Disturbing History - The 1990's

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

On July 16, 1990, Time magazine put a group of young adults on its cover beneath the word “twentysomething” and asked whether they were laid back, late blooming, or simply lost. The story said they struggled to make decisions, would rather hike the Himalayas than climb the corporate ladder, and had no anthems, no heroes, and an attention span as short as one click of the remote. Those young adults were the same kids who had been labeled “at risk” in the 1980s. Now they were entering adulthood under a new set of warnings. This is the fifth episode in the Disturbing History series on the American decades, and this time Brian looks back at the 1990s, the decade he grew up in.The story begins just before the decade officially started, on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. From there, the episode follows the same path as the rest of the series: beginning with the version of the decade America remembers, then digging into the stories it often forgot. And there was plenty to celebrate. Unemployment fell from 7.8 percent in 1992 to 4 percent by the end of 1999. The Dow climbed from 2,753 to 11,497. The federal government recorded its first budget surplus since 1969. Homicides dropped dramatically. Teen birth rates declined. Juvenile murder arrests fell by roughly two-thirds.And the generation supposedly unable to make decisions helped build the internet. Then the story moves beneath the surface. Brian examines the 1990s panic over so-called juvenile “super-predators,” a prediction that helped reshape laws across the country even as youth violence was already falling. He follows that fear into a string of school shootings in Pearl, West Paducah, Jonesboro, and Springfield before arriving at Columbine on April 20, 1999.The episode looks at the propane bombs that were intended to be the real centerpiece of the Columbine attack, the music and video games blamed afterward, and a search warrant affidavit drafted against one of the shooters more than a year earlier that was never presented to a judge. The decade’s fear of the internet gets similar treatment.A 1995 Time cover story warning about cyberporn relied heavily on a flawed undergraduate study. The panic helped fuel the Communications Decency Act. Most of that law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1997, but 26 words survived and became Section 230.Brian also follows the internet boom itself, from Netscape’s 1995 IPO to the rise of Amazon, eBay, Google, and Napster. Then comes the money underneath it all: the 1998 collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, the emergency meetings in New York, and the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall.From there, the episode turns to what the government was not saying.In March 1991, U.S. forces demolished an Iraqi nerve agent depot at Khamisiyah. Nearly 100,000 American troops may have been downwind. The Pentagon denied the exposure for years.In Albuquerque, reporter Eileen Welsome uncovered the story of people secretly injected with plutonium during the early Cold War. Once government files were opened, investigators found thousands of radiation experiments, including radioactive oatmeal fed to schoolboys and radioactive iron given to pregnant women.President Bill Clinton formally apologized in 1995.Then there was Waco. Federal authorities denied for years that incendiary tear gas rounds had been used during the final assault on April 19, 1993. That admission did not come until 1999.And in December 1995, the FDA approved a new painkiller called OxyContin with language on its label that would later become central to one of the largest pharmaceutical scandals in American history.The episode also revisits the seven tobacco executives who raised their hands before Congress in 1994 and denied that nicotine was addictive, followed by the $206 billion tobacco settlement four years later.It covers the deadly Chicago heat wave of 1995, when hundreds died in a single week. It examines the mislabeled oxygen generators that contributed to the crash of ValuJet Flight 592 in the Everglades in 1996.Brian also looks at the West Memphis Three, the Y2K panic, the satellites that really did experience problems at midnight, and the customs inspector in Port Angeles, Washington, who stopped a rental car in December 1999 and discovered explosives intended for Los Angeles International Airport.The decade ends where it began: with Time magazine judging a new generation.On May 20, 2013, the magazine ran another cover story asking what was wrong with young adults.This time, one of the people doing the judging belonged to the very generation Time had questioned back in 1990.Different decade. Different generation.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. A little before seven on the evening of the 9th of November, 1989, a member of the East German Politburo named Gunther

Shabowski sat down in front of the cameras in East Berlin to close out a long and mostly boring press conference. And near the end of it, he pulled out a sheet of paper somebody had handed him on the way in and started reading it aloud without having read it first. It said that East Germans would be allowed to travel abroad. A reporter asked him when that took effect, and Shabowski looked down at the paper, looked up, and said as far as he knew, immediately, without delay. He was wrong about that, and the guards at the checkpoints hadn't been told anything. But by 9 o'clock, there were thousands of people standing in the cold at the Bornholmer Strasser crossing,

chanting to be let through. And the lieutenant colonel in charge there, a man named Harold Yeager, spent two hours on the phone with superiors who wouldn't give him an order until he finally gave one himself. and raised the barrier. By midnight, there were people on top of the wall with hammers, and the guards who'd been ordered for 28 years to shoot anyone who touched it, stood there and watched them do it. Within a year, there was one German. Within two, the country that had been the reason for every bomb shelter and every duck-and-cover drill in the first three episodes of this series, voted itself out of existence. And the red flag came down off the Kremlin on Christmas

night of 1991 with no ceremony to speak of and nobody firing a shot. The American we've been following since the 50s episode, the one born in 1940, had just turned 50 when the wall came down. He'd spent every year of his adult life under the assumption everybody else had, which was that the country on the other side of the world would still be there tomorrow. And then, one winner, it simply wasn't. And the decade that was opening in front of him was going to hand him the best economic run of his lifetime. A budget surplus for the first time since he was 29. A stock market four times the size of the one he knew. A machine on his desk that could reach a stranger in Australia for the cost of a local call. And a generation of young people he was going to decide before the decade was a

year old, couldn't be trusted with any of it. He got help with that decision from Time magazine, which in the middle of July 1990 put a group of sullen young adults on its cover under the world, 20-something, and a line asking whether they were laid back, late blooming, or just lost. The two reporters who wrote the story, David Gross and Sophronia Scott, packed the whole indictment into a single paragraph, and it's worth hearing the way they built it. They have trouble making decisions, the story said. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder. They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own. They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial.

They postpone marriage because they dread divorce. Every episode in this series has started with somebody saying a version of that about somebody else's children. The 50s opened with the line about the young being tyrants who contradict their parents, which people still hand around as Socrates and which no ancient writer ever wrote. The 60s opened with a graduate student in Berkeley telling a reporter not to trust anybody over 30. And the 70s opened with a president calling college students bombs. And the 80s opened with a federal commission announcing that the nation was at risk because of what its schools were sending out into the world. So it's the 90s now. And the kids who were at risk in 1983 have turned into the

20-somethings who can't pick a lunch. And the man who was complaining about them across the dinner table in the last episode is the one reading the magazine. That generation is mine. I was in high school the summer that cover came out, which put me a few years short of the people it was describing and squarely in line to be the next batch. And if you were anywhere between 10 and 30 in 1990, this episode is about you too. It's about the country you grew up in, while the people who'd been the kids in the last four episodes settled into the job of worrying about you. And about how much of what they were worried about turned out to be real, and how much of what was real they never noticed. Some of it involves the deaths of children, and I'll say that here so nobody's caught off

guard later. I'll start with the good news, because there was more of it in the 90s than in any decade we've done so far, and most of it comes with a number attached. The decade actually opened in a recession, a mild one on paper that ran from the summer of 1990 into the spring of 1991, but the recovery that followed it was so slow to produce work that economists had to invent a phrase for it, and the phrase was jobless. Unemployment kept climbing for a full year after the recession was officially over and peaked at 7.8% in June of 1992, which is the number that put the words, it's the economy stupid, on a whiteboard in a campaign office in Little Rock, and the number that finished off a president who'd had a 90% approval rating 15 months earlier when the Gulf War ended.

After that, it ran the other way for eight straight years, and it never stopped. By the end of 1999, unemployment had fallen to 4%. Inflation, which had eaten the 70s alive and had to be beaten in the early 80s with the worst recession since the Depression, sat quietly between 2 and 3 percent for the entire second half of the decade, until people forgot it had ever been a problem. The economy grew every single quarter from the spring of 1991 to the end of the decade, which was the longest expansion the government had ever measured. A gallon of gas at the end of 1998 cost a little over a dollar, and in real terms, that was the cheapest gasoline anybody had ever bought in the United States.

The minimum wage went from 380 to 515, and the Census Bureau reported that real median household income in 1999 was the highest it had ever recorded. The stock market is where it gets glossy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished 90s, 1989 at 2,753, crossed 10,000 for the first time at the end of March 1999 and closed out the decade at 11,497, which is better than quadrupled. A man who put $10,000 into a dull index fund in January of 1990 and forgot about it was sitting on something north of 40,000 by December of

1999 without having done one intelligent thing in between. Then there's the line our man born in 1940 had never seen in his adult life. In the fiscal year that ended in September of 1998, the federal government took in $69 billion more than it spent. The first surplus since 1969, when he was 29 and the country was landing on the moon. The next year, the surplus was $126 billion, and the year after that, it was $236. And the Congressional Budget Office was putting out serious projections that the national debt would be paid off entirely somewhere around 2012. And people at the Treasury were writing papers about what the bond market would do when there weren't any treasury bonds left to buy. The wars were short. Iraq rolled into Kuwait at the start

of August 1990. The air campaign started in the middle of January, 1991. And for the first time in history, Americans watched a war begin live on cable news, with reporters describing the flashes over Baghdad from a hotel window. The ground war lasted 100 hours. 293 Americans died in the whole thing, 148 of them in combat, and 35 of those 148 were killed by other Americans. Crime is in the good news too,

and it's the item that would have stunned the man from 1940 if you'd told him in 1991 what was coming, because 1991 was the worst year the country had ever counted. 24,700 homicides, more than ever before, and a violent crime rate of 758 per 100,000, also more than ever before. By 1999, the homicide count was down to 15,500, and the rate was down to 523, which works out to 9,000 fewer people murdered in a single year than at the start of the decade. New York City went from more than 2,200 murders in 1990 to 671 in 1999. Nobody predicted it, and there are still a dozen theories about why it happened, and every one of them comes with a professor attached.

And the part of the good news that the time cover would have found hardest to swallow is that the kids were fine. The birth rate for teenage girls, which had been climbing through the late 80s, peaked in 1991 and fell 20% by the end of the decade. The juvenile arrest rate for murder peaked in 1993 and then dropped by roughly two-thirds. The 20-somethings who couldn't make decisions went out and built the internet. And by 1999, the ones who'd been hiking in the Himalayas in 1990 were running companies with billion-dollar valuations and no revenue, which is a different kind of problem than one I'll get to. So that's what the decade looked like from the porch.

The rest of this episode is about what was going on inside the house. and the first thing inside the house is a prophecy. In November of 1995, a Princeton political scientist named John Deulio published an essay in the Weekly Standard under a title that did most of the work by itself, The Coming of the Super Predators. His argument was that American cities were producing a new kind of juvenile criminal, radically impulsive and brutally remorseless in his phrase, a child who would kill without a second thought and feel nothing afterward,

and that a demographic wave of these children was about to break over the country. The arithmetic went like this. The number of boys between 14 and 17 was going to grow by half a million by the year 2000. A fixed share of any group of boys turns violent, and therefore the country should brace for what he put a number on in a book he co-wrote the following year. 270,000 more juvenile predators on the streets by 2010. He wasn't some crank with a newsletter. His co-author on that book was William Bennett, who'd been Secretary of Education under Reagan

and Drug Tsar under Bush, and a criminologist at Northeastern named James Allen Fox was making the same forecast in the same years and reaching for the word bloodbath, warning that the country was living through the lull before the crime storm. Both men testified before Congress. The phrase worked its way into a state-of-the-union address and into a presidential campaign and into the mouths of prosecutors and state legislators in every part of the country. And between 1992 and 1997, 47 states rewrote their laws to make it easier to try children as adults. And it's hard to find one of those debates that didn't have the word super predator in it somewhere. The prophecy was sitting on top of something real.

Juvenile homicide arrests really had doubled between 1985 and 1993. And there were real 14-year-olds carrying real hands. guns in real cities while the crack trade was at its worst. De Yulio was extrapolating from a genuine problem rather than inventing one. He was just extrapolating in the wrong direction, and he'd been wrong since before the essay came out. Juvenile arrests for murder had peaked in 1993, two years before anybody read the word super predator, and they fell in 1994 and again in 1995, and they kept falling every year for the rest of the decade until by 1999, the rate was down by about two-thirds. The half-million extra teenage boys showed up right on schedule, and the 270,000 super

predators never did. The generation that was supposed to be the most violent in American history turned out to be the one that lived through the biggest drop in youth violence anybody had ever measured. De Ulios said as much himself. He told the New York Times in February of 2001 that if he'd known then what he knew now, he would have shouted for prevention of crimes instead of prisons. And he spent a good part of the next decade trying to take the word back. And in 2012, he put his name on a brief to the Supreme Court in a case about life sentences for juveniles that said, in plain language, that the super predator prediction had been a mistake. The laws that prediction had produced were still on the books when he signed it. Kids who'd been

tried as adults under them in 1996 were still in prison, while the man who'd coined the term was telling the Supreme Court he'd gotten it wrong. Every decade in this series has been sure its children were worse than the last, and the 90s is the one where somebody put a number on that feeling, wrote it into law in 47 states, and then watched the number fail in front of everybody. There was one place, though, where the fear about kids and guns seemed to come true, and it didn't happen in the cities Diulio was writing about. It happened in small towns and suburbs, and the country explained it wrong for the better part of a decade. It started in Pearl, Mississippi, in October of 1997,

when a 16-year-old killed his mother at home, and then drove to his high school and shot nine students, two of whom died. Two months later, in West Paducah, Kentucky, a 14-year-old walked up to a prayer circle in the lobby of Heath High School before first period and opened fire on it and killed three girls. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The next March, in Jonesboro, Arkansas, two boys aged 13 and 11,

pulled a fire alarm at Westside Middle School, ran to a wooded hillside about 100 yards away, and shot at the students filing out of the building, killing four girls and a teacher named Shannon Wright who'd stepped in front of one of her students. And two months after that, in Springfield, Oregon, a 15-year-old shot both his parents at home and then walked into the cafeteria at Thurston High School and killed two students. That's four school shootings in eight months in four states. None of them in a city, none of them fitting the profile the super predator literature had drawn, and none of the shooters old enough to drive. The Jonesboro boys were released at 21 because Arkansas

law at the time had no way to hold a child that young any longer, and the 11-year-old walked out in 2007. Columbine came 11 months after Springfield on the 20th of April 1999 when two seniors at a high school in Littleton, Colorado, killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 others before they shot themselves in the school library. The country watched it live, students climbing out of windows with their hands on their heads and a wounded boy being pulled from a second story window by police. And by that evening, the explanation had already been put together out of whatever was lying around. What was lying around was the two shooters black trench coats, which got tied to a group of students who'd called themselves the trench coat mafia, and the video game Doom, which one of

the two had built custom levels for, and the musician Marilyn Manson, whose name was on television within hours and who canceled the rest of his tour, and the movie The Matrix, which had opened three weeks earlier. And above all, bullying, which became the master story, the one about two outcasts who'd been pushed until they pushed back. What the records actually showed took years to surface, and the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office fought a good deal of it. The two had been planning for more than a year, and what they'd planned wasn't a shooting at all. They'd carried two propane bombs and duffel bags into the cafeteria and set the timers for the peak of the lunch rush when more than 400 students were in the room. And the bombs failed.

And the shooting was what they did when the bombs didn't go off. One of them had kept a journal for a year that read as a plan to kill as many people as he possibly could, and it named nobody who'd ever bullied him. Neither boy was a member of the Trenchcoat Mafia. A reporter named Dave Cullen spent 10 years on the case and found that most of the outcast story had been assembled in the first 48 hours by people who'd never met either of them. The piece I'd put on top of the file, if it were my file, is older than the shooting by more than a year. In March of 1998,

a family named Brown had gone to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office with printouts from a website one of the shooters had built, a site that talked about the pipe bombs he'd made and about wanting to kill people and that named the Brown's son specifically, and a deputy drafted an affidavit for a search warrant on the boy's home. It never went in front of a judge. Nobody searched the house, where by then there were pipe bombs,

and the department didn't disclose that the draft affidavit existed until years after the shooting, and it eventually took a grand jury to sort out who'd known what and when. None of that fit the story the country told itself in April of 1999, which was that a video game and a rock singer had gotten into two boys and turned them into something. So the generation that had grown up being told it had no anthems, and no attention span, now had a video game blamed for a massacre, and the hearings started up again. They'd been through it once already. In December of 1993, Senators Joseph Lieberman and Herb Cole held a hearing in Washington on violence and video games, and the two games on the table

were Mortal Kombat, where a fighter could reach into his opponent's chest and pull out the still beating heart, and a Sega title called Night Trap, a full-motion video game in which the player was supposed to protect a house full of teenage girls from intruders. The senators played a clip of a girl being attacked in a bathroom as though the player were the one attacking her, which was the exact opposite of how the game worked. And Lieberman said these things were teaching children to enjoy inflicting torture, and the industry was handed a deadline. By September of 1994, it had built the entertainment software rating board and the letter ratings that are still printed on every box. Congress had done the same thing with comic books in 1950s.

and with rock lyrics in 1985, and the 90s version had the same shape as both. A technology the parents didn't use, a product the kids loved, and a hearing where a senator holds up the worst example he could find. What made the 90s different was that the technology in question was about to become everything, and the panic about it produced a law that shaped the next 30 years. The magazine that had started the decade by calling my generation lost put a wide-eyed child at a keyboard on its cover in the first week of July, 1995, under a single word, cyberporn. The article inside reported that a Carnegie Mellon study had examined nearly a million images on computer networks and found that 83.5% of the pictures stored on Usenet news groups

were pornographic. The author of the study was an undergraduate named Marty Rimm. Senator Charles Grassley read the article into the congressional record and Senator James Exen of Nebraska, who'd already been carrying a bill to regulate indecency online and had been walking the Senate floor with a blue binder full of printouts he'd ask a friend to download for him, now had a time cover to go with the binder. The study fell apart in about three weeks. Two marketing professors at Vanderbilt, Donna Hoffman and Tom Novak, took it apart line by line and showed that the 83% figure had come from a sample of adult bulletin boards that existed for the sole purpose of selling pornography, which is a bit like measuring how much of a city is pornographic by only counting the

shelves in the adult bookstore. Across Usenet as a whole, the real figure was under 1%. Rimm's methods couldn't be reproduced. He'd refused to hand over his data, and time ran a follow-up at the end of July, acknowledging that the study had serious flaws, and Carnegie Mellon quietly backed away from him. The bill passed anyway, and the Communications Decency Act became law in February of 1996. as part of the Big Telecommunications Act, making it a federal crime to transmit indecent material online anywhere a minor might see it. The Supreme Court struck those provisions down in June of 1997 without a single dissenting vote, in an opinion by Justice Stevens that treated the internet

as deserving the same protection as a newspaper. One piece of the law survived that ruling because nobody had bothered to challenge it. Two congressmen, Chris Cox of California, and Ron Wyden of Oregon had attached 26 words to the bill, saying that a provider of an interactive computer service couldn't be treated as the publisher of anything its users posted. That's Section 230, and it was written to encourage the young online services to clean up their bulletin boards without getting sued over whatever they missed. And it was written in 1996,

when the biggest online service in the country was America Online, and there were something like 100,000 websites in the entire world. Every social media company in existence today is standing on those 26 words, and they got attached to a bill that passed on the strength of a magazine cover built on an undergraduate's broken study. Now the machine itself, because the version everybody keeps says the internet happened in the 90s, and the version underneath it is stranger. In January of 1990, there were about 5 million Americans with a cell phone,

and the phone was the size of a brick and came in a bag with a shoulder strap. By the end of 2000, there were 109 million. In 1990, the personal computer in a typical house, if there was one, wasn't connected to anything. And the handful of people who dialed into a bulletin board did it at 2,400 bits per second with a modem that screamed at them through a speaker. By 1999, 40% of American households were online, most of them through America online. and that modem handshake is a sound every person my age can still hear on demand, along with the voice that told you that you had mail. The company that made the whole thing visible to ordinary people

went public on the 9th of August 1995, and it had been in business for 16 months, had never turned to profit, and was giving its only product away for free. Netscape's browser was the way most people got onto the web. The bankers priced the stock at $28 a share the night before, and it opened at 71 because there weren't enough shares to cover the orders. And it closed the day at 58 and a quarter.

And the company's chief engineer, Mark Andresen, who was 24 years old and had written the first version of that browser as an undergraduate in Illinois, was worth about $58 million by dinner time. That day is the one the industry marks as the beginning of the dot-com era. And what followed it has a shape anybody can check. A man named Jeff Bezos quit a hedge fund in New York. York in 1994, drove to Seattle, and started selling books out of a garage under a name he'd picked partly because it started with A. And Amazon went public in May of 1997 at $18 a share and lost money

every year of the decade. A software engineer named Pierre Omidyar wrote an auction site over the Labor Day weekend of 1995. And the famous story that he built it so his fiance could trade pez dispensers was made up by a public relations manager two years later. because reporters kept asking for a founding legend, and the real one was boring. Two Stanford graduate students incorporated a search engine called Google in September of 1998 in a rented garage in Menlo Park. And in June of 1999, a 19-year-old named Sean Fanning released a program called Napster that let anybody share any song with anybody else in the world.

And inside a year, it had tens of millions of users and the entire recorded music industry was in court trying to kill it. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, gave a dinner speech in December of 1996 and wondered aloud how anybody could know when irrational exuberance had unduly escalated asset values, and markets in Tokyo fell on the phrase overnight. The Dow was at about 6,400 when he said it.

It nearly doubled again over the next three years, and the standing joke on Wall Street by the end of the decade was that Greenspan had been right about the exuberance and wrong about the timing by about 40 months. The NASDAQ, where the internet companies lived, closed at 5,048 on the 10th of March 2000, and that turned out to be the top. Now the money. And the money is the place where the good news and the bad news were being printed on the same page at the same time. In 1994, a bond trader named John Meriwether who had been pushed out of Solomon Brothers after a treasurer,

bidding scandal started a hedge fund in Greenwich, Connecticut, called Long-Term Capital Management, and he staffed it with the smartest people money could find. Two of them, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, would share the Nobel Prize in economics in 1997 for the mathematics of pricing options. A former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve was a partner. The fund's strategy was to find tiny price differences between nearly identical securities and bet that those differences would clothes. And because the differences were tiny, it that enormous amounts of borrowed money on every one of them, so that by the start of 1998, it had about $4.5 billion of its own capital, about $125 billion in borrowed positions, and derivative contracts with a face value of more than a

trillion dollars. For four years, it made money faster than anybody in the business, better than 40% a year after fees in 1995 and 1996. Then, in the middle of August, 1998, Russia defaulted on its domestic debt and devalued the ruble. And every tiny price difference the fund had bet would close blew wide open at once. The mathematics had assumed those bets moved independently of each other, and in a panic, they all moved together. And in about a month, the fund lost roughly $4.5 billion, which was nearly all of it.

And because it had positions with every major bank on Wall Street, its failure meant to every one of those banks was about to be holding paper it couldn't sell. So on the 23rd of September, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York called the heads of 14 banks into a conference room on Liberty Street and kept them there until they'd agreed to put $3.6 billion into the fund to unwind it slowly rather than all at once. No public money went into it. The Fed supplied the room and the pressure, and Greenspan cut interest rates three times in seven weeks that fall, and the phrase that walked out of that room was, too big to fail. The lesson the industry took home was that if a firm was tangled up with enough other firms, somebody would organize a rescue. The other

lesson came 14 months later. Since 1933, a law called Glass Stegel had kept the banks that hold your deposits separate from the banks that trade for their own account. And in April of 1998, Citicorp and the Travelers Group announced a merger that was flatly illegal under that law. On the the understanding that the law would be changed before the grace period ran out. And it was. President Clinton signed the Graham Leach-Blyley Act in the middle of November 1999, and the wall came down. And Senator Phil Graham said at the signing that the law would make the 21st century the century of American finance. He turned out to be right about that in a way he didn't mean. There's a smaller piece of the money story that belongs here because it belongs to the fever.

By 1999, ordinary people were quitting their jobs to trade stocks from rented desks at day trading firms that advertised the arrangement as a career. And at the end of July that year, a man named Mark Bart, who'd lost about $105,000 in a few weeks at it, killed his wife and his two children at home, and then walked into two day trading offices in the Buckhead section of Atlanta and shot 22 people, nine of whom died, before he shot himself at a gas station a few hours later, when the police cornered him. His note said he'd been a failure and had killed his family to spare them what came next. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. It was the deadliest workplace shooting in Georgia's history, and the industry had happened in

had barely existed three years before. Now what the government wasn't telling us, and the first thing on that list walked straight out of the 100-hour war, in the first two weeks of March 1991 after the ceasefire engineers from the 82nd Airborne and the 37th Engineer Battalion demolished a huge Iraqi ammunition depot at a place called Comacia in southern Iraq, blowing up bunkers and open pits full of rockets and artillery shells. And some of those rockets were filled with sarin and cyclocerin. The demolition put a plume into the air that drifted over American positions for days. The soldiers who set the charges weren't told what they'd blown up and the Units downwind weren't told there was a plume.

Veterans started coming home sick that year and the next, with fatigue and joint pain and memory trouble and rashes and headaches that never resolved. And by the middle of the decade, there were tens of thousands of them. And for five years, the Department of Defense said there was no evidence that any American had been exposed to chemical weapons in the Gulf. Then, in June of 1996, the department announced that it had reviewed the Comacia Demolition, and some troops might have been exposed after all. Its first estimate was a few hundred soldiers.

Then it was about 5,000. Then the CIA and the Pentagon modeled the plume in 1997, and the number of troops who might have been standing in its path came to just under 100,000. Nobody has ever proved the plume caused the illness, and there are a dozen other candidates. From the nerve agent pills the troops were ordered to swallow, to the oil well fires,

to the pesticides sprayed on the tents. What's proved is that the government knew about the demolition in 1991, told sick veterans for five years that no exposure had occurred, and revised that statement upward by three orders of magnitude, once a UN inspection team's records forced its hand. Our man from 1940 had watched the same thing happen with Agent Orange in the 70s episode, and here it was again, with a different chemical and a different war. The second item on the list is older and uglier, and a reporter in New Mexico. Mexico dug it up. Back in 1987, Eileen Wellsom, who worked for the Albuquerque Tribune, was going through declassified papers about animal experiments at Curtland Air Force Base and came across a footnote about human beings. Between April of 1945 and July of 1947, 18 people had been injected with plutonium by doctors working for the Manhattan Project,

at hospitals in Oak Ridge and Rochester and Chicago and San Francisco to find out how the human body handled the stuff, and the records identified them only by code numbers, and none of them had been told what was in the syringe. Wellesom spent six years finding out who they were. The first had been a 53-year-old construction worker named Eb Cade, who'd been brought to an Army hospital in Oak Ridge after a car wreck, and was injected while his broken bones were left unset for weeks, so the doctors could keep collecting samples. Another was a house painter in San Francisco named Albert Stevens, who'd been misdiagnosed with stomach cancer and went on to live 20 more years carrying the highest plutonium dose any human being has ever survived. The Tribune

published her series in November of 1993, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. And the Secretary of Energy, Hazel O'Leary, read it and said in public that she was appalled. And then she opened the files, and the files turned out to hold a great deal more than 18 people. President Clinton created an advisory committee in January of 1994 to go through all of it, and its report came out in October of 1995. Between 1944 and 1974, agencies of the United States government had run or paid for something like 4,000 human radiation experiments. At the Fernaud State School in Massachusetts, boys who'd been classified as feeble-minded were fed oatmeal laced with radioactive iron and calcium, in a study run by MIT and paid for in part by Quaker Oates,

and the boys were told they'd been picked for a science club. At Vanderbilt, more than 800 pregnant women were handed drinks containing radioactive iron and told they were vitamins. Prisoners in Oregon and Washington had their testicles irradiated for a few dollars a session, and whole communities downwind of the Hanford plant in Washington State had been exposed to deliberate releases of radioactive iodine in 1949, so the government could see how it spread. Clinton stood in the East Room in October of 1995

and apologized on behalf of the government to the people who'd been experimented on and to their families. Most of the 18 plutonium patients had been dead for decades by then, and the ones Wellsome had managed to find alive had learned what was done to them from her, 45 years after the fact. The third item is closer in time, and it's the one I'd have the hardest time explaining to a jury. In April of 1993, after a 51-day standoff, the FBI began pumping tear gas into the Branch

Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas. And around noon, the building caught fire, and 76 people inside it died. 25 of them, children. Who started that fire became the most argued question in the country for a while? And the Bureau's answer, given under oath and repeated for six years, was that it had used no pyrotechnic devices of any kind that day. Then, in August of 1999, the Bureau acknowledged that its agents had, in fact, fired at least two military tear gas rounds that burn as they disperse, several hours before the fire, at a concrete bunker some distance from the main building. Attorney General Reno said she'd been told otherwise for six years and was very troubled by it.

An independent counsel, the former Senator John Danforth, spent a year on the question, and concluded in 2000 that the fire had been set from inside the building and that the pyrotechnic rounds hadn't caused it, and also that the government had spent six years denying something that happened to be true. Waco stays on this list for a second reason. On the second anniversary of that fire, the 19th of April 1995, a former army sergeant named Timothy McVeigh parked a rented truck loaded with a fertilizer bomb outside the Alfred P. Muirah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and 168 people died, 19 of them, children in the daycare on the second floor. He'd driven down to Waco during the

siege and sold bumper stickers off the hood of his car, and he said afterward that the date was the whole point. It was the deadliest act of terrorism ever carried out on American soil up to that morning, and it had been carried out by a decorated Gulf War veteran with a two-year-old grudge against the government he'd fought for. The thing that never makes anybody's list of fears is what was actually killing us. And in the 90s, the answer was the same as it had been in every decade of this series. Heart disease first, cancer second, and the tobacco that fed a good share of both. About 400,000 Americans a year died from smoking across the decade, which is more than every murder and car crash and suicide and AIDS death and overdose put together. And for the first time, the people

People selling it had to sit at a table and answer for it. They did that on the 14th of April 1994 when the chief executives of the seven biggest tobacco companies in the country sat side by side at one long table in front of a House subcommittee chaired by Henry Waxman and were sworn in together. And the photograph of the seven of them with their right hands in the air is one of the pictures of the decade. Waxman went down the line and asked each man whether nicotine was addictive and each one said he believed it was not.

starting with the chairman of Philip Morris. At the moment he said it, his own company had research going back to the 1960s, describing nicotine as an addictive drug and the cigarette as a delivery device for it. And a paralegal in Kentucky named Merrill Williams had already spent four years photocopying thousands of pages of the same kind of thing out of the law firm that represented Brown and Williamson. And those pages were on their way to a professor at the University of California and to the New York Times. The rest of the decade was the company's losing, a piece at a time. A Brown and Williamson Research Executive named Jeffrey Wigand told CBS that his company had known nicotine was addictive and had manipulated the levels of it.

And CBS killed the interview in November of 1995 on the advice of its own lawyers, then aired it the following February after the Wall Street Journal published his deposition and made the point moot. The smallest of the companies, Ligget, broke ranks in 1996 and admitted everything. The states sued to get back what smoking had cost their Medicaid programs, and in November of 1998, the four largest companies signed a settlement with 46 states that committed them to paying $206 billion over 25 years, the largest civil settlement in American history, and to taking down every cigarette billboard in the country. adult smoking fell through the decade, and teenage smoking rose through the middle of it and then fell after the settlement. And the chairman of Philip Morris, who'd raised his hand in 1994, retired in 1997.

And a few years later, the company changed its name to Altria. While that was being settled, a different drug company was in a different room in the same city. And what happened there is the biggest thing the 90s handed to the decade that followed. In December of 1995, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new painkiller from a privately held company in Connecticut called Purdue Pharma. The drug was oxycodone in a time-release tablet sold as oxycontin, and the approved label carried a sentence no opioid label had ever carried before. It said that delayed absorption, as provided by the tablet, was believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug. There was no study behind that sentence. It was a belief, and the FDA put it on the label and Purdue's sales force carried it into

doctors' offices across the country for the next six years as a promise that this drug was safer than the ones that had come before it. And the company trained its representatives to tell doctors that the risk of addiction was under 1%. The FDA examiner who'd overseen the approval left the agency in 1997 and was working for Purdue a year after that. OxyContin sold $48 million worth in 1996 and more than a billion in 2000. The company pleaded guilty to misbranding it in 2007 and paid $634 million. And by then, the sentence had been taken off the label. And the counties in Appalachia and New England, where the sales force had worked hardest, were burying their kids. The same agency approved that label in the same year the tobacco executives were being called

liars a few miles away. Our man from 1940 read about the tobacco. tobacco settlement in his newspaper, and he never read a word about the label. Some of what killed people in the 90s killed them all at once, and those are the ones the country forgot within a few years, because they didn't come with a villain. In the second week of July, 1995, a heat wave settled on Chicago, and on the 13th, the temperature hit 106, with a heat index over 120, and it didn't cool off at night. The power grid failed in patches across the city, roads buckled and kids opened fire hydrants until the water pressure dropped in the neighborhoods that needed it most. And within a week, 739 more people had died in Cook County than would have died

in an ordinary July. Most of them were old, and most of them were alone. A sociologist named Eric Kleinenberg spent years reconstructing who they were, and the pattern he found was people living by themselves in apartments and single-room hotels who'd nailed their windows shut against burglars and were afraid to open the door for anybody. The county morgue ran out of room, and the medical examiner brought in refrigerated trucks and parked them in the lot. And the mayor, Richard Daly, stood up in the middle of it and questioned the medical examiner's count, suggesting people were dying of other things and being written up as heat deaths. And it took a study from the Centers for Disease Control to settle that the count had been right, and if

anything too low. That's 739 people dead in one American city in one week, most of them from nothing more exotic than being alone in a hot room. Hurricane Andrew, which tore across South Florida in August of 1992 and did $26 billion in damage, killed 65. The Northridge earthquake in January of 1994 killed 57. The Chicago heat wave killed more than both of them together and got a fraction of the coverage, because there's no footage of a hot room. Two airplanes came down in the summer of 1996, and the first one belongs on this list for what it says about who was supposed to be watching. Valuejet Flight 592 took off from Miami on the 11th of May with 110 people aboard and went into the Everglades 11 minutes later, and everyone on board died. The cause was in the

forward cargo hold, where a maintenance contractor called Sabreto had loaded a hundred and 144 chemical oxygen generators, the canisters that feed the drop-down masks, and had labeled them as empty. They weren't empty. And one of them went off, and the rest went off, and the fire burned through the cabin floor at 3,000 degrees. ValueJet was a discount airline that had been flying for two and a half years, and the Federal Aviation Administration had known about its maintenance record for months, and there was an internal FAA memo from that February recommending the airline be grounded. The Secretary of Transportation went on television after the crash and said he'd be happy to fly value jet himself. The airline was grounded five weeks later, and the law that had given the

FAA the double job of regulating the airlines and promoting them was rewritten that same year so that the agency had one job. Two months after that, TWA Flight 800 exploded 12 minutes out of Kennedy Airport and fell into the Atlantic off Long Island with 230 people on it. and the investigation took four years and became the most expensive in the history of the National Transportation Safety Board. It concluded that the center fuel tank had exploded, most likely from a spark in the wiring, and that the tank had been nearly empty and full of vapor because the plane had sat on a hot runway with the air conditioning running. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

Hundreds of witnesses had seen a streak of light rising toward the airplane, and a former press secretary to President Kennedy spent years insisting it had been a Navy missile, and the board reconstructed 95% of the aircraft in a hangar to show that it hadn't. The people who believe in the missile still believe in it. The other loss of that size in the decade wasn't an accident. In March of 1997, 39 members of a group called Heaven's Gate lay down in bunk beds in a rented mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, wearing matching black shirts and brand new black Nike sneakers with a $5 bill and three quarters in each of their pockets and took phenobarbital in applesauce washed down with vodka.

They'd left a videotape explaining that a spacecraft traveling behind the comet Hailbop was coming to collect them. Their leader was a 65-year-old former music teacher named Marshall Applewhite, and the group had been paying its rent by building websites for local businesses under the name higher source, which means the deadliest mass suicide on American soil was carried out by a web design firm. The comet was visible to the naked eye that whole spring, and our man from 1940 could see it from his driveway. Now what we were afraid of, which in every decade of this series, has lined up badly with what was actually killing us, and the 90s kept the street going. In the middle of October 1990, a swarm of Africanized honeybees turned up in a trap out of

outside Hidalgo, Texas, and the newspapers had been waiting on it for 30 years. Because the bees had escaped from a breeding experiment in Brazil back in 1957 and had been working their way north at a couple hundred miles a year ever since. In every few years, a magazine would print a map with an arrow on it pointing at the Rio Grande. Hollywood had made three killer bee movies in the 70s alone. The first American death came in July of 1993. an 82-year-old man in Rio Grande City who disturbed a hive in a wall of his own house. And there were a handful more over the rest of the decade.

And then, the bees settled into the southwest, bred with the local stock, and became one more thing beekeepers manage. In 1994, a science writer named Richard Preston published a book called The Hot Zone about an Ebola outbreak in a monkey house in Reston, Virginia, in 1989. And it sold in the millions. And the next spring, Dustin Hoffman started a movie called Outbreak, in which the virus reaches a California town and the army thinks about bombing it. Two months after the movie opened, a real outbreak started in Kickwit, in what was then Zaire, and killed about 250 people. An American cable news covered it like an invasion fleet had been spotted off Miami.

The virus stayed in the Congo basin, where it had always been, and no American caught Ebola in the 1990s or in the 10 years' hour. In March of 1996, the British government announced that a fatal brain disease in cattle had probably crossed over into 10 young people who'd eaten beef, and 3.5 million British cows were destroyed over the next few years. The disease crossed the Atlantic mostly as a talk show. Oprah Winfrey said on the air that April that the story had stopped her cold from eating another burger. Cattle Futures dropped the next morning, and a group of Texas cattlemen sued her under a state law that made it illegal to disparage a perishable food. So she moved her show to Amarillo for the trial and beat them in 1998. The number of Americans who'd contracted the

disease from American beef by the end of the decade was zero. And there was Japan, which had been on the verge of owning the country since about 1985. Mitsubishi Estate bought a controlling stake in Rockefeller Center in October of 1989 for $846 million. A Japanese developer paid $841 million for the Pebble Beach golf course the following year. And in 1992, Michael Crichton wrote a thriller in which Japanese corporations ran Los Angeles and told his readers in the afterward that the novel was meant as a warning. What nobody over here was watching was that the Japanese stock market had peaked on the 29th of December, 1989, at nearly 39,000, and had spent the year of the Pebble Beach deal, losing 40% of its value. Pebble Beach got sold back at a loss of hundreds of millions

inside two years. Rockefeller Center's owners filed for bankruptcy in 1995, and Japan spent the whole decade in an economic stall that its own economist named the Lost Decade, so that by 1999, The thing Americans feared about Japan was that its troubles might be catching. The fear that swallowed the end of the decade whole was a date on a calendar. For most of the history of computing, programmers had stored the year as two digits because memory was expensive and nobody expected their code to still be running in the year 2000. And an enormous amount of it was still running in banks and power plants and air traffic control and the payroll systems of every large company in the country.

And at midnight on the 1st of January 2000, all of it was going to read the date as 1900. The problem was real. What it would actually do was unknown. And into that gap went five years of the most expensive precaution in the history of the country. American businesses and government spent something over $100 billion fixing code before the deadline. And worldwide, the figure ran to several hundred billion. The federal government appointed a czar for it, a man named John Korn, Koskinen, who spent 1999 going from hearing to hearing, promising that the lights would stay on.

Congress passed a law shielding companies from lawsuits over Y2K failures, and the Federal Reserve printed an extra $50 billion in cash in case people pulled their money out of the banks. Sales of generators and freeze-dried food and gun safes ran at levels the retailers had never seen. Every bookstore had a shelf of paperbacks on how to survive the collapse, and a Baptist minister in Texas did a good business selling 55-gallon drums of wheat. Midnight came around the world in sequence. The news anchors sat up all night with their maps, and the power stayed on everywhere.

A few things did break. Slot machines at three racetracks in Delaware quit. The website of the United States Naval Observatory, which keeps the country's master clock, displayed the date as the 1st of January, 19100. A radiation monitor at a nuclear plant in Japan tripped a false alarm, and 150 pregnant women at a hospital in England got the wrong down syndrome risk results because a computer miscalculated their ages. And on the afternoon of the 1st of January,

the Deputy Secretary of Defense, John Hamry, told reporters that a ground station processing data from American reconnaissance satellites had gone down at midnight Greenwich time, and that for about three hours, the country's spy satellites had been sending pictures nobody could read. The Pentagon had spent $3.5 billion getting ready, and the one system that actually failed was the one that watched everybody else. It was fixed by evening, and the department said there'd been no danger. Whether that $100 billion prevented a catastrophe or bought insurance against one that was never coming is a question nobody can answer, because the code got fixed, and the other version of the night never happened. The people who did the work say it would have been bad. The people

who watched from outside, noticed that Italy and South Korea spent next to nothing and had the same quiet evening. What can be said for certain is that the 90s ended with the whole country holding its breath over a two-digit field in a payroll program, and that the money and the attention that went into that weren't available for the things that were actually on their way, one of which had been arrested at a border crossing 17 days before the ball dropped. The satanic panic of the 80s, the daycare cases and the recovered memory. and the therapists finding cults in every suburb was supposed to have ended in January of 1990 when the McMarton preschool trial in Los Angeles finally closed after seven years and two trials

with no convictions on any count. It had moved out of the daycares and into the teenagers instead. In May of 1993, three eight-year-old boys, Christopher Byers and Stevie Branch and Michael Moore disappeared while riding their bikes in West Memphis, Arkansas, and were found the next day in a drainage ditch in a patch of woods called Robin Hood Hills, naked and hog-tied with their own shoelaces. Within a month, the police had arrested three teenagers. Damien Eccles was 18, wore black, listened to Metallica, read Stephen King, and had once told a juvenile officer he was interested in Wicca. Jason Baldwin was 16 and his closest friend. Jesse Muskelly was 17, had a measured IQ of 72, and after about 12 hours of

questioning, less than an hour of it recorded, gave a confession that got the time of the murders wrong by most of a day and got the manner of the boy's deaths wrong, and then took it back. There was no physical evidence tying any of the three to that ditch. The prosecution's theory put in front of the jury by an expert whose doctorate had come through the mail was that the killings had been a satanic ritual, and the evidence for the ritual was the black clothing and the music and a notebook of Eccles' with song lyrics copied into it. Miss Kelly was convicted in February of 1994 and got life, and Eccles and Baldwin were convicted a month later, and Eccles was sentenced to die. What kept the case alive was a documentary crew from HBO that had been

given access to both trials, and the film they put out in 1996 let a national audience see exactly what the jury had seen. The three were released in August of 2011 after 18 years, under an arrangement that let them maintain their innocence while the state maintained their guilt. And DNA testing done in 2007 had turned up no genetic material from any of them at the scene, and nobody has ever been convicted of the murders of those three boys on any other theory. I put that case here because it's what the fear of the young looked like when it got inside a courtroom in the 90s. A jury in Arkansas looked at an 18-year-old in a black t-shirt and believed he'd sacrificed three children to the devil. In the same year, the magazines were describing his

generation as too apathetic to get up off the couch. Nobody complains about a telescope, which is why the best things the decade built barely made anybody's list at all. The Hubble Space Telescope went up in April of 1990, after a decade of delays, and within two months, NASA had to announce that the main mirror had been ground to the wrong shape. The error was about a 50th of the thickness of a human hair, and it was enough to make a $2 billion instrument nearsighted. And it had happened because the company that ground the mirror built one of its test devices wrong,

and then trusted that test over two other tests that disagreed with it. It was a punchline for three years, until a shuttle crew in December of 1993 installed corrective optics over five spacewalks. And the pictures that came down after that changed what the word galaxy meant to people who'd never once thought about one. In July of 1996, a lamb was born at a research institute outside Edinburgh from a cell taken out of the utter of a six-year-old youth. And the scientists who'd done it named her Dolly, after Dolly Part, for a reason they've since admitted in print. They kept her secret for seven months while the paper went through review. And when they announced her in February of 1997,

the President of the United States called for a ban on cloning humans inside of two weeks, and every editorial cartoonist in the world drew the same cartoon. Dolly had six lambs of her own, died of a lung disease in 2003, and is stuffed and on display in a museum in Edinburgh to this day. On the 4th of July, 1997, a spacecraft called Pathfinder came down on Mars inside a cluster of airbags, bounced about 15 times, rolled to a stop, and let a row of, over the size of a microwave oven named Sojourner, drive off it the next morning. It had cost a fraction of the previous Mars mission, and NASA put the pictures on a website,

and that site took more than half a billion hits in its first month, a number no website had ever seen. Two years later, the agency lost the next Mars spacecraft, a $125 million dollar orbiter, because one engineering team had calculated thrust in pounds, and another had assumed the numbers were metric, and nobody checked. and the thing went into the Martian atmosphere at the wrong altitude and burned up. Now the things everybody remembers, every one of which made the cover of the magazine that started this episode. On the 17th of June 1994, 95 million Americans watched a white Ford Bronco drive slowly up a Los Angeles freeway with a line of police cars behind it, and the networks

cut away from the NBA finals to show it. The trial ran nine months, and when the verdict came in at 10 in the morning Pacific time on the 3rd of October 1995, the country stopped work to watch it. And this show has walked through that case and the ground under it in other episodes. In September of 1991, a trio from Aberdeen, Washington put out a record called Nevermind. And in January of 1992, it knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the billboard chart. And the music industry spent the next three years signing anything from the Pacific Northwest that owned a flannel shirt. Kurt Cobain was found dead in a room above his garage in Seattle in April of 1994, three days after he'd shot himself at 27 years old with a note that quoted Neil Young.

The generation that had been told it had no anthems had been given one and then watched the man who wrote it die. And the news magazines used the occasion to run the 20-something story all over again with a darker cover. The 14th of May, 1998, was a Thursday, and 76 million people watched the last episode of Seinfeld, which is more than watched the moon landing. At the end of that August, a car carrying Diana, Princess of Wales, hit the 13th pillar of a tunnel under the sun in Paris at about 65 miles an hour,

with a drunk driver at the wheel and photographers on motorcycles behind it, and two and a half billion people watched her funeral a week later. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. That December, a three-hour movie about a ship that sank in 1912 opened and stayed at number one for 15 straight weeks and became the first film to take in a billion dollars. And in January of 1998, an internet gossip page that a man named Matt Drudge ran out of his apartment reported that Newsweek had killed a story about the president and a 22-year-old intern.

And the year that followed produced a 445-page report from an independent council, a vote of impeachment in the House the week before Christmas and an acquittal in the Senate in February of 1999. And through all of it, the president's approval rating never dropped below 60%, because unemployment was at 4% and the surplus was real, and the country had decided it could live with the rest. Our man from 1940 watched every minute of that. He'd been a young husband when Kennedy was killed and a middle-aged one when Nixon resigned. And now he watched a president get impeached over a sexual relationship and watched the country shrug it off. And I'd bet that's when he decided for cert that the people who'd come up behind him had lost something he'd had.

The record shows that the country in 1999 had the lowest crime rate in a generation, the lowest unemployment in 30 years, and the first budget surplus of his adult life. And the record also shows that a majority of Americans told the pollsters that same year that the nation's moral values were getting worse. On the 26th of February, 1993, a rented van packed with about 1,200 pounds of explosive, went off in the parking garage under the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and six people died, and more than a thousand were hurt.

The plan had been to knock the North Tower over into the South Tower and kill tens of thousands, and the tower held. And the man who'd built the bomb, Ramsey Yusuf, was caught in Pakistan two years later, after the FBI identified the van from a vehicle identification number stamped on a piece of axle found in the rubble. It was treated as a crime and prosecuted as a crime, and the sentences were handed down, and the buildings went back to work. In August of 1996, a Saudi exile living in Afghanistan named Osama bin Laden published a declaration of war against the United States that almost nobody in America read. And in February of 1998, he published a second one, co-signed by the leaders of several other groups,

saying that killing Americans, civilian or military, was a duty for every Muslim in every country where it could be managed. Six months after that, on the 7th of August, truck bombs went off within minutes of each other outside the American embassies in Nairobi and Dara Salaam and killed 224 people, 12 of them American. Two weeks later, the United States fired cruise missiles at a training camp in Afghanistan and at a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Bin Laden wasn't at the camp. The plant, the administration said, had been making nerve agent.

And people who worked in the government at the time have disputed that ever since. And the plant's owner sued. And in a good part of the world, that strike is remembered as a mistake. While in Washington, it's remembered as an argument nobody ever settled. Then on the 14th of December 1999, a customs inspector named Diana Dean, working to ferry terminal in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped a rental car coming off the boat from Victoria, British Columbia because the driver was sweating and fidgeting and couldn't answer ordinary questions in an ordinary way. He ran. Inspectors caught him two blocks away, and in the spare tire well of the trunk, they found about 130 pounds of explosive and four timers built out of Casio watches. And the driver, an Algerian named Ahmed Rassam, who trained at a camp in Afghanistan, was on his way to Los Angeles International Airport to set them off in a terminal on New Year's Eve.

He was 17 days short of it. So the country spent the last two weeks of 1999 worrying about whether its computers would work, having just caught a man carrying a bomb toward an airport who'd been trained by a man who'd declared war on it twice in writing. Laid end to end, the records of that decade show the shape of the next one clearly enough that a first-year detective could have drawn the line through them. Nobody laid them end to end. The pieces sat in different agencies and different files, and a commission would eventually write nearly 600 pages about why.

The things we remember are the Bronco and the verdict. The blue dress, the flannel, the wall coming down, the war on cable, the sound of the modem, the last night of Seinfeld. the boat, Diana's funeral, and the Dow crossing 10,000, along with the feeling that it would never come back down. The things we forgot are 739 people dead in Chicago in a week, and 110 people in the Everglades because somebody wrote the word empty on a box. In Rwanda, where about 800,000 people were killed in 100 days in the spring of 1994, while the United States argued over whether to use the word genocide and where the president

went four years later to apologize for the argument. Their 18 Americans killed in Mogadishu on a Sunday in October of 1993 in a raid that was supposed to take an hour, and 8,000 men and boys killed at Shreberneza in July of 1995 in a town the UN had declared safe. A bomb in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta in July of 1996, and a security guard, named Richard Jewell, who found it and got people away from it, and then spent three months named in the newspapers as the chief suspect, and who died at 44 before the man who'd actually built the bomb was ever sentenced. And there are three people killed and 23 wounded over 17 years by a

hermit in Montana, who mailed bombs from a cabin with no electricity, and was caught in April of 1996 because his brother recognized the sentences in a manifesto the newspapers had printed to placate him. The things we feared were super predators and killer bees and Ebola and mad cow and Japan and cyber porn and video games and Maryland Manson's Mascara and the militia in the next county and black helicopters and the year 2000. And in a courtroom in Arkansas, an 18 year old in a Metallica shirt. What was actually killing us was heart disease and cancer and the 400,000 smokers a year and the 40,000 people a year dying on the road. and the AIDS deaths that peaked at about 50,000 in 1995 and then fell by more than half within two years once the protease inhibitors arrived. A story this show has told on its own. And, starting in 1996, a time-release tablet with a sentence on its label that nobody had tested. What the government

wasn't telling us was that it had blown up a nerve agent depot upwind of its own soldiers and would admit it five years later. That it had injected 18 people, with plutonium in the 40s and fed radioactive oatmeal to schoolboys and would apologize for it in the East Room 50 years on, that it had fired burning tear gas rounds at Waco and said for six years it hadn't, that its own regulators had a memo recommending an airline be grounded three months before that airline went into a swamp, that the label on a painkiller said something no study had ever shown, and that a man in Afghanistan had declared war on it twice, while a customs inspector in Port Angeles caught his first soldier at the border. And what it handed forward was 26 words

called Section 230, a phrase called Too Big to Fail, the Repeal of Glass Stegel, a painkiller called Oxycontin, a NASDAQ at 5,000, with companies underneath it that had no revenue. 47 states' worth of laws for trying children as adults that had been written for a wave that never came. A file on a desk with the World Trade Center in it and the embassies and Port Angeles, and nobody assigned to read the whole file, and a surplus that the Congressional Budget Office said would retire the national debt by 2012, and which lasted through the fiscal year that ended in September of 2001. Our man born in 1940, turned 60 in the year 2000. He'd been a boy in the 50s, when the country was told its teenagers had become tyrants, and the young man the 60s episode

was about, and the father the 70s episode was about, and the man in his 40s who'd read a at risk in 1983 and looked across the dinner table at his own teenagers. By 1990, those teenagers were the 20-somethings on the cover of time, and he read that article, and I'd bet the house he nodded along. Those 20-somethings are in their 50s and 60s now. They raised the children who were born in the 90s, the ones who were toddlers during Y2K. And in May of 2013, the same magazine that had put their parents on the cover under the word 20-something put those children on the cover under three words, me, me, me, and called them the generation that was lazy and entitled and still living at home. The writer's name was Joel Stein, and he was born in 1971,

which makes him one of the people David Gross and Sophronius Scott had been writing about in the summer of 1990. He grew up and he got a job at the magazine, and 23 years after he'd been told he couldn't make decisions and had no anthems. He wrote the same story about the next ones, in the same voice on the same cover, and it sold.