By the mid-1950s, half the seats in Congress were held by (mostly quite young) veterans

From The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell.  

By the mid-1950s, half the seats in Congress were held by (mostly quite young) veterans. Their domination of Congress would keep rising through the decades, peaking in 1971, when vets held 75 percent of the seats. They dominated journalism, too. “The intimate interaction between press and president in the thousand days of John F. Kennedy’s administration . . . ,” recalled Washington Post journalist Robert G. Kaiser, “depended on the existence of a like-minded cohort of World War II veterans (soldiers and journalists who covered the war) who shared a view of America’s destiny.”