Disturbing History - The 1980's

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

The 1980s began with 52 Americans still being held hostage in Tehran and ended with crowds tearing open the Berlin Wall. Between those two moments came one of the most turbulent, contradictory decades in modern American history.In this fourth episode of the Disturbing History decades series, Brian looks back at the decade he grew up in—beyond the neon, MTV, blockbuster movies, and nostalgia. The episode moves through the moments everyone remembers: the Miracle on Ice, Mount St. Helens, the shooting of John Lennon, the launch of MTV, the Macintosh, Live Aid, the MAS*H finale, Reagan’s presidency, and the Challenger disaster. Then it turns the decade over.Behind the economic recovery were recession, mass unemployment, the firing of 11,359 air traffic controllers, a frozen minimum wage, the farm crisis, a soaring national debt, and the savings-and-loan collapse. The decade also saw deadly failures at the Hyatt Regency, Air Florida Flight 90, and Challenger—disasters where warnings, design changes, or ignored risks became part of the story.Fear shaped the culture as much as prosperity did. The Tylenol murders changed product safety forever. Missing children appeared on milk cartons. The McMartin preschool case fed the satanic panic. Dungeons & Dragons, heavy metal, and supposed occult networks became national anxieties. At the same time, Cold War tensions pushed the United States and Soviet Union dangerously close to catastrophe.The episode also revisits stories the decade nearly forgot: Lawnchair Larry, the buried E.T. cartridges, the Titanic discovery’s secret Navy connection, Al Capone’s empty vault, Cleveland’s disastrous balloon release, Baby Jessica, cold fusion, and a garbage barge that became a national spectacle. Then come the scandals and secrets: Iran-Contra, presidential astrology, Iran Air Flight 655, the USS Iowa explosion, and other moments where the official story raised as many questions as it answered.Beneath all of it were the quieter death tolls that rarely defined the decade on television: heart disease, cigarettes, drunk driving, gun violence, the crack epidemic, the early AIDS crisis, and tens of thousands of suicides every year.The 1980s also handed the future some of its foundations—the early internet, the World Wide Web proposal, cellular phones, modern talk radio, sentencing laws that reshaped American prisons, major environmental agreements, and early warnings about climate change.And once again, the episode ends with the same recurring pattern: the generation everyone complained about grew up and started complaining about its own children. Four decades in a row.Email BrianGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. Walter Cronkite had a habit. At the end of the CBS evening news, he'd give the date, and then he'd give the number, and the number was how many days 52 Americans had been held inside the embassy compound in Tehran. When 1980 began, the number was

59, and it was going to keep climbing every night for the rest of that year, through a spring and a summer and a fall, until it was the last thing anybody heard before they went to bed. and the first thing they heard when the radio came on in the morning. That's where the 70s had left the country. It had come through Vietnam and Watergate, through two rounds of gas lines and a partial meltdown on an island in Pennsylvania, with inflation running past 13% and a president who'd gone on television the summer before, to tell people they were suffering from a crisis of confidence.

Then, for one night in February, a hockey game got in the way. A team of American college kids in Lake Placid, New York, beat the Soviet national team four to three, which shouldn't have been possible, because the Soviets had won the gold medal at the last four Olympics and had beaten that same American team 10 to 3 in an exhibition at Madison Square Garden, less than two weeks earlier.

Al Michaels was calling it for ABC, and with the clock running out, he asked the country whether it believed in miracles and answered his own question before anybody. else could. Most of the country wasn't watching when he said it. The game had started at five in the afternoon and ABC ran it on tape delay that night. So people sat down already knowing and watched it anyway. Two days later, the same kids beat Finland for the gold medal. And for about a week, the number on the evening news didn't seem quite so heavy. Two months after that, it got heavier.

In the last week of April, a rescue force went into the desert south of Tehran to get the hostages out. and it never got close. The mission had gone in with eight helicopters and needed six to continue. And by the time the force reached its refueling point, a stretch of desert the planners had named Desert One. There were five, so the commanders called it off. They were pulling out when one of the helicopters drifted into a transport plane loaded with fuel and men,

and eight servicemen burned to death on the ground. Jimmy Carter went on television at seven the next morning, told the country the operation had failed, and said the responsibility was his. Three weeks later on a Sunday morning in May, the north face of Mount St. Helens let go at 832, and a geological survey volcanologist named David Johnston, sitting on a ridge about six miles from the summit,

had time to key his radio and tell the survey office in Vancouver, Washington, that this was it before the blast reached him. Harry Truman, who was 83 and had run a lodge on Spirit Lake for more than 50 years, and had told every reporter who'd asked that he wasn't, leaving was buried where he lived, along with his 16 cats. The mountain lost 1,300 feet of its summit in a few seconds. Ash came down across 11 states, and 57 people died. By the fall, the number on the evening news was past 350, and on the 4th of November, exactly one year after the embassy

had been taken, Ronald Reagan carried 44 states. 17 days after that, on a Friday night, 83 million Americans sat down in front of their televisions to find out who shot J.R. Ewing, and most of them had spent that same day watching pictures from Las Vegas, where a fire had started in a restaurant on the casino floor of the MGM Grand, a little after seven that morning, and climbed the tower, and 85 people were dead, by the time the primetime lineup came on. Both stories ran on the same newscast, and one of them got the ratings. In December, a man with a paperback and a pistol waited outside an apartment building in New York City,

and John Lennon was dead before midnight, and Howard Cassell broke it to the country in the fourth quarter of the Monday night football game. And then it was the 20th of January, 1981, and at noon Ronald Reagan stood on the west front of the Capitol and took the oath of office while the plane carrying the hostages, sat on a runway in Tehran with its engines running. Reagan gave his speech and walked inside to the inaugural luncheon, and partway through that lunch, he stood up and told the room that some 30 minutes earlier, the planes bearing the prisoners had left Iranian airspace. It was day 444. I was a small kid when that plane cleared the coast, and I was a teenager when the Berlin Wall came down. Everything in between is the decade I grew up in, and this is the episode I've been waiting to get to since we started this series.

The 80s, the quote about the kids didn't come from a philosopher or a campus radical. It came out of a federal commission, and it came with a letterhead. In April of 1983, an 18-member panel called the National Commission on Excellence in Education handed President Reagan a report titled, A Nation at Risk. The Secretary of Education, Terrell Bell, had appointed the commission, and the President of the University of Utah, David Gardner, had chaired it, and the report ran 36 pages and two sentences out of those 36 got read into the minutes of every school board in America for the next 10 years. The first said that the educational foundations of the society were being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity

that threatened the very future of the nation and its people. The second said that if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America, the mediocre educational performance that existed at that moment, the country might well have viewed it as an act of war. war. The kids that report was written about were sitting in high school classrooms in 1983. The oldest of them are past 60 now, and they run the country, and a fair number of them sit on school boards. The 80s didn't spend most of its worry on what those kids were learning, though. It worried about what they were listening to, and what they were playing at the kitchen table,

and who might be waiting for them in the parking lot after school. Inflation was running at 13.5% when the decade opened, and by 19,000,000,000,000. And by 19, In 183 it was down to 3.2, and it stayed between 3 and 5 for the rest of the 10 years. The prime rate, which is what a bank charged its best customers, had hit 21.5% in December of 1980, and a 30-year mortgage in October of 1981 cost 18.5. By the end of the decade, a mortgage cost less than 10. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 1980 at 964 and closed 1989 at 2,0,000, and closed 1989 at 2,0.7. 753, and that's after the Monday in October of 1987, when it lost 22.6% of its value between the

opening bell and the close, which is still the largest single-day percentage drop it has ever taken. Gasoline had been the whole argument of the 70s, and in 1980 it averaged about a dollar 19 a gallon. Then in 1986, the price of crude oil fell from around $27 a barrel to under 10, and the price at the pump dropped below 90 cents, and the line at the gas station went away and hasn't come back. The expansion that started in November of 1982 ran 92 months all the way to July of 1990, which made it the longest peacetime expansion the country had ever recorded up to that point.

A new house that had cost $64,600 at the median in 1980, cost $120,000 in 1989. and the median household's income went from about $17,700 to about $28,900 over the same stretch. Cable television was in about one home and five when the decade started, and in more than half of them when it ended. A video cassette recorder was in about one home in 100 in 1980, and in roughly two out of three by 1989. And along the way, the Supreme Court had to decide in January of 1984, by a vote of five to four. by a vote of five to four that taping a television show in your own living room wasn't a crime.

The first blockbuster opened in Dallas in October of 1985, an MTV had gone on the air at one minute past midnight on the 1st of August, 1981 in a few hundred thousand homes in northern New Jersey, playing a song about video killing the radio star to almost nobody. Michael Jackson put out Thriller at the end of 1982, and it's still the best-selling album ever made. The last episode of MASH aired at the end of February in 1983 to about 106 million people,

and that number stood as the most watched broadcast in American television history for 27 years. E.T. came out in June of 1982 and held the box office record for 11. IBM introduced its personal computer in August of 1981 for $1,565. And Time Magazine skipped its man of the year the following year and put the computer on the cover instead. Apple ran a 60-second commercial during the Super Bowl in January of 1984 and put the Macintosh on sale two days later for $2,495. The first commercial cellular phone network in the country switched on in Chicago in October of 1983 and the phone that worked on it, the Motorola DinaTac, cost $3,995 and gave its owner about 30 minutes of talk time

before it died. Nintendo put its entertainment system on sale in New York in October of 1985. Two years after the American video game business had collapsed so completely that people had stopped believing there was one. The Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 were boycotted by the Soviet block and paid for by private sponsors, and they turned a profit of $232 million, which no Olympics had ever done. Live Aid ran 16 hours across two stadiums on two continents on the 13th of July, 1985, and something like a billion and a half people watched some part

of it. And there's the president who's on that front page for eight of the ten years. 69 days into his first term, coming out of the Washington Hilton, he was shot in the chest by a 25-year-old named John Hinkley Jr., and the bullet stopped about an inch from his heart.

He told the surgeons at George Washington University Hospital that he hoped they were all Republicans. And the surgeon in charge, who was a Democrat, told him that for today they all were. Three and a half years later, he carried 49 states. In December of 1987, he and Mikhail Gorbachev signed a treaty that eliminated an entire class of nuclear missiles, which had never been done. And in May of 1988, standing in Red Square, he was asked whether he still thought of the Soviet Union as an evil empire, and he said he'd been

talking about another time, another era. 18 months after that, on the night of the 9th of November 1989, an East German official named Gunter Shabowski read a new travel regulation allowed at a press conference, and a reporter asked him when it took effect, and Shabowski looked down at his notes and said immediately, without delay. By 1130 that night, the border guards at the Bournemer Street crossing had stopped trying to hold the crowd and open the gate. In November of 1982, the unemployment rate reached 10.8%. which put 12 million people out of work and was the highest the country had seen since the Depression.

Inflation didn't get beaten by a speech. It got beaten by a recession, and the man who ran it was Paul Volker at the Federal Reserve, who had started pushing interest rates up in October of 1979 and kept pushing until money cost 20% to borrow. The country went into recession in January of 1980 and came out that summer and went back in during July of 1981. and stayed there for 16 months. Home builders mailed two by fours to the Federal Reserve. Car dealers mailed keys.

Farm groups picketed the building. Volker kept going, and it worked. And the people it worked on were the ones who'd lost the house or the dealership or the farm before it did. The first labor fight of the decade happened in the middle of that recession and set a pattern that outlasted it. About 13,000 air traffic controllers walked off the job on the 3rd of August. 1981. Over pay and hours and the equipment they were working with, and they walked knowing that

federal employees weren't allowed to strike on the theory that Reagan, whom their union had endorsed the year before, understood their complaints. He gave them 48 hours to come back. When the deadline passed, he fired the 11,359 who hadn't, and barred them from federal employment for life, and military controllers and supervisors ran the system, while replacements were taken. trained. The union was decertified that October. Private employers had watched all of it, and the number of major strikes in the United States, which had averaged around 300 a year through the 70s, fell to around 50 a year by the end of the 80s, and never came back up. The minimum wage went to $3.35 an hour on the 1st of January, 1981, and it sat there until April of 1990,

which was nine years and three months without an increase and the longest stretch since the law had been written in 1938. The cost of living rose more than 40% over those same nine years. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The federal debt stood at about $908 billion at the end of the government's 1980 fiscal year, and at the end of 1989, it stood at about $2,857 billion.

billion. In 1985, the United States became a net-debted nation, owing more to the rest of the world than the world owed it for the first time since 1914. In September of 1989, Sony bought Columbia Pictures for $3.4 billion, and a month later, a Japanese real estate company bought a controlling stake in Rockefeller Center, and the way the country reacted to those two purchases says more about the decade's actual mood than the Dow does. Now, the farms. On the 4th of January 1980, Jimmy Carter cut off grain sales to the Soviet Union over the invasion of Afghanistan, and the Soviets had been one of the biggest customers American grain had.

Farmers had spent the 70s borrowing against land that was appreciating faster than the stock market, on the advice of their banks and their government, so they could plant more of what the world was buying. And now the customer was gone, and the interest rate on the loan had tripled. Farmland and Iowa lost more than half its value between 1981 and 1986. Farm debt across the country topped $200 billion, and a farmer who'd borrowed against his acreage at 1979 prices was underwater by 1983, no matter how good his crop came in, with the same bank that had encouraged the loan now calling it. Hollywood noticed before Washington did. Three films about farm foreclosures came out in 1984.

And in May of 1985, three actresses who'd played farm women on screen the year before, Jessica Lang, Sissy Spacic, and Jane Fonda sat in front of a House Agriculture Subcommittee and talked about the families they'd met while making the pictures. That September, Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young put on a concert in Champaign, Illinois for about 80,000 people and called it Farm Aid. And it existed because Bob Dylan had said from the stage at Live Aid, months earlier, that it'd be nice if some of that money went to American farmers. Three months after farm aid on the 9th of December, a 63-year-old farmer in Hills, Iowa named Dale Burr,

who was deeply in debt to the local bank, shot and killed his wife at their home, drove into town to the Hills Bank and trust and shot and killed its president. John Hughes drove out to a neighboring farm and shot and killed a neighbor named Richard Goody, and then killed himself. The story ran nationally as the face of the farm crisis. The savings and loans took longer to come apart and cost more. A savings in loan took deposits and made home mortgages, and for 40 years, it had been about the sleepiest business in America. Until the late 70s, when inflation ran past the interest, a thrift was allowed to pay, and the money left for the money market funds. Congress answered with deregulation. Reagan signed the Garns-San Germain Act in October of 1982 and said he

thought they'd hit the jackpot, and the law let a thrift pay whatever interest it wanted and put its depositors money into commercial real estate and corporate bonds and about anything else, while the deposits stayed federally insured up to $100,000, a limit that had been raised from $40,000 two and a half years earlier. So a thrift could gather insured money at high rates from all over the country and lend it on a shopping center in Texas, or a junk bond out of Drexel-Burnum. and if the bet paid off, the owner kept the profit, and if it didn't, the government paid the depositors. Washington cut the examiner staff at the same time. The one everybody remembers is Lincoln Savings and Loan of Irvine, California,

which a Phoenix developer named Charles Keating bought in 1984 and moved into raw desert land and hotels and junk bonds. When the regulators in San Francisco started closing in on it in 1987, Keating, who'd given about a million $300,000 over the years to five United States senators, got those five senators into a room in April to lean on the regulators for him, and it bought him two years. Lincoln was seized on the 14th of April 1989 and cost the government $3.4 billion and about 23,000 people. A lot of them retirees who'd been sold the parent company's bonds in the lobby of the thrift

as though they were insured deposits, lost around $250 million. Congress passed the bailout that August, and by the time the cleanup agency shut its doors in 1995, more than a thousand thrifts had failed and the bill had come to about $160 billion, $124 billion of it paid by the taxpayer. The five senators, one of whom was John McCain, got a Senate ethics investigation and nothing more. Keating went to prison in the 90s on state and federal charges, had both convictions overturned on appeal, pleaded guilty, to reduced federal counts in 1999, and was sentenced to the time he'd already served.

On a Friday evening in July of 1981, the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City was holding a tea dance in its atrium lobby, with about 1,600 people there and a band playing, and three suspended walkways crossing the atrium above them at the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floors. The 4th floor walkway hung directly above the 2nd floor one, and people were standing on both to watch the band. And a little after 7 o'clock, the fourth floor walkway dropped onto the second floor walkway, and both of them came down onto the crowd. 114 people died and 216 were injured, and until September of 2001, it was the deadliest structural collapse in the history of the United States. The National Bureau of Standards found the cause, and it was a change to a drawing.

The original design called for long steel rods to run from the ceiling down through the fourth floor walkway and continue on to hold the second floor walkway so that each one hung on the rods independently. The steel fabricator proposed splitting that into two sets of rods, one set from the ceiling to the fourth floor, and a second set from the fourth floor down to the second, because it was easier to build, and the engineering firm approved it. What that did was hang the second floor walkway from the fourth floor beams instead of from the ceiling, which doubled the load on a connection the bureau found would only have carried about 60% of what the city building code required, even as originally drawn.

The two engineers of record lost their Missouri licenses in 1986. Nobody was charged with a crime, and the hotel reopened. Six months later, Washington was in a snowstorm, and on the afternoon of the 13th, of January, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90, a Boeing 737 bound for Fort Lauderdale, had been sitting on the ground at National Airport for the better part of an hour after being de-iced. It took off at about four o'clock, failed to climb, struck the 14th Street Bridge across the Potomac, crushing cars as it went, and slid into the river. 74 of the 79 people aboard died, along with four people on the bridge. The National Transportation Safety Board found ice on the wings and an engine

anti-ice system that had been left off so the cockpit gauges showed more thrust than the engines were producing. And the cockpit voice recorder had caught the first officer telling the captain as the throttles came up that something didn't seem right. Five people from the plane ended up alive in the water among the ice and a park police helicopter came down low and dropped them a line. A 46-year-old bank examiner from Atlanta named Arland Williams Jr. caught it and handed it to someone else. And when the line came back, he handed it off again. And when the helicopter came back for him, he was gone. The span he died under carries his name now.

A 28-year-old government office worker named Lenny Scutnik, who'd been standing on the bank watching, went into the river in his shirt sleeves and pulled a woman named Priscilla Tarado to shore. and 13 days later, Reagan had him seated in the gallery for the state of the Union and pointed him out to the country, which no president had done before, and everyone since has done every year. About half an hour after that plane went into the river, a metro train derailed in a tunnel under Federal Triangle and killed three people, the first fatal accident in the history of the Washington subway. It ran below the fold that day, and it stayed there. On the morning of the 28th of January, 1986, at 38 minutes past 11, Challenger lifted off from Cape Canaveral with

seven people aboard, one of them a high school social studies teacher from New Hampshire named Krista McAuliffe, which is why school children all over the country were watching on classroom televisions when it came apart 73 seconds later. The air temperature at the pad that morning was 36 degrees, and the coldest launch before that had been 53. The night of the night. before engineers at Morton Theocol, the contractor that built the solid rocket boosters, had gotten on a conference call with NASA and recommended against launching below 53 degrees because the rubber O-rings that sealed the joints between the booster segments lost their flexibility in the cold and had already come back with burn damage on previous flights. A NASA manager on the

call asked whether they wanted him to wait until April. The Eocles management asked for a few minutes off the line, and during that caucus, according to the sworn testimony afterward, a Theacol vice president told the engineering director to take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat, and Theocal came back on the line and approved the launch. The engineer who'd argued hardest against it, Roger Boyz Jolie, had written a memo the previous July warning that if the O-rings failed, the result would be a catastrophe of the highest order, meaning the loss of human life. On the morning of the 29th of September, 1982, a 12-year-old girl in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, named Mary Kellerman woke up with a sore throat, took an extra-strength Tylenol capsule, and was dead by 7 o'clock. A few hours later, a 27-year-old postal worker in Arlington Heights, named Adam Janus, took two capsules for chest pain and collapsed.

And that evening, when his family gathered at his house, his brother Stanley, who was 25, and Stanley's wife Teresa, who was 19. Each took capsules from the same bottle, and both of them died. Over the next two days, a 31-year-old woman named Mary McFarlane died in Elmhurst, a 27-year-old named Mary Reiner died in Winfield four days after giving birth, and a 35-year-old United Airlines flight attendant named Paula Prince was found dead in her Chicago apartment, with a drugstore security camera having recorded her buying the bottle. Two Chicago area fours, firefighters listening to scanner traffic connected the Kellerman and Janus cases and noticed that both families had mentioned Tylenol, and from there, it unwound fast. Every capsule that had

killed someone had been opened and filled with potassium cyanide, and the tainted bottles came from different manufacturing plants, which meant the poisoning had been done on the store shelves. Johnson and Johnson pulled 31 million bottles nationwide at a cost of more than $100 million, and towns around Chicago canceled trick-or-treating that Halloween. A man named James Lewis mailed the company a letter, demanding a million dollars to stop the killing, and he was caught in December in a New York public library, convicted of extortion, sentenced to 20 years, and served about 13, and he was never charged with the murders. He died in 2023, and the case is still open.

Tylenol came back to the shelf that November in a package with a glued box and a plastic neck seal and a foil seal over the mouth of the bottle. And the following October, Reagan signed the Federal Anti-Tampering Act, which made what had happened in Chicago a federal crime. Every bottle anybody has opened since has a seal on it because of those seven people. The first person convicted under that law was a woman in Auburn, Washington, named Stella Nickel. In June of 1986, her husband Bruce collapsed at home after taking Excedron capsules and died, and the death was written up as emphysema. And six days later, a 40-year-old bank manager named Sue Snow died in her home a few miles away after taking Excedrin, and the

pathologist smelled bitter almonds at the autopsy. When the poisoning hit the news, Stella Nicol came forward and told police her husband had taken capsules from the same lot. Investigators found two contaminated bottles in her house, bought from two different stores, and the cyanide in the capsules contained flecks of an algae killer used in home fish tanks, and Stella Nickel kept fish. She'd taken out additional life insurance on her husband, and her adult daughter testified that her mother had talked about killing him. She was convicted in May of 1988 and sentenced to 90 years, and by every finding of the court, Sue Snow had been killed, so that Bruce Nickel would look like the victim of a random poisoner. On the 1st of September

November 1983, a Soviet fighter shot down Korean Airlines flight zero-zero seven over the sea of Japan after the airliner strayed into Soviet airspace, and all 269 people aboard died. One of them a congressman from Georgia named Larry McDonald. Reagan called it a massacre. Moscow said the plane had been a spy flight. Twenty-five days later, a little after midnight, a lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer at a satellite early warning station south of Moscow, called Serapuka 15, when the system reported an American missile launch and then reported four more. The procedure said to pass the warning up the chain, and he had minutes to do it. He reported a malfunction instead on the reasoning that a real

first strike would come with hundreds of missiles rather than five, and he turned out to be right because the satellite had picked up sunlight reflecting off high clouds over the northern United States. Nobody outside the Soviet military heard about any of that until 1998. Six weeks after Petrov shift, from the 7th to the 11th of November, NATO ran an annual command exercise in Europe called Abel Archer, which that year simulated the procedures for releasing nuclear weapons. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Soviet intelligence had spent two years looking for signs that the West was preparing a surprise and some in the Soviet leadership read the exercise as the real thing,

and nuclear-capable aircraft in East Germany and Poland were put on alert. A British-run agent inside the KGB named Oleg Gordievsky got word of the alarm back to London, and from there it went to Washington. A review by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in 1990, which stayed classified until 2015, concluded that the United States may have inadvertently placed its relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger that fall. Nine days after Abel Archer ended, ABC aired a two-hour film called The Day After, about a nuclear strike on Kansas City and the weeks that followed in Lawrence, Kansas,

and about a hundred million people watched, which made it the most watched television movie ever made. Reagan had seen it at Camp David the month before, and had written in his diary that it was very effective and had left him greatly depressed. So inside of the 11 weeks in the fall of 1983. A civilian airliner was shot down. A Soviet officer decided a launch warning was a glitch. The Soviet Air Force went on alert over a NATO drill and a hundred million Americans sat down to watch Kansas City get hit. The front of the photograph has Reagan and Gorbachev shaking hands in Geneva two years later. And I don't think either picture makes sense without the other. The other fear of the decade was closer to home and it started with a boy in a

Sears. On the 27th of July, 1981, a six-year-old named Adam Walsh was taken from the toy department of Assiers in Hollywood, Florida, while his mother shopped a few aisles away, and his remains were found two weeks later. His father, John Walsh, spent the rest of the decade in front of Congress, and the case became the reason the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children opened in 1984. In September of 1982, a 12-year-old paperboy named Johnny Goss, disappeared from his route in West Des Moines, Iowa. And in August of 1984, another Des Moines Paperboy, a 13-year-old named Eugene Martin,

disappeared the same way. And that September, a Des Moines Derry, called Anderson-Erickson put both boys' photographs on the side of its milk cartons. Within a year, dairies across the country were doing it, and a generation of kids ate breakfast looking at the faces of other kids who'd been taken. The numbers that traveled with those cartons were that a million, and a half children went missing every year and that as many as 50,000 of them were taken by strangers

and those figures got repeated by advocacy groups and by members of congress and from the white house in 1985 the Denver post took them apart in a series that won the Pulitzer prize the following year most of the million and a half were runaways who came home within days and most of the rest had been taken by a parent in a custody fight and when the justice department finally put a research team on the question Its 1990 study found that the number of children abducted by strangers in the way the milk cartons implied, taken and held overnight or moved a distance or killed, was somewhere between 200 and 300 a year in the whole country. Two to 300 is not zero, and every one of them has a name. It's also not 50,000, and the distance between those two numbers is about the distance between how the 80s felt and what was actually happening.

In August of 1983, a mother in Manhattan Beach, California, named Judy Johnson, told police that her two-year-old son had been molested at the McMartin preschool by a teacher named Ray Bucky, the grandson of the school's founder. Police arrested Bucky and released him for lack of evidence, and then in September mailed a letter to about 200 families of current and former McMartin students, naming Bucky, describing the allegations, and asking parents to question their children about oral sex, sodomy, and being photographed nude. The children were sent to a therapy clinic in Los Angeles called Children's Institute International, where an interviewer named Key McFarlane questioned about 400 of them with puppets and anatomically detailed dolls and concluded that 360 had been abused. The accounts drawn out over those sessions came to include secret tunnels under the school, a rabbit killed in front of the children,

airplane flights to be abused, and trips to a car wash. And Judy Johnson's own allegations eventually included the claim that her son had been abused by a teacher who could fly. She was hospitalized with a mental illness in 1985 and died in December of 1986 before the trial began. Seven people were indicted in March of 1984 on more than a hundred counts. Among them Ray Bucky, his mother Peggy McMartin Bucky, and his 76-year-old grandmother. and the preliminary hearing alone took 18 months. In January of 1986, the new district attorney, Ira Reiner, dropped the charges against five of the seven for what he called incredibly weak evidence.

And one of his own prosecutors quit the case saying he'd come to believe the children had been coached. Ray Bucky and his mother went to trial in April of 1987, and in January of 1990, the jury acquitted both of them on 52 counts and hung on 13 against Ray. And a second jury hung again that summer, and the prosecution gave up. Ray Bucky had spent five years in jail waiting for trial. The case had run seven years and cost about $15 million, which made it the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history. And it produced no convictions, and the excavations under the school that the parents paid for never found a tunnel. McMartin was the biggest of dozens of daycare cases around the country in those years.

And the pattern in the others was the same. Small children questioned over and over by adults, who already believed something had happened, accounts that grew with every session, and a wave of prosecutions that mostly ended in acquittals or reversals, though not all of them did. And some people went to prison on that kind of evidence and stayed there into the next century.

The same fear ran through the kids' bedrooms. In June of 1982, a 16-year-old in Virginia named Irving Pulling killed himself, and his mother, Patricia Pulling, became convinced that the game Dungeons and Dragons had driven him to it. She sued his school principal in the game's publisher and lost both suits. And in 1983, she founded a group called Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, which spent the rest of the decade giving police department seminars on occult crime and giving reporters a running tally of teenage suicides she attributed to the game.

60 minutes put her across the table from the game's designer, Gary Gygax in 1985. The American Association of Suicidology found no link between the game and suicide, and sales of the game went up through the decade. In September of 1985, the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on rock lyrics at the request of a group called the Parents Music Resource Center, founded that spring by a group of Washington wives that included Tipper Gore, whose husband sat on that committee, and Susan Baker,

whose husband was the secretary of the treasury. The group had circulated a list of 15 songs it called The Filthy 15 and wanted a rating system for records, and three musicians showed up to argue against it. Frank Zappa called the proposal an ill-conceived piece of nonsense. John Denver said he'd had a song banned from radio by people who thought it was about drugs. D. Snyder of Twisted Sister came in a sleeveless shirt and explained that a song the committee had cited as being about

sadomasochism was actually about a bandmate's throat surgery. Six weeks later, the record industry agreed to put a parental advisory sticker on albums, and the sticker is still there. That same morning, a magnitude 8 earthquake had leveled a good part of Mexico City and killed something like 10,000 people, and the two stories ran on the same night's news. Three years later, in October of 1988, NBC aired a two-hour Geraldo Rivera special called Devil Worship, exposing Satan's underground, which told about 20 million viewers that there were more than a million Satanists in the United States operating a highly organized secretive network. In 1992, an FBI supervisory special agent named Kenneth Lanning, who'd spent years fielding those cases at the Bureau's Behavioral Science Unit,

published a report concluding that after all the investigations, there was no evidence of a single organized satanic ritual abuse network, anywhere in the country. That's what was waiting for the kids in the parking lot in the 80s, a record album, a 20-sided die, a preschool, and a face on a milk carton. When somebody finally counted, the numbers came back at two to 300 a year, no tunnels, no link, and no network. The fear was real, and the things it was pointed at mostly weren't there. In July of 1982, a 33-year-old truck driver in San Pedro, California, named Larry Walter, tied 42 weather balloons to a Sears lawn chair, filled them with helium, packed a pellet gun and a CB radio and some sandwiches and a camera,

and cut the tether, expecting to rise a few hundred feet and float over the neighborhood. He rose to about 16,000 feet instead and drifted into the approach corridor for Los Angeles International, where pilots for TWA and Delta reported him to the tower, and he came down by shooting balloons with the pellet gun until he dropped the gun, Got the chairs dangling lines tangled in a power line, knocked out electricity to part of Long Beach for about 20 minutes, and landed. The Federal Aviation Administration fined him $4,000, later cut to $1,500. And when the reporters asked why he'd done it, he said,

A man can't just sit around. In September of 1983, Atari sent about 14 truckloads of unsold video game cartridges to a landfill in a Lomagordo, New Mexico, ran a steamroller over them. and poured concrete on top. Most of them were copies of a game based on ET that had been designed in five weeks to make Christmas of 1982 and had sold so badly that the company lost more than $500 million the following year. The burial was a local newspaper story that turned into a legend, and for 30 years people

argued about whether it had ever happened until a documentary crew dug up the landfill in April of 2014 and found the cartridges. That same Christmas, a company called Coleco couldn't make enough of a soft-bodied doll that came with its own birth certificate. And in stores from Pennsylvania to California, adults shoved and punched and trampled each other for a cabbage patch kid. Coleco sold about 3 million of them in 1983 and about 20 million the year after. In April of 1985, Coca-Cola changed its formula for the first time in 99 years. after taste tests on nearly 200,000 people in which the new formula won, and it lasted 79 days. The company got around 400,000 letters and phone calls, most of them angry.

A man in Seattle founded an organization called the Old Cola Drinkers of America, and on the 11th of July, the company brought the old formula back under the name Coca-Cola Classic, and the announcement broke into daytime programming on the networks. At about one in the morning on the 1st of September that year, a camera sled being towed behind a research ship named the Noor sent up a picture of a boiler sitting on the seafloor, 12,500 feet down, about 370 miles southeast of Newfoundland, and the expedition's leader, Robert Ballard, had found the Titanic.

That story ran everywhere. The part that ran nowhere was that the Navy had paid for the camera system and the ship time on the condition that Ballard first survey the wrecks of two nuclear submarines, Thresher and Scorpion, that had been lost in the 60s, and that he'd tell no one. So he'd done the submarines first and had 12 days left over for the Titanic. He didn't say so publicly until the 2000s. In April of 1986, about 30 million people watched a two-hour live special in which Geraldo Rivera opened a sealed vault under the old Lexington Hotel in Chicago

that had once belonged to Al Capone, having promised the possibility of money and bodies and documents, and found dirt and a few empty bottles. It was the highest rated syndicated special in television history. A month later, on the 25th of May, somewhere between 5 and 6 million people held hands in a line that was supposed to run from New York to Long Beach, California, to raise money for for hunger and homelessness, and they called it Hands Across America. The line had gaps across most of the desert and the plains. About $34 million came in, and about $15 million made it past the costs. And Reagan, whose administration the organizers had spent months criticizing,

joined the line on the White House lawn. That September, the United Way of Cleveland released about a million and a half helium balloons at once from a netted structure in the city's public square. to break a world record and raise money, and a storm front pushed the balloons back down over Lake Erie, where the Coast Guard was searching for two fishermen whose boat had been found empty the day before. The Coast Guard said the search was hampered by balloons covering the water,

and both men's bodies washed up later, and one widow sued the United Way and settled. The runway at the Lakefront Airport had to be closed, and a horse breeder in Ohio sued over injuries to her animals, and nobody in Cleveland has tried it since. In January of 1987, the Pennsylvania State Treasurer, R. Bud Dwyer, called a press conference in Harrisburg, a month after a federal jury had convicted him of taking a bribe on a state contract, and the day before he was to be sentenced to as much as 55 years. He read a statement maintaining his innocence,

handed envelopes to his staff, took a revolver out of a Manila envelope, and shot himself in front of the cameras, and several Pennsylvania stations aired it. He was still in office when he died, which meant his widow received his full pension. In 2010, the man whose testimony had convicted him said in a documentary that he'd lied about the bribe to get a lighter sentence for himself. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Two months after Dwyer, a barge called the Mowbrough 4,000 left Islip, New York, with 3,168 tons of garbage aboard, bound for a landfill in North Carolina that had,

had agreed to take it, and North Carolina changed its mind, and so did Louisiana and Mexico, and Belize, and the Bahamas. The barge spent about five months and six thousand miles being turned away and came back to sit at anchor off Brooklyn while the lawyers argued, and the garbage was finally burned in a Brooklyn incinerator that September, and the ash buried in Islep. Curbside recycling programs multiplied across the country in the two years after, and a lot of the people who ran them credit the barge. That October, an 18-month-old girl named Jessica McClure fell 22 feet down an abandoned well casing eight inches across in the backyard of her aunt's home daycare in Midland, Texas. And rescuers drilled a parallel shaft through rock and reached her 58

hours later while CNN, which was seven years old, carried the whole thing live. When she came out, the paramedic who'd worked the shaft carried her past the cameras wrapped in gauze, and Reagan, said that everybody in America had become her godparent. In March of 1989, two chemists at the University of Utah, Stanley Paul and Martin Fleischman announced at a press conference that they'd produced nuclear fusion in a jar of heavy water at room temperature with a palladium electrode. It ran on the front page of every newspaper in the country, and laboratories all over the world tried to reproduce it. And by the end of the year, the American Physical Society and a Department of Energy Panel had both come to the world.

included there was nothing there. Utah had already committed $5 million to a Cold Fusion Institute. And in July of 1988 at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta, a 41-year-old governor of Arkansas named Bill Clinton gave the speech nominating Michael Dukakis, went 33 minutes, and drew the loudest applause of the night when he said the words in closing. Johnny Carson had him on the show the following week to make fun of it, and four years later, he was president. On the 3rd of November, 1986, a magazine in Beirut called Ash Shirah reported that the United States had been secretly selling missiles to Iran. A country the United States had under an arms embargo had labeled a state sponsor of terrorism and had spent two years asking its allies not to arm. Ten days later, Reagan went on television and said the country did not, and he repeated the word,

did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages. On the 25th of November, Attorney General Edwin Meese stood in the White House briefing room and announced that money from the Iranian arms sales had been diverted to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, which Congress had prohibited by law. A Marine Lieutenant Colonel on the National Security Council staff named Oliver North was fired that day, and the National Security Advisor, John Poindexter, resigned, and over the four days before Mesa's announcement, North and his secretary Fawn Hall had run so many documents through the office shredder that it jammed, and Hall had carried others out of the building

inside her boots and her clothes. The following March, Reagan went back on television and said that a few months earlier he told the American people he did not trade arms for hostages, that his heart and his best intentions still told him. That was true, but that the facts and the evidence told him it was not. The joint congressional hearings ran through the summer of 1987. North testified in uniform for six days in July and came out of it a folk hero to a sizable part of the country. And Hall told the committee that sometimes you have to go above the written law. On the 13th of July, a Texas congressman named Jack Brooks asked North about a report that he'd worked on a plan

to suspend the Constitution in a national emergency. And the committee chairman, Senator Daniel Enollier, cut him off and said, the question touched on a highly sensitive and classified area, and that if it was to be pursued, it would be pursued in closed session, and it was never answered in public. The Independent Council, Lawrence Walsh, spent six years on the case

and charged 14 people and convicted 11, including North and Poindexter, whose convictions were thrown out on appeal because their immunized congressional testimony had contaminated the trials. On Christmas Eve of 1992, President Bush pardoned six of the others, including the former Secretary of Defense, 12 days before his trial was to start.

Donald Reagan, who'd run the White House through Reagan's second term until he was pushed out over Iran-Contra, published a book in May of 1988 in which he wrote that virtually every major move and decision the Reagan's made during his time as chief of staff had been cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes. The woman was an astrologer named Joan Quigley. whom Nancy Reagan had started consulting after the 1981 shooting on the introduction of the talk show host Merv Griffin and paid a monthly fee. Reagan wrote that he'd kept a color-coded calendar at his desk, green for good days, red for bad,

yellow for iffy, based on what Quigley sent, and that the president's travel and press conferences and surgery and the announcement of the Geneva Summit had all been moved around to fit it. The White House confirmed that Mrs. Reagan consulted in a... astrologer and said no policy decision had ever been influenced by it. Quigley published her own book in 1990 and claimed considerably more. On the 3rd of July 1988, the guided missile cruiser USS Vincen, operating in the Persian Gulf during the tanker war, shot down an Iran-Air Air Airbus on a scheduled flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai, and 290 people died, 66 of them children. The next day the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crow,

told reporters the aircraft had been descending toward the ship at high speed outside the commercial air corridor, squawking a military identification code. The Navy's own investigation released the following month, found the aircraft had been climbing inside the commercial corridor, transmitting a civilian code, and that the crew in the ship's combat information center had misread their own displays under stress. The ship's captain got a Legion of Merit in 1990 for his tour. In 1992, Crow acknowledged on television that the Vincen had been inside Iranian territorial waters when it fired, and in 1996, the United States paid the family's $61.8 million without admitting liability. In April of 1989, an explosion

in the number two gun turret of the battleship USS Iowa during a gunnery exercise off Puerto Rico, killed 47 sailors, and that September the Navy released an investigation concluding that the blast had most likely been set deliberately by a gunner's mate named Clayton Hartwig, who died in it. The report and the leaks around it described Hartwig as a suicidal loner and suggested a failed relationship with another sailor, and his family objected, and the Senate Armed Services Committee asked Sandia National Laboratories to look at the Navy's technical work. Sandia showed in 1990 that ramming the powder bags into the gun too fast and too far could set them off without any device at all,

and that the chemical residue the Navy had called evidence of a detonator was consistent with seawater and cleaning fluid. The Navy reopened the case, and in October of 1991, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Frank Kelso, apologized to the Hartwig family and said there was no clear and convincing proof of what had caused the explosion. The Navy's official cause is undetermined, and the fall of 1983 stayed in the drawer, too.

The public learned about the airliner the day it was shot down. It learned about Petrov 15 years later, and about the Able Archer Alert, in the government's own assessment of it, 32 years later. Every decade in this series has had a drawer like that, and I went in, expecting this ones to be lighter than the 70s, and it wasn't.

Now the actual death toll, which never once made the front of the photograph. Heart disease killed around 760,000 Americans in 1980 and around 730,000 in 1989. In a country that had grown by 20 million people in between, so the rate was falling and nobody threw a parade for it. Cancer killed a little over 400,000 a year at the start and a little under 500,000 at the end, and cigarettes were behind a large share of both. About a third of American adults smoked in 1980 and about a quarter did in 1990. The Surgeon General C. Everett Coop put out a report in 1986, concluding that breathing other people's smoke caused lung cancer in non-smokers. And another in 1988 concluding that nicotine was addictive in the same sense as heroin and cocaine.

And in April of 1988, smoking was banned on domestic flights of two hours or less, and the airlines fought it. cars killed about 51,000 people in 1980 and about 45,000 in 1989, and about half of the first number involved alcohol. On the 3rd of May, 1980, a 13-year-old named Carrie Lightner was walking to a church carnival in Fair Oaks, California, when she was hit from behind and killed by a driver who had three prior drunk driving convictions and had been released on bail two days earlier from a hit and run. and her mother, Candace Lightner, founded mothers against drunk driving that year. In July of 1984, Reagan signed a law that took 10% of a state's highway money away

unless it raised its drinking age to 21. And by the summer of 1988, every state had done it. New York passed the country's first mandatory seatbelt law, effective the 1st of December, 1984. And most states had followed within three years. The federal estimate of alcohol-related traffic deaths fell from about 26,000 in 1982 to about 22,000 in 1989. Guns killed a little over 33,000 people a year at both ends of the decade, about half of them suicides, and homicides ran around 23,000 in 1980, dipped below 20,000 in the middle of the decade, and were climbing again by the end.

The mass shooting as a category of American news took its modern shape. during those 10 years. In July of 1984, an unemployed security guard named James Huberti walked into a McDonald's in San Ysidro, California, and killed 21 people and wounded 19 over 77 minutes before a police sniper on a neighboring roof shot him, and it was the deadliest shooting by a single gunman in the country's history at that time. In August of 1986, a part-time letter carrier named Patrick Sherrill shot 14 co-workers to death at the post office in Edmond, Oklahoma, and the phrase-going postal entered the language.

In January of 1989, a drifter named Patrick Purdy fired more than 100 rounds from a semi-automatic rifle into a schoolyard in Stockton, California, and killed five children between the ages of six and nine, and California passed the country's first assault weapons ban, four months later. Cocaine had been a rich man's drug in the 70s, and was a corner drug by 1985, and the government's answer came out of a basketball player's death. Two days after the Boston Celtics made him the second pick in the NBA draft in June of 1986, a 22-year-old University of Maryland forward named Lynn Bias died of cocaine intoxication in his dormitory.

And four months later, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which created mandatory minimum sentences and set the amount of crack cocaine that triggered a five-year term at five grams, against 500 grams of the powder form. The state and federal prison population, which had been about 320,000 in 1980, was nearly 700,000 by 1989, and that law is a large part of why. A virus that didn't have a name in 1980

had killed about 89,000 Americans by the end of 1989, according to the Centers for Disease Control. I gave that one its own episode, and suicide took somewhere between 20, and 30,000 people a year, every year of the decade, which means the kids on the milk cartons and the teenagers and the Dungeons and Dragons panic were a rounding error against what was actually taking young lives, and nobody put a hotline number on a carton of milk.

On the 1st of January 1983, the Defense Department's Research Network switched over to a set of rules for moving data between computers called TCPIP, and the engineers who ran it called the data, flag day, and that's the birthday most of them give for the internet. In March of 1985, a computer company in Massachusetts registered the first dot-com domain name. In November of 1988, a 22-year-old Cornell graduate student named Robert Tappan Morris, whose father was the chief scientist at the National Security Agency's Computer Security Center, released a program onto that network to see how big it was, and a bug in the program made it copy itself faster than he'd intended,

and it took down about 6,000 of the 60,000 computers connected at the time. He became the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and got three years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050. In March of 1989, a British physicist at a laboratory in Geneva named Tim Berners-Lee handed his supervisor a proposal for a system of linked documents that could be read across that network, and his supervisor wrote on the cover that it was vague but exciting. In August of 1987, the Federal Communications Commission voted four to nothing to abolish the Fairness Doctrine, which since 1949 had required broadcast stations to present contrasting views on public issues. And it did so two months after Congress had voted to write the

doctrine into law, and Reagan had vetoed the bill. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. A year later on the 1st of August, 1988, a radio host in Sacramento named Rush Limbaugh went national out of New York, and everything that followed on the AM dial follows from those two dates. In May of 1985, three scientists with the British Antarctic Survey published a paper in the journal Nature, reporting that the ozone layer over their station had thinned by about a third every spring since the late 70s, and it turned out American satellites had been recording the same thing for years, while the software flagged the readings as errors. Two dozen countries signed a treaty in Montreal in September of 1987 to phase out

the chemicals responsible, and it worked. The following June, on a day when it was 98 degrees in Washington, a NASA scientist named James Hansen told a Senate committee that he was 99% certain the planet was warming and that the greenhouse effect had been detected and was changing the climate now. And the senator who'd called the hearing said years later that he'd scheduled it for the hottest week of the summer on purpose. The Food and Drug Administration approved fluoxetine, sold as Prozac, at the end of December in 1987. The movie industry created the PG-13 rating in July of 1984, after parents complained about a heart being pulled out of a man's chest and a film rated PG, and the first film released under it was Red Dawn.

And James Brady, the press secretary who took a bullet to the head outside the Washington Hilton in 1981 and never walked unaided again, gave his name to a bill requiring background checks on handgun purchases that was introduced in 1987 and became law in 1993. At four minutes past five in the afternoon on the 17th of October, 1989, the third game of the World Series was about to start at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, with the Giants playing the Oakland A's from across the bay, when a magnitude 6.9 earthquake hit the region. Al Michaels was calling that broadcast, too, and he got out the words, I'll tell you what, were having an earth before ABC lost the feed.

63 people died, and 42 of them were on a mile and a quarter of double-decked freeway in Oakland, called the Cypress Street Viaduct, where the upper deck came down onto the lower one during an evening commute that was lighter than usual, because so many people had gone home early to watch the game. The Bay Bridge lost a 50-foot section of its upper deck, and firefighters in the Marina District fought the fires with water pumped from the bay by a fireboat because the mains had broken. Three weeks later, the wall came down in Berlin. Six weeks after that, on the 20th of December, 27,000 American troops went into Panama. to arrest its head of state.

And when he took refuge in the Vatican's embassy, the army parked loudspeakers outside and played rock music at the building around the clock, until he came out on the 3rd of January. In three days before the invasion, the first half-hour episode of The Simpsons aired on the Fox Network, which was three years old. So the Berlin Wall and a fugitive dictator and Bart Simpson

closed out the decade in the same news cycle. And I don't think anybody could have arranged that on purpose. What we remember. Reagan on the west front and Reagan in Red Square. Lake Placid. The Macintosh. And the Dinatack. MTV at one minute past midnight.

Thriller. E.T. Going Home. Live Aid. And an Olympics that turned a profit. Gorbachev. The gate at Born Homer Street. What we forgot. A walkway in Kansas City and a drawing change that doubled the load.

A bank examiner from Atlanta handing off a rope in the Potomac. And a metro train. that killed three people the same afternoon. A farmer in Hills, Iowa. A barge with nowhere to go. A million and a half balloons over Lake Erie and two fishermen under them. A state treasurer in Harrisburg. A woman in Auburn, Washington, who killed a stranger so her husband's death would look

random. A Soviet lieutenant colonel who decided five missiles were a glitch. What we feared. The bomb, which for 11 weeks in 1983, deserved it. A stranger in the parking lot. who took two to 300 children a year against the 50,000 on the posters. A preschool with no tunnels. A record album with a warning sticker.

A game with a 20-sided die. A satanic network the FBI couldn't find. What was actually killing us? Hearts. Cigarettes. Cars and beer. Though less of that by the end. Guns.

Half of them turned on their owners. Cocaine in two forms, the law priced 100 to 1. A virus that had no need. name when the decade began, and 30,000 suicides a year, none of them on a milk carton. What the government wasn't telling us, that it was selling missiles to Iran and sending the money to Nicaragua, that the president's schedule ran on a horoscope out of San Francisco, that the airliner was climbing, that the battleships gunner's mate had done nothing anybody could prove, that the O-rings had been burning since 1981, that the Soviets had gone on alert

over a drill and the world had come closer than anyone was told. What it handed forward. Two trillion dollars of new debt. A network of 60,000 computers and a proposal on a desk in Geneva. A telephone with no cord. Talk radio with no fairness rule. A sentencing law and 700,000 people in prison. A treaty about the sky that worked.

And a warning about the sky that didn't get one. A gate in Berlin with nobody guarding it. and a class of high school kids a federal commission had described as the equivalent of an act of war. The American born in 1940, the one we followed since the first episode of this series, turned 40 in the first year of this decade. He'd been the kid the 50s worried about, and the college student who told the 60s not to trust anyone over 30, and the 30-something the 70s couldn't figure out, and in the 80s, he was the parent. His kids were the ones on the other side of the milk carton, in the archival.

with a roll of quarters, in the basement with the dice and the graph paper, in the front row at the Twisted Sister Show with the sticker on the album. He was the one reading a nation at risk at the kitchen table and wondering what had gone wrong with them, and he was 50 a few months after the wall came down. And the kids he was worried about, the ones that Federal Commission called a rising tide of mediocrity, are in their 50s and 60s now.

They're the ones on the school boards. They're the ones with the phones in their hands, worrying about the phones in their own kids' hands, telling anybody who will listen that things were different when they were young, that people went outside, that nobody was afraid of the wrong things back then. I was one of those kids, and I catch myself doing it too. The generation everyone complained about grew up and started complaining about its own children. That's four decades in a row now, and I don't expect the fifth one to break the streak.