More people now visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington than any other single site in the nation's capital. But even before it was dedicated in 1982, it was the subject of bitter debate. Everything about the war in Vietnam was controversial.
People who had been drafted to fight in that very unpopular war were actually blamed for having participated in it. I saw some of these troops coming home from Vietnam, booed and hissed on the docks of San Francisco. A very shocking sight. Indeed, it was the Vietnam veterans themselves, not the government, who began the memorial project. It was designed by a 22-year-old Yale student named My Lin.
Its austere simplicity came as a shock. On the wall, the names of all the Americans who died in Vietnam. Every day, friends and loved ones, wives and children come here to make a connection.
When I finally got there to the wall, I was panicked that I didn't see his name. And I thought for a moment, maybe he's not here. Maybe they've left him out.
And so I'm searching, searching, and the minute I finally locked my eyes on his name, Wall A. Branch, it almost felt like... Maybe that I was looking at myself for the very first time, maybe as his daughter, and I never really saw myself that way before. Among those who leave mementos and tributes at the wall are the Vietnam veterans who survived. Jennings Mannion was there on Veterans Day in 1982 when the wall was dedicated. I just, I don't know, I just had to go.
I knew people who were going to be on this wall. Wall Huff, Mikhail Hiller, Tim Rice, Benjamin Fordham, Malcolm Rohl, Melvin Rimmel. I mean, I knelt right down on the ground when I saw Malcolm Wall and Melvin Rimmel.
The last time I saw either one of them, I was kneeling next to the bags that they were in. Behind every name, there's a story. Captain Hartley, a real gung-ho guy, and he just couldn't wait to get into combat.
That was his biggest goal. I remember his tank going by and he was covered but he used to wear these skin-tight black gloves and you could see this arm going by with the black glove on the hand and I just I was crushed. Youu can see your reflection in the wall. To have your own image somehow superimposed behind the names is eerie and also comforting and that you can be with friends one more time. America lost the war in Vietnam.
In 1975, the North Vietnamese took over. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. And as the 80s began, what many identified as communism...
was gaining ground in Africa and Central America. A new form of anti-Americanism was spreading throughout much of the Muslim world. At home, Americans were mired in economic problems, sky-high inflation, interest rates over 20%.
The country was discouraged. But Ronald Reagan, with his infectious optimism, persuaded Americans that their country could overcome the humiliation of Vietnam and was destined again to be as it had once been, the world's military, economic, even, he said, the moral leader. On January the 20th, 1981, Ronald Wilson Reagan became America's 40th president. Reagan came in at exactly the right time.
They wanted someone who represented the older, better, stronger America. He made people feel good about being Americans, with that whole idea that everything's fine and, you know, everything's under control. But only two months after the inauguration, the country's newfound sense of hope and purpose seemed suddenly in danger. It was just unbelievable. Just shocking.
We just couldn't believe what had happened. We have word from George Washington Hospital that President Reagan may not live. And then it turned out that the next day that he survived the bullet, he was actually joking with doctors, and it just kind of added to the Superman myth of Reagan, I think. Within a month, the president was looking hale and hearty again and talking up the future. We have much greatness before us.
We can restore our economic strength and build opportunities like none we've ever had before. Ronald Reagan's answer to double-digit inflation, record unemployment, and high interest rates was fewer regulations, lower taxes, and less money for social programs. The immediate effect was a brutal recession.
Daryl McDaniels of the rap group Run DMC grew up in Hollis, Queens in New Yourk City. It was really a close-knit type community. Everybody knew everybody.
Youu knew every kid, you knew every uncle, you knew the name of every dog and cat on the block. But hit by the recession, inner-city neighborhoods deteriorated. Homelessness became a prominent feature of urban life.
Listen to Daryl McDaniels. When I came off the road in 1986, I mean, it looked like a war zone, like a battle zone, like somebody dropped a bomb. The bomb was crack, cocaine, in the form of a rock.
This new scourge first came to public attention in 1983. It was cheap, it was instantly addictive, and it was devastating in its effects. Youu're gonna be fine. Oh yes, oh yes. Youu know, I came off the road and I'm like... Oh, that's homeboy's sister.
And I'm like, what happened to her? You, she's fiending out. You, she's cracked out. The's, you know, selling her body, and she's doing everybody in the neighborhood.
What? You, it's because of crack, man. It's because of crack.
Crack turned addicts into predators. You, she robbed her mother, and he robbed her father, and he killed his brother, and this and that. And I was like, oh, my God.
The population in America's ghettos was decimated by jail and death. Violent crime rose by 33% during the decade. Drug dealing became a quick way to riches for those with few other opportunities. The drug dealers had two things. They had money and they had power.
Because you look in this guy, he's 18 years old, he's driving a Mercedes Benz, he's got big gold chain, diamond rings all over the place. What does he do for a living? The great divide between the haves and the have-nots got wider in the 1980s.
In the world outside the ghetto, there were now new legal ways to get rich quick. Reagan had achieved its goal. Inflation had been stopped.
With regulations reduced and interest rates lowered, Wall Street exploded. This was the beginning of the roaring 80s. When I started brokering government bonds, I was 23 years old.
I was making $75,000 a year. Chris Burke, a former waiter with a high school education, went to Wall Street and joined a new class of wealthy, young, urban professionals. In the acronym of the time, he was a yuppie.
When I would come in at 7.30 in the morning with a trench coat and I have a phone and I have two phones in my hand, I could get my coat off until 10 o'clock in the morning. Literally. I mean, it was, back then it was wild.
By 2pm. the roar in the bond trading room, fueled more by fear than greed, was unearthly. They all shouted and sweated and swore and devoured their electric donuts.
The heady times were described in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, the novel of the 80s. Creates a half 10,000 by 10,000, kidder taking it up. Extraordinary percentages of the...
Graduates, the top graduates at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, were heading for Wall Street. No longer were they going to be doctors or lawyers. They were going to go straight to this great cornucopia where there was money practically floating in the air. There was no place in America, small or large, where a company couldn't be a target for a corporate raider.
Corporate raiders were looking for companies to buy and then sell off their assets. In Wallsport, Pennsylvania, a small dairy company with a string of convenience stores became the target of a hostile takeover. It struck me as incredible that someone with a stack of paper, a stack of legal documents, and a bank behind them could come in and steal a company away from a community and away from the people who worked so hard to build it. It just didn't make sense.
Keith Stercula was working for his father, the CEO of Foodcraft Inc., when the raider visited the company. It was the beginning of deer season in Pennsylvania, which is national holiday in Pennsylvania. This guy came in dressed as a hunter. The company was a target and he was a big game hunter. Farmers, dairy workers, store clerks, almost a thousand people depended on food craft for a living.
The entire city of Wallsport was worried. People would come up and express sympathies, almost as if someone had died. The company fought back. Trying to persuade every individual shareholder not to sell to the Raider.
A year and a half later, at a shareholders meeting in 1986, the company's fate was decided. It's kind of like the Academy Award. where it's like somebody's going up there and opening up an envelope, and you don't know what the outcome's going to be.
I thought the company was going to go. And I looked over at my father, and he had his poker face. And the votes were coming in, and we realized that we had won.
I said, you know, David beat Goliath in this one. It was the exception, of course. Many wage earners were crushed, and many companies destroyed in the greatest wave of corporate takeovers in American history.
In the early 1980s, American confidence in the future found a powerful symbol in the space shuttle. It made its maiden flight in 1981. The space shuttle, at 2,000 tons fully fueled, is virtually the size and the length and the weight of a World War II destroyer. But if you took a World War II destroyer and turned it up on its fan tail, that is the scale of the space shuttle.
Malcolm McConnell. ...was a journalist who covered the Shuttle for Readers Digest....11, 10, we are go for main engine ignition....7, We have main engine ignition. Three, two, one, and... Tower's further ignition and liftoff.
Liftoff of the first operational space shuttle mission. There's two satellites on board and the shuttle has cleared the tower. The first time I saw it rise into the sky, I was virtually speechless.
I stood there, my mouth agape, my eyes open. I thought, this is wonderful. This is stupendous.
If we can do this, we can do anything. The world could now watch as the shuttle launched communication satellites into orbit. There were already many there.
And with every new satellite, the world grew smaller. The remotest place was now just a phone call away. We had actually figured this out and built... something that allowed us to manipulate the trillion dollar phone system around the world.
We'd go to a pay phone and we'd take a cable to White Plains, a satellite to Europe, we'd go over to the Turkey satellite station, take a satellite back to Texas, and we'd actually loop around the world three or four times and call. the payphone next door and so you could shout into the phone and about 40 seconds later you'd hear it on the other phone and it was it was patently illegal by the way we were lucky we didn't get caught stephen jobs and stephen wozniak would bring computer technology into the 1980s such a far cry from the 50s and 60s the computers at that time were as big as this room we're in right now if not bigger they were custom-made you couldn't you could not just go out and buy a computer there were enormous instruments enormously expensive. Developed by the military, but also put to use by the bureaucracy, computers, some Americans worried, could be used by the government to monitor or even control the lives of its citizens, just like Big Brother in George Orwell's most famous novel. It was in 1948 when Orwell wrote 1984. But he was overly gloomy about the resilience of democracy. Wozniak and Jobs and their fans had a dream.
Make computers available to all Americans. There was going to be a computer in every home and it was going to change the world. We talked about how people were going to be empowered.
I listened to people who were excited about the revolution. We talked about it as being a revolution. And there were a lot of people like me who somehow wanted their own computer that they owned.
When cheap microchips became available, Wozniak and Jobs decided to build the computer that everybody was looking for. We were forced to start this company. We didn't really want to, but everybody wanted these computers. We worked in my parents'garage and eventually kind of took over their whole house. It was kind of funny.
Their first efforts were Apple I and the popular Apple II, launched in 1977. They made the computer affordable. But it was the 1984 Macintosh with its mouse and user-friendly graphics that truly liberated the computer. On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh.
And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984. The explosion of personal computers onto the market seemed to liberate technology. For one thing, ordinary citizens began to dream of going into space themselves. I think most people have come to believe that space flight was absolutely safe. Pretty soon civilians of all sorts will take these flights to begin this bus service, which was the shuttle. The first civilian chosen was a teacher, Krista McAuliffe.
Oh, that's great! I love it! The New Hampshire mother of two small children joined the crew of the 25th shuttle mission. The launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, was set after many delays for January the 28th, 1986. For Florida, it was an unusually cold morning, 27 degrees. T-minus 15 seconds.
We were quite surprised to hear that the countdown was proceeding ahead. T-minus 15 seconds. The shuttle had been launched in weather that cold. Seven, six, we have main engine start.
Four, three, two, one, and liftoff. Liftoff of the 25th Space Shuttle Mission. As the shuttle cleared the tower and the first shock waves of sound began to pound the press grandstand, the roof bouncing up and down, the plywood under your feet bouncing, the shock waves hitting your chest.
At that point we were all standing up, we were all screaming our heads off, go, I mean any sense of professional composure was lost. My husband and I were just stepping off an escalator in a department store in the TV department. So we stopped to watch.
And there were a hundred sets all on the same scene. And we watched it go up. And then all of a sudden, poof! And we just couldn't believe it.
Flight controllers here looking... Situation. I felt a sense of utter cold doom virtually flow over me.
That massive, huge, 2,000 ton vehicle had been shredded into tiny little pieces almost like confetti. It was caused not by high-tech computer failure, but by the simplest gasket which had contracted in the cold. Just for those lives to be gone in a flash, just gone, it's unbelievable.
We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye, and slipped to the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God. 1980s was a decade of pushing boundaries. Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll. 1981 saw the premiere of round-the-clock music television. It was great.
My mom thought MTV was as fun as Satan. The PTO Television Network presents... Competing for the attention of television viewers was a new breed of televangelists who preached a mixture of old-fashioned religion and modern entertainment. They attracted about 90 million viewers a week. Up, up, and we fight.
I thought they were unique. The evangelists on TV. I was all over television. Tim Swaggart and Baker. It was really unique.
Jesus theme park. Wow. Youu know, I mean, we, of course, I didn't buy into it, but that was the mood of the country. That was the mood the way things were going.
In the early 1980s, the world had its first warnings about AIDS. In June of 1981, we heard the first report of a new and peculiar disease. We called it slim disease for a while, and we called it other things for a while.
We did not really have the understanding in 1981 of what we were up against. Suddenly you would hear, so-and-so is sick. How is so-and-so?
And people you know would say, well, I'm not sick. Youu knew, got it. People were getting sick and dying.
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome. AIDS affected mainly gay men at first, and by 1983, it had killed 2,000 people. Literally, people were dropping like flies.
Tom Ammiano was a gay man in San Francisco. In 1984, when 6,000 people had died of AIDS... Tim, a teacher and Tom's lover of six years, was diagnosed with the disease.
Tom became an activist. Youur frustration was there. There's no help. There is absolutely no help.
What do we want? Youu're free! We were desperate and we were angry. What do we want?
Youu're free! We had tremendous trouble making the people around President Reagan understand how serious this was. These were ultra-conservative people and most people got AIDS by doing things that other people didn't do and most people didn't approve of their doing. Tim, he was a wonderful, wonderful man.
And when you knew Tim and you knew his worth, this could drive you absolutely nuts. It was very hard for all of us to watch him deteriorate in the past days of his life, but at the same time, he gave us so much. By 1985, more than 12,000 people had died.
One of them was the movie idol, Rock Hudson. Rock Hudson's death took AIDS out of the shadows. AIDS affected anybody.
Rich and poor, young and old, men and women. When Allie Gertz got AIDS from an encounter with a bisexual lover, she became emblematic of the disease's spreading danger. Allie Gertz was my best girlfriend.
Allie gave me a big lecture. Tom, you be careful. Youu take care of yourself. And that night she went home early. And two weeks later, she ended up in the hospital.
Someone did a very simple blood test and realized she had full-blown AIDS and she had pneumocystis pneumonia. People magazine put her on the cover of the magazine and it sold more issues than any issue that year. All of a sudden, she was everybody's little sister, best friend, daughter.
The wasn't a drug user. The wasn't promiscuous. It didn't matter who you were.
All it meant was that you could fall in love with someone, and that was the fatal mistake. Charles Booger, She Clover, Anthony Martin, D.A. Johnny. In 1987, people who had died of AIDS got their memorial, a quilt which showed the magnitude of the nation's loss.
More than 40,000 Americans. Alex Murphy, Jerry Baker... I think that for my generation, AIDS was the equivalent of World War II. It was a cataclysmic event.
It was a wake-up call. We had pushed the boundaries of behavior so far. And here was nature coming up with a way to say, you've gone too far....
Stercula and our dear son... By the end of the decade, almost 100,000 people had died in the battle with AIDS. And it was not over.
Youu were here to liberate, not to conquer. And so you and those others did not doubt your cause. On June the 6th, 1984, President Reagan and some of the D-Day veterans commemorated those who died for freedom on the beaches of Normandy.
Youu all knew that some things are worth dying for. One's country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it's the... President Reagan saw the struggle with the Soviet Union in the clear-cut terms of World War II. Good versus evil.
The Soviets were willing to pursue a very aggressive foreign policy, and indeed their foreign policy, they were quite frank about it, was world domination. This is a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM which can reach the United States 30 minutes after launch. I remember standing out in the street of my house on a fall afternoon with the dark clouds and thinking, wow, there was this huge presence on the other side of the world that was out to get us all.
What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies? The president's strategic defense initiative, SDI, or Star Wars, was part of his effort to neutralize communism everywhere. In Nicaragua, he supported the Contras, who were trying to topple the Soviet-supported government.
In the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada He quickly crushed a communist coup and at home he started the greatest peacetime defence build-up ever. He made people feel good about our country, that it was strong economically and strong in defence and that you felt like he could protect you from, you know, the Russians and these other countries. But the world remained a dangerous place. On June the 14th, 1985, TWA flight 847 took off from Athens in Greece on its way to Rome. A few minutes into the flight, I look up and there are people walking down the aisle yelling, head down, no talk, and I didn't know what was happening really.
The flight was hijacked by two Muslim extremists with ties to the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Their latest demand is that all Shiite Muslim prisoners being held by Israel be released. And I'm watching this. And all of a sudden my brother walked in the door, came downstairs, and he said, Tom is on that plane. Paula Sookforth, the mother of six, was one of 153 people on board, most of them Americans.
They were going to kill someone every five minutes if their demands weren't met. The hijackers forced the plane on a frightening odyssey from Athens to Beirut to Algiers and back to the darkened airport in Beirut, where the plane was refused permission to land. He has pulled a hand grenade and he is ready to blow up the aircraft if he has to. We must, I repeat, we must land at Beirut. Youu have no permission to land Beirut.
The airport is closed. I expected that we were going to... crash so this is how it was going to end when things looked absolutely hopeless the runway at Beirut was finally cleared but the crisis was far from over They are threatening to kill the passengers. Their first victim was Navy diver Robert Steetham. I just can picture that body coming out the door and landing on the tarmac and then thinking, oh God, they're actually killing people.
I wrote my name and address and telephone number on my stomach just in case I was found dead somewhere. Unwilling to risk more American lives, Ronald Reagan abandoned his own no-negotiations policy with terrorists and worked out a deal to free some prisoners held in Israeli jails in exchange for the TWA hostages. I didn't expect the United States to negotiate. In hindsight, I'm glad they did.
I never thought I would see her again and there she was. It was wonderful. The summer of 1987 was not a good one for the Reagan administration.
Congressional hearings that summer revealed that the administration had illegally sold arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran and funneled the profits to the Contras in Nicaragua. for the first time president reagan's popularity plummeted and then on october the nineteenth black tuesday the stock market went into freefall losing five hundred eight points and moral empires to came tumbling down when several televangelists were charged with financial crimes or personal sins. Suddenly it seemed that not all was well in the United States. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, there was a whole new sense of optimism.
After a succession of old man and old style rule which had left the Soviet Union in deep stagnation, a vigorous new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power in 1985. Gorbachev soon began to make changes. in a country long ruled by repression and fear. He instituted glasnost, or openness, and suddenly there was freedom of speech.
It was discussion openly, and I was there, I was right in the middle of it. It was something absolutely incredible. Alex Zurbin was a composer who had a studio in Moscow's Pushkin Square. At the time it was a center of political discussion. Thousands of people.
Once Gorbachev is terrible, he is scoundrel, and I said, no, he is a great man, we have to support him. It was times when, you know, all the hopes were open, you know, we just were absolutely overwhelmed. But Gorbachev's attempt to restructure the Soviet economy, perestroika, did little to shorten lines for the paltry number of available consumer goods.
Soviet hopes for material progress demanded cutbacks in their defense. spending. And this led to a series of summit meetings with President Reagan.
The first one was in Geneva in 1985. The next one was at Reykjavik in Iceland. On a weekend in October 1986, the leaders got down to the serious business of disarmament. And they were negotiating, frankly. They were both sides are going to give up all their nuclear weapons, all their nuclear weapons. President Reagan's director of communications was Patrick Buchanan.
I just couldn't believe that a decision of this magnitude was being made by two men on a Sunday afternoon. It was late in the afternoon. They'd taken a break. And so I got right out there. I wanted to see exactly how he looked.
He looked as tough as any customer I have seen. Gorbachev told Reagan, we're going to do the deal, but you've got to give up SDI. The Soviets had spent a trillion dollars building the greatest land-based missile force on earth. And here was Ronald Reagan, who was developing a system that was going to turn it into junk.
And they believed he could do it. Ronald Reagan slammed down his hand on the table, got up and left. No. That was the end of the summit, but not of good relations between the two leaders. A year later, Mr. Gorbachev came to Washington.
Sidestepping the issue of the Strategic Defense Initiative, the leaders signed a more limited arms reduction treaty. Mr. Gorbachev was very popular in America. Gorbachev's motorcade came around the corner on the Connecticut Avenue and suddenly the motorcade stopped.
And then the door opened and Gorbachev got out and began working the crowd along Connecticut Avenue like an American politician. People around me were rapt. I remember a young woman looking out through the crowd and smiling on her face, and she said, God bless you, Mr. Gorbachev.
I couldn't believe it. It's great that he came out to meet us all like that. That was very special. He didn't have to do it, and he did it. I am very surprised and pleased.
What do you think of Gorbachev? The guy is a PR genius. I mean, jumping out of the car like that.
That is unbelievable. Youu've got to shake his hand. Six months later, President Reagan went to Moscow.
There was a sense that this long nightmare of the threat of nuclear holocaust, of the Cold War, somehow that was coming to an end. We find ourselves standing like this. We meant to change a nation, and instead we changed a world. 1989 was a momentous year, first in China, where just at about the time that Mikhail Gorbachev was paying a visit, Chinese students occupied their country's most important square. What I'm seeing on television cannot be happening.
Chinese students marching into Tiananmen Square, carrying a large plaster, Goddess of Democracy, very similar to the Statue of Liberty. In the heart of the largest communist country in the world, the American symbol of freedom towered over demonstrations for democracy. There clearly was a historic significant event. I had a feeling it wasn't going to last very long. And it did not.
On June the 4th, the demonstrations were crushed. Hundreds of people were killed. But what the students and workers had attempted would change China forever.
Forever. All over Eastern Europe that summer, democracy movements were gathering strength. Poland was gearing up for free elections.
It was happening in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and behind the walls in East Germany there were pro-democracy demonstrations. People were demanding change. On November the 9th, the East German government finally gave in to the pressure. Youu wanted to see what's really behind the wall.
What have they been hiding over there? And it's just people on the other side, waiting to see loved ones. The Berlin Wall was breached.
The Iron Curtain had been lifted. The hopes for freedom kindled by Gorbachev's reforms in the Soviet Union proved mightier than walls. We were crying.
Watching them tear down this thing that had haunted them for so long and I remember thinking, what joy. Youu could just feel it coming through the television with these people. And I thought, man, that's what it's all about.
Youu know, conquering your ghosts. Having gone into war to prevent the spread of communism, and now, a decade and a half later, the wall comes down, it causes you to stop, it caused me to stop and think, wow, this sacrifice that people made, 58,000 in Vietnam, I don't know the statistics from Korea. I think they made a contribution. It would be too heartbreaking to think that they didn't. Many historians actually believe that the 20th century ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and that the 90s represent the first decade of a new era.
Why don't you judge for yourself when we take a look at the century's last decade. That's the 90s. next episode of the Century, America's Time. Thank you for joining us. I'm Peter Jennings.