The Reagan Revolution may have tilted America to the right in the 1980s, but it was eventually dwarfed by the genuine revolutionary movements that tore down the Iron Curtain and replaced so many heads of state with new ones that you really did a need a scorecard to keep track of them all.
The decade began and closed on tumultuous notes. In 1980, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were already strained over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent withdrawal of the US from the Moscow Olympics. Tensions soared, however, after Soviet pilots shot down a civilian Korean airliner in 1983, killing all 269 aboard.
There was also substantial domestic turmoil. In 1980, a flotilla of Cuban refugees swelled Miami's population. At the same time, tensions between the police and the city's black community were rising, in 1980 riots exploded after four policemen were acquitted of all charges in the death of an African-American man who had been captured and beaten following a high-speed chase. In Washington, one senator and five Congressmen were ensnared in an FBI sting that became known as Abscam, after they were caught on videotape agreeing to take money from a phony Arab sheik in exchange for various political favors.
Some of the former hostages involved in the Iran hostage crisis
But it was the Iran hostage crisis and the failed negotiations and rescue attempt that dominated the news in 1980 and doomed the Carter presidency. Ronald Reagan easily defeated Carter in November 1980. On the day of his inauguration, the hostages were released, raising suspicions that a deal had been arranged between Reagan's transition team and Iran's revolutionary guard.
Reagan's economic team, led by Budget Director David Stockman, began instituting what would be called variously the "trickle-down" theory, or Reaganomics, the process of severely cutting back regulations and government spending, boosting profits in the hope that it would decrease unemployment and return the country to prosperity. It didn't work. By the time Reagan left office eight years later (he was succeeded by Vice President George Bush), Stockman had long since resigned. And despite the passage of the Gramm-Rudman Act mandating a balanced budget, the country faced crushing debt and was mired in a recession following a steep stock market crash. Still, many major corporations reported record profits during the decade, and relaxed FTC regulations meant that the Administration looked the other way at corporate mergers.
The President also had a powerful influence on the makeup of the Supreme Court. In 1981, he chose conservative Sandra Day O'Connor as the first female justice. When Chief Justice Warren Burger retired, he was replaced by the Court's most right-wing member, William Rehnquist. Reagan also appointed another strict conservative, Antonin Scalia, to the court. But there were limits even to Ronald Reagan's powers of persuasion. His choice of Robert Bork to replace Lewis Powell was rejected after contentious hearings. Anthony Kennedy eventually took his seat.
The President didn't always seem to be aware of his own Administration's actions. The aging process may have been accelerated when he was shot and seriously wounded by John W. Hinckley in 1980. By the end of his second term, he often appeared confused in public. Questioned about the Iran-contra affair that had beset his Administration (and made a hero of his aide Oliver North), he was unable to reply coherently. Indeed, the at-times rudderless Administration was repeatedly engulfed in scandal. Several top aides, including Edwin Meese, Michael Deaver, Lyn Nofziger, among others, were either accused or convicted of serious ethical violations. Another key official, the President's former Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan, resigned from the Administration over Iran-contra and later wrote in his memoirs that important Administration decisions were made by Reagan's wife, Nancy, after consulting an astrologer. It wasn't only Reagan staffers who were falling victim to ethical crackdowns. Two of television's most influential conservative Christian ministers, Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, were both caught violating the Ten Commandments and were punished by their flocks. In 1988, Colorado Senator Gary Hart's presidential campaign was derailed when his affair with Donna Rice was exposed.
The President's personal popularity was such, however, that despite the Democratic criticisms of mismanagement, he was handily re-elected in 1984 -- a historic election that for the first time featured a woman -- vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, on the ticket of a major party.
The Administration was able to get much of its economic program, including a major tax overhaul, past Congress, but its foreign policy was not nearly as successful. Following Israel's invasion of Lebanon, the President sent US Marines to Beirut. A bomb outside their headquarters killed 241 soldiers in 1983. The Administration also lent military support to the El Salvadoran government over the protests of human rights advocates and pushed for the overthrow of the Sandinistan regime by the contras. It did have one triumph when the Army invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada to rescue a group of medical students who were trapped amid a coup by a leftist group.
The decade was also marked by enormous tragedy. The newly discovered AIDS virus, originally called GRID, or "the gay cancer," had killed nearly 100,000 gay men in the US alone by the end of the decade. In Africa the toll soared even higher. On a much smaller scale, the televised explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, which killed all seven aboard, temporarily shut down NASA's space program. Terrorist acts cost hundreds of lives, including those of the passengers of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland -- downed by a bomb hidden in a portable tape recorder. Terrorists also comandeered the Italian ship the Achille Lauro, and tossed overboard wheelchair-bound American Leon Klinghoffer.
The 1980s were not the happiest decade for several longtime dictators. Fernando Marcos was forced from power in the Philippines. Alfredo Stroessner was deposed in Paraguay. Both Chile and Brazil enjoyed their first free elections in years.
The shocking changes that were unthinkable when the '80s began occurred in Eastern Europe as the decade came to a close. Under pressure, Poland legalized Solidarity, the union led by Lech Walesa that would soon assume power by a democratic vote. The Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan, and shortly afterward the Communist Party was defeated in the country's first-ever free parliamentary elections.
Hungary opened its border with East Germany, prompting a flood of immigrants, and then declared itself a free socialist republic. After East German Communist leader Erich Honecker resigned, the entire government followed, and on November 9 the Berlin wall was opened. Within weeks, the Communist governments of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania had collapsed -- all relatively peacefully. By the end of the year, the cold war was quickly drawing to a close.
The 1970s
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