(FORTUNE Magazine) – Maybe it's because we grew up in an era of unprecedented economic expansion and mass affluence. Or maybe it's because our parents defeated Hitler and clearly expected something equally big of us. It could be because we saw a buoyant 43-year-old, J.F.K., replace a 70-year-old warhorse, Ike, as President of the United States and, in the frenzy of media-fed youth worship, came to expect all future Presidents to be 40-something. As we got older and various things began to recede -- our hair, our prospects of making the Olympic team, / just possibly our real income -- it didn't help to watch 20-something whiz kids knock down million-dollar bonuses on Wall Street. Whatever it was, we in the vanguard of the great baby boom always thought that somehow we'd be a lot further along by now. Perhaps middle age reduces every generation's expectations. But corporate America's recent message to the once-haughty baby-boomers has been particularly shocking: First, you ordinary performers, your services may no longer be required down at the office. Second, you superstars, don't hold your breath waiting for the old man to hand over the keys to the CEO's suite. There aren't likely to be many 43-year-old CEOs assuming leadership of FORTUNE 500 companies anytime soon -- or black or women CEOs for that matter. America's boardroom elders have spoken: For these tough times, they want older white males at the helm. ''At the very top level there is certainly some bias for people who are older,'' says Chuck Sweet, president of A.T. Kearney Executive Search. ''All the big jobs are being filled by older guys. Sometimes we aren't even allowed to look for anybody below 50.'' Quite a contrast from 1949, when Charles Percy, the future Senator, was named CEO of Bell & Howell at 29. These days a Wunderkind CEO is somebody like new Philip Morris boss Mike Miles, 52, or Allied-Signal's recently appointed head, Larry Bossidy, 56. Are baby-boomers just not old enough to take on the herculean tasks of the day? Well, Jack Welch -- the 1980s hero -- got the top job at GE when he was 45 and promptly began to restructure the place. Yet today Detroit's Big Three, whose seemingly intractable woes scream out for such energy and vision, prefer grizzle. Ford and GM most recently chose CEOs who are now 66 and 58, while Chrysler sticks with Iacocca at 67. If it isn't our age, then, was it something we said? The paisley we wore? Our fondness for Jimi Hendrix? The long hair of long ago? Something we smoked? Probably all of the above. In retrospect, though, we should also realize that Kennedy was an aberration, the only 20th-century President since Teddy Roosevelt under 50. Reagan, the oldest President ever to take office, began his term at 69, Bush at 64. Back when Kennedy came along, most elder statesmen were exhausted from World War II and Cold War rigors and probably secretly happy to hand the reins over to somebody who promised to bring ''great vigor'' to the job. Those in power today -- the so-called silent generation -- have no reason to want to let go. Born in the middle of the Depression but too young to have fought in the Big One, they were nevertheless mentored by the WWII bunch. And unlike the baby-boomers, their scarce numbers often left them heavily in demand. While the oldest among them experienced a little tonic competition with returning veterans to get places in college, many breezed into the Ivy League, were courted by corporations, rose rapidly, and were paid more than any group in history. In return they embraced their elders' values and became good Organization Men. To them, we baby-boomers have always been a spoiled, whiny, aimless bunch who spawned books about why we couldn't read, bitched about having to fight a war, and made that mess at Woodstock. To our juniors, somewhat similarly, we're the ones who ruined everything. ''Your generation had free love,'' a 20- something colleague said recently. ''Our legacy is AIDS.'' To us baby-boomers, the problem has always been standing in line. Sometimes it was good: We stood in line for the first polio vaccinations. Sometimes it was frightening: We stood in line for nuclear holocaust evacuation drills. Sometimes it was depressing: We stood in line for the last military draft, to fight a war that came to no good end. And sometimes it was fun: We stood in line to see the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But always there have been too damned many of us, 78 million. Always we stood in line. So now, as our oldest turn 46, we've become the ''aging baby-boomers.'' Most of us -- men and women -- succumbed to the system long ago. After college, or a hitch in the military, or a backpacking walkabout around the world, we joined corporations or law firms or ad agencies or accounting firms or even investment banking houses. But we didn't embrace all the old values, and our reluctance and our arrogance -- especially from the MBAs among us -- sometimes alienated our corporate seniors. We did become a tremendous market force, though, helping make our seniors look like marketing geniuses. We bought houses and watched the prices skyrocket from the soaring demand of our own demographic bubble. This false promise of early riches vanished when the market digested that bubble, and prices headed back south. We became extraordinary consumers: of personal computers, VCRs, imported cars, videocameras. We had children and piled them into minivans and taught them to consume: baby-tech goods, and Turtles, and Nintendos, and videotapes of the old Disney movies we watched, and -- for those special family moments -- home-delivered pizza. Now in our intellectual prime and our peak earning years, the stars among us are being told they're still too young to drive, while the more typical among us are being told: ''Go home. We made a mistake. We thought we needed seven layers of management, but it turns out we need only four. The Japanese, you know, have only three.'' Well, fine. Okay. We'll go. But what will that mean for where we take the country, which actuarial tables dictate we must lead fairly early in the 21st century? The answer is, we don't know just yet. But ironically our somewhat checkered history prepares us well for an uncertain future. ''Baby-boomers actually work very well in ambiguous, fluid situations,'' says Bruce Tucker, co-author of The New Individualists: The Generation After the Organization Man. Of some 19 million sons and daughters of organization men, he says, around ten million became managers and professionals. ''But they weren't really buying into the system,'' Tucker says. ''Many saw a real sense of pain and betrayal when their fathers were fired or rushed into early retirement. They vowed it wouldn't happen to them. They said, 'You can fire me, but you can't hurt me because I'm not giving you my loyalty.' '' And when Wall Street began vaporizing venerable corporations in the 1980s, Tucker says, it reinforced the stance. ''How can anyone expect you to be loyal to something you're likely to outlive? This generation gap isn't about rebellion. These people were differently formed.'' It isn't the first time a generation grew up to find all the rules changed. One group -- typified by baseball great Ted Williams -- had to fight in both World War II and Korea. But it is nevertheless a shocker, this downsizing or restructuring or whatever it is that's happening to corporate America, this elimination of a primary occupation: the manager. Early retirement is not an option for us, as it is for some of our older ''surplussed'' colleagues. We have mortgages to pay off, and we need good health insurance. Our kids still need orthodontia, which is a real bargain compared with college. Simply put, most of us baby-boomers have cash flow needs that require us to work well into the next century. So we must reinvent ourselves. One suggestion, by futurist Steve Weiss, is that we baby-boomers begin thinking of ourselves as industrious, bright immigrants -- like the Koreans or the Cubans -- recently arrived in a new land filled with undiscovered opportunity. It helps also to realize that some of our most formative images of how we thought our lives might turn out were only mirages anyway. J.F.K., for example, has been preserved for all time as the ever youthful leader. He would be 74 today. Having a crotchety version of him around, with some of that ''great vigor'' sapped, might help us baby-boomers understand more clearly that we're still plenty young enough to handle the job at hand. - J.H.