Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings

by The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America

  To me, November 4, 1979, seemed like just an ordinary gray, rainy Sunday in Teheran. I was at work at ten o’clock that morning. All of a sudden I heard marching sounds coming from the main avenue in Teheran. I looked out my window and saw Iranian students climbing the gates and jumping over the walls of the embassy. They had photographs of Khomeini on their chest and they were yelling, “Marg bar Amrika! Death to America!” The students banged on my door, and then came storming in with clubs and some small arms.

  We were taken to a library in the embassy, where the hostage takers interrogated me and my Iranian coworkers. They eventually let all the Iranians go. I had become good friends with the Iranians in my office, and I cried because I was happy that they were being let go. They cried because they were sure that I was going to be executed. I was tied up and blindfolded and then led out of the library into the courtyard, raindrops hitting me on the head. That’s when I started to think about my family, and I began to wonder, “Will I live through the rest of the night?”

  My captors dragged me into the cook’s quarters, where they took off my shoes and started searching them, trying to tear the heels apart. They thought that I had some secret message machine in the heels of my shoes. They were convinced that we were all CIA agents and would do anything to escape. That’s why they tied us up day in and day out.

  One of the most wrenching moments in my captivity was when the students tried to get me to sign a letter indicating my crimes against Iran. This young man held an automatic weapon to my head and started to count down from ten to one. It was then that I realized that I would do anything to survive. I wanted to be a good American, and I didn’t want to sign something that would state that I was not, but I knew that the best thing to do to survive was to sign whatever needed to be signed, so I did.

  The worst pain of it all was brought on by the length of captivity. Not the boredom, but the fear that grows inside of you over a long period of time. The fear of death. A fear that creeps into the subconscious. That, and just not being able to go outside, to see a bird fly, or to take a walk. The physical cruelty, getting beaten up or being pushed around or being blindfolded, was less of a potent force than the lack of freedom.

  There was no other alternative but to live. I spent several months sharing a room with a lieutenant colonel named Dave Roeder. He was a man who knew how to survive. He taught me to get up and exercise and to meet each day with purpose. We learned to make small things beautiful. For example, for whatever weird reason, the Iranians gave me the classifieds from the Washington Post boat section. Not great reading, but something. Dave actually knew something about boats, so he would describe the different types, and we would both lie down on the floor and we would take a trip on the Chesapeake Bay. Just escaping in our imaginations like that made life worthwhile.

  One morning in January a guard came in and said, “Pack your bags. You’re leaving.” Just like that. Once again we were bound and blindfolded and then marched to a bus. We traveled on the bus for what seemed like an interminable amount of time. When it finally stopped, they ripped off my blindfold and pushed me out of the bus. I stumbled past this long line of Iranian guards who spat on me. I was just soaking wet from spit. But I saw this light and an arm waving toward me. It turned out to be the entrance of an Air Algiers plane, so I ran toward it. It seemed so unreal. It was as if we were in another world altogether—very blurred, but once we realized we were free, also very beautiful.

  Back in the United States we were greeted as heroes. We were so isolated that we didn’t realize that we had become the center of the American news, that we had been their purpose for the last 444 days. In some ways, I think the people were celebrating what they believed was American power. But I honestly think that both countries lost. There was a lot of hate on both sides that didn’t need to happen. I don’t believe we were winners. I believe it was a period of great sadness.

  The hostage crisis continued through the 1980 presidential campaign. Americans were exhausted by disappointment, turmoil, and embarrassment. They wanted to feel good about themselves again. And they elected as president a man who promised to let them do that and to bring the country back to a golden age. That man was Ronald Reagan. In his inaugural address in 1981 Reagan asked Americans to believe once again in their capacity for greatness. And as he spoke the weary hostages were being dragged into the night and pushed aboard an airplane bound for home. The long national nightmare was over.

  CHAPTER 3

  New Morning

  1981–1989

  Americans entered the 1980s worn by the events of the previous decade. They longed for a fresh start, and they found it in a new, conservative approach to government. The leader of this conservative “revolution” was the new president, Ronald Reagan.

  Ronald Reagan was the most influential president in forty years. Anger over high inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis had pushed Americans to vote President Carter out of office. Reagan, a former actor and governor of California, rallied the nation with nostalgic images of less complicated times. He called upon Americans to return to the values of hard work and self-reliance that had made their country great. To some, Reagan’s foreign policy ideas sounded simplistic and extreme, and his economic policies seemed to blame the poor for their own problems. But his message of good feeling and self-confidence seemed to invigorate the nation.

  Richard Viguerie, born in 1933, shared the enthusiasm many Americans felt about President Reagan.

  Ronald Reagan was the epitome of America. He was an optimist and a “can-do” type of leader. He believed that today is great, but tomorrow’s going to be better. In times of crisis, Reagan was able to reach out to the American people and put his arms around us and bring us together. He was always recognized as the “Great Communicator.” The reason Ronald Reagan was such an effective speaker was because he had a message that resonated with America.

  It was no accident that, literally a few minutes after Reagan became president, the hostages were freed. I think that if Carter had been reelected, those hostages would have been there throughout Carter’s presidency, because Khomeini knew he had somebody that he could move around like a puppet on a string. But Ronald Reagan had sent a very clear message, which is the old New Hampshire state message—Don’t Tread on Me. The Iranians weren’t 100 percent sure of Ronald Reagan and they weren’t gonna take any chances.

  Ronald Reagan moved boldly and decisively. The major world leaders saw that they were dealing with a man of strength and that the rules had been changed from the Nixon-Ford-Carter days. They were now dealing with an administration that was going to stand up for its beliefs and its rights. Mr. Reagan had an agenda, and he knew where he was going.

  Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt before him, Ronald Reagan was a master communicator. He made people feel that something was getting done. Unlike Roosevelt, however, Reagan did not see the power of the state as a positive tool to help society. He believed that oversize government programs had made people weak and dependent. Where Roosevelt had wanted to save people with government, Reagan wanted to save people from government.

  The essence of Reagan’s economic policy was the tax cut. His philosophy was that people who made money should be allowed to keep it. And if the rich had money to spend, it would eventually “trickle down” to the people who had less. This argument allowed him to cut funding for social programs that had been constructed to aid the poor.

  At the same time that Reagan cut taxes, he also increased defense spending. His view of the Soviet Union was simple: It was an “evil empire” and must not be coddled. He dramatically enlarged America’s supply of nuclear weapons. But with less money coming into the government from taxes and more money going into defense, the federal budget became seriously out of balance.

  Nonetheless, the economy seemed to be on the mend. America’s standing in international affairs, thanks to Reagan’s tough, no-nonsense attitude toward the Soviets, was improving. But all was not rosy. Reagan’s trickle-down
theory had justified severe cuts in social spending, but the trickling was hard to see. Many people enjoyed the new prosperity, but at the bottom of the ladder, others were falling into deep trouble.

  The Reverend Patrick Mahoney, born in 1954, saw a tragedy emerging from President Reagan’s economic policies.

  What was discouraging to me about President Reagan was that he was the first style-over-substance president. He had great style in front of the public up there, but he was lacking in substance. For example, he talked about church values, but he never went to church. He talked about family values, yet he had an incredibly dysfunctional family and his children didn’t talk to him. He spoke out about drugs, but we saw cocaine wars in south Florida. He wanted to reduce government spending, yet the deficit skyrocketed. President Reagan introduced something very detrimental, and that is this photo-op kind of candidacy. It dumbed down the political debate and made everybody more interested in good sound bites and creative commercials than in real issues. Also Reagan’s economic policies made life very difficult for a lot of people. The theory behind Reaganomics was that the rising tide would lift up all the boats. If the already well-to-do started making more money, then it would trickle down to the less well-off and everyone would do better. But in reality that was not the case. I lived in Bristol, Connecticut, in the 1980s. And under Reagan, Bristol experienced this huge boom. I mean, it was great. Everyone was saying, “Aren’t things wonderful? Aren’t things just spectacular under President Reagan? He’s our man. He’s lowered interest rates. I’m making money hand over fist.” But that was for people who owned property and who were already fairly well off. For people who didn’t have money—for the poor—it was a horrible time. Property values in Bristol doubled or tripled, but so did the rents. And as the rents went up, the wages of the working class stayed the same, and suddenly many people couldn’t afford to live in their own homes anymore. In Bristol, as in a lot of America, entire families found themselves without a home. These were not lazy people. They were not sluggards or substance abusers. They were committed, dedicated men and women who were trying to make a difference in their own life, and suddenly they couldn’t afford a place to live.

  So when I hear about the legacy of Mr. Reagan, and I hear of the good times of the Reagan years, I can say that I personally benefited—the value of my home more than tripled—but the same factors that allowed for me to make money turned out to be very hard on the working class. The trickle-down theory just stopped at those who already had money, and many of those who were already struggling to make ends meet were forced out into the streets. It was tragic.

  For the poor, life was getting harder. Homelessness was on the rise. So were drug abuse and the crime that came with it. But the Reagan era encouraged many to distance themselves from these social problems. The social consciousness of the sixties and seventies now seemed to have faded, a victim of impatience, cynicism, and, for some, a firm belief that government programs rarely worked. At the top of the ladder of opportunity, some wealthy Americans spent their newly made money more freely and publicly on themselves.

  Starting in 1982, more than a hundred thousand new millionaires were created each year, so many that the word millionaire lost its significance. Millionaire? Try billionaire. America was throwing itself into conspicuous consumption: big cars, mammoth houses, opulent dinners, and luxurious vacations. The panting pursuit of wealth was now acceptable, even admirable. “Greed is good,” claimed a character in Wall Street, a movie that defined the times.

  Chris Burke, born in 1958, experienced the excitement of easy money on Wall Street in the 1980s.

  In 1979 I was two years out of high school and working in a local bar in Manhasset, Long Island, a bedroom community for people who work in Manhattan. And probably about 80 percent of those people worked on Wall Street. A lot of these Wall Street guys were regulars at the bar and they were always saying things like “What are you doing here? Come on down and work on Wall Street with us. You have what it takes.” They made it all seem very glamorous, and I was lured in. In 1980 I went down to work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Wall Street was just heading into a big upswing, so things were pretty exciting down there. Suddenly there I was, a twenty-year-old kid with a high-school education, and I was starting out at $40,000 a year.

  I was a clerk for a specialist house that traded in about eighty big stocks like TWA, Delta Air Lines, things like that. I stood behind a counter, and outside the counter was the broker I worked for. Surrounding him were ten to twenty guys just screaming and yelling, buying and selling. And I’d have to record all of these orders. Hectic isn’t the word. It was overwhelming. We ripped our hair out of our head for the entire day every day.

  When the bell rang in the afternoon, we cleaned up, and then it was cocktail time. I went out every night with the guys that I worked with and our immediate bosses. And we never spent a penny. Everything was on an expense account. We would go to this same restaurant a couple of blocks from the stock exchange. There’d be about fifteen guys. And we’d head right for the bar and just start pounding drinks. Then we’d sit down at the table. And we’d never even see a menu; the food would just start to come out, and it seemed like it would never end. It was obscene. Platters and platters of food and bottles and bottles of wine. We never thought once about what anything cost. Not at all. Just like at the exchange, it was all funny money. Never your money. So you didn’t think about it.

  In 1982 I switched over to the government bond market. By the mid-1980s the government bond market was booming and I was making good money with a nice bonus every year. I bought a new house, new cars, new clothes, and I became so entrenched in the lifestyle that I was spending tons of money. When your whole life revolves around money, pretty soon your value judgments come into question. My buddies and I would literally be stepping over homeless people on our way to work, and we’d snicker about it. We certainly didn’t want to get our shoes scuffed up by their burlap pants. “Get a job” was our attitude.

  Wall Street in the 1980s was like nowhere else on this planet. It was a culture of greed and backstabbing and partying. Your best buddy is the one who’s gonna stab you in the back tomorrow if it means some more greenbacks in his pocket. It wasn’t a good way to live, but it was the only way I knew.

  Not since the Roaring Twenties had there been such a culture of money and glitz in America. Yet the new rich were making money differently than their predecessors. A thriving 1920s capitalist might have amassed a fortune building automobiles, while a successful 1950s businessman might have thought up new ways to sell products. In the 1980s millionaires were often lawyers and investment bankers who got rich not by building or selling anything, but by shifting ownership of companies, by refinancing companies, by making deals. It was all done on paper, and to many it all felt a little unreal.

  Looking back, experts would agree that this was a streamlining that American business desperately needed. Still, all this wheeling and dealing, which seemed so abstract, affected the jobs—and the lives—of real people. Sometimes it meant closing factories in the United States and reopening them in places such as Thailand or Mexico. Why should management pay union workers in Ohio or Michigan high wages when they could pay a tenth of that to someone in the Third World? Sometimes it meant buying out local family-owned businesses to break them apart and sell each part.

  Whole towns suffered dramatically from this rampage of mergers, acquisitions, and relocations. Communities that had relied on local factories for jobs now found themselves without any source of employment. Increasingly, people could not find new jobs. A new underclass emerged. Most visible were the homeless, people living on the street, whose desperate lives seemed to put the lie to claims that the country was back on its feet. The homeless problem was a complicated one, caused in part by Reagan’s welfare cuts, by an inner-city drug epidemic, by a shortage of affordable housing, and by the decline of marriage, which left more people struggling to get by on their own.

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nbsp; A powerful new form of cocaine, called “crack,” swept through American cities in the late 1980s. Darryl McDaniels, born in 1964, is the “DMC” of the rap group Run-DMC. He saw the damage crack did to his community.

  I grew up on the tree-lined streets of Hollis, Queens, in New York. Most of the parents in my neighborhood were hardworking people with nine-to-five jobs. You knew everybody’s parents, every kid, every uncle, the name of every dog and cat on the block, and the TV repairman, the oil man, and the mailman. Hollis was really a close-knit middle-class community. Almost every Saturday in the summer, the whole neighborhood would come into the park, and a DJ would be there, and the rappers and the emcees from the neighborhood would come on the set and we’d rap and we’d party and we’d DJ and we’d play music and have fun until the police came and said, “Somebody called the cops on y’all. Y’all gotta go home.”

  In the early eighties I started noticing neighborhood businesses were closing down. Our favorite candy store and deli, where we’d go as kids to read comic books, closed. The supermarket kept closing and reopening under a new name. The crime level was going up a little bit. People, particularly older people and well-educated people, started moving out of Queens, too. Even when we’d DJ in the park, fewer and fewer people were coming.

  So the neighborhood was already starting to go downhill when I left to do a tour from 1984 to 1986. My rap group, Run-DMC, had made it big with our first single. Everywhere we went on tour, and especially in the South, people were talking about this new drug called crack. And we’d see crack fiends on the road and we could see how it hooked people. But we didn’t realize crack had penetrated so deep into our own neighborhood.