William Grimes - The New York Times The Times of the Eighties The Culture, Politics, and Personalities that Shaped the Decade

THE TIMES OF THE EIGHTIES

The Culture, Politics and Personalities that Shaped the Decade

Edited by William Grimes

Copyright 2013 The New York Times

All rights reserved. No part of this book, either text or illustration, may be used or reproduced in any form without prior written permission from the publisher.

Published by

Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc.

151 West 19th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by

Workman Publishing Company

225 Varick Street

New York, NY 10014

Cover design by Evan Gaffney Design
Cover and interior images courtesy of Getty Images.

ISBN-13: 978-1-57912-933-0
eISBN: 978-1-60376-328-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file.

Every decade seems momentous to the people who are living through it. In that sense, all decades are created equal, but some are more equal than others. The 1980s can rightly claim to be one of the most equal of the 20th century.

There were no world wars, the defining cataclysms of the teens and the 40s. But the signal events of the 1980s transformed lives across the globe and continue to reverberate today.

The cold war ended as the Soviet Empire fell apart. The Internet came into being. AIDS, an utterly mysterious disease afflicting mostly young gay men, ravaged an entire generation and created a powerful new movement to advance the political rights of gay people. Cable television rewrote the script for news and entertainment. The baby boomers, dubbed the Me Generation by Tom Wolfe in the 1970s, morphed into the acquisitive, high-achieving tribe known as yuppies.

At the sharper edge of this movement, the predatory capitalists Wolfe satirized as masters of the universe in his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities helped jump-start the decades wild financial ride. One after another, giant companies swallowed each other whole in a wave of leveraged buyouts and acquisitions. This was the era of the junk bond and Gordon Gekko, the sharklike trader at the center of the film Wall Street. His mantra, greed is good, seemed to encapsulate the spirit of the times.

In an essay for The New York Times published on New Years Day 1987, the novelist James Michener surveyed the decade thus far and pronounced judgment: It begins to look as if the 1980s will have to be remembered as The Ugly Decade, because so many distasteful things have surfaced in the first six years and may continue into the last four.

Michener cited the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States, mounting government deficits, the deification of wealth and the worship of financial freebooters like Ivan F. Boesky. He noted with alarm the growing political influence of religious conservatism and a new spirit of adventurism in American foreign policy typified by the covert sale of arms to Iran to fund the right-wing contras in Nicaragua. The list included terrorism and the lethal advance of AIDS.

He might have written a different essay three years later. He most certainly would have marveled at the events of the previous two months.

For two generations national interests, domestic agendas and private fears had been shaped by the standoff between two glowering nuclear powers, each with the ability to annihilate the other and take a good portion of the globe with it.

The postwar division seemed permanent, with Eastern Europe in thrall to the Soviet Union and the West bound, often nervously, to the United States. The election of Ronald Reagan, a strident anti-Communist, as president of the United States seemed to guarantee an escalation of tensions, especially after he unveiled plans for the antimissile defense system known as Star Wars and, standing near the Berlin Wall in 1987, provocatively challenged the new Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, to tear down this wall.

And then the unthinkable happened. On Nov. 9, 1989, astonished television viewers watched as thousand of jubilant East Germans poured through a gap in the Berlin Wall. Then, one by one, the regimes fell. Formerly omnipotent party bosses slunk away, rejected by the people they once lorded over. In Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were hunted down and executed on Christmas Day.

The opening of the Berlin Wall and the cascading events in Eastern Europe made for an unforgettable moment, the cold wars answer to Armistice Day in 1918 or V-E Day in 1945.

At the same time, an entirely different sort of revolution, quiet but equally powerful, was gathering strength. Largely unobserved, communications technologies were making advances unseen since the invention of the telegraph, the telephone and the radio.

In the early 1980s, the groundwork was being laid for a system that made it possible for users all over the world to communicate via personal computer. The terms Internet and World Wide Web would not appear until late in the decade, but private companies and consumers were already reaping the benefits of the giant government computer networks created in the United States and Europe for defense and scientific research. A new vocabulary entered the lexicon. Some were old words with new applications, like mouse, crash and virus. Others were strange hybrids, like e-mail and emoticon. All became common currency, reflecting a radical change in the way that offices were run and ordinary people exchanged information.

Cable television ended the three-network cartel that had defined television viewing in the United States. When Walter Cronkite, the longtime anchorman of The CBS Evening News, announced his retirement in 1981, newspaper stories declared the end of an era. And so it was.