well as sentimental reasons: to remind voters of an era when federal activism was welcomed, not feared. The Democrat’s appeals to history also served to buttress his charge that while Bush may have been the right man to end the Cold War, he was unsuited to the new era of economic challenge that followed.

Even some Republicans quietly agreed with that argument. Former Education Secretary William J. Bennett said that Bush had a “generational” problem: The President’s experience with history told him that the most important thing was to end the Cold War and secure a global order, while most of the voters already had turned their attention to the post-war challenge of meeting the economic competition of Germany and Japan.

In that sense, the historical precedent for Bush may not have been Herbert Hoover, who was turned out of office by F.D.R. in the depth of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Instead, it may have been Winston Churchill, the conservative British prime minister who led his nation to victory in World War II--and was unceremoniously fired by his voters within a year as Britain turned back to domestic concerns.