Alan Axelrod: Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

During the Reagan years, the Wall Street word for the day was arbitrage –the art of buying securities, commodities, or currencies in one market and immediately (sometimes simultaneously) selling them in another market to profit from price differences. Arbitrageurs like Ivan Boesky acted on takeover bids and impending mergers, buying blocks of the target company’s stock at a low price, with the hope of selling them at a much higher price when the merger occurred. If the merger failed to occur, losses could be devastating.

Michael R. Milken (b. 1946) was a star executive at the prestigious Wall Street trading firm of Drexel Burnham Lambert, Inc. He engineered a number of high-stakes, high-profile corporate takeovers through the use of high-yield junk bonds, making many of his clients and himself enormously wealthy in the process. However, it was subsequently discovered that much of Milken’s trading was based on illegal inside information, and in 1989, a grand jury handed down a 98-count indictment against him for violating federal securities and racketeering laws. When Milken pleaded guilty to securities fraud and related charges in 1990, the government dropped the insider trading and racketeering charges, which carried greater penalties. His 10-year sentence was later reduced to three, and Milken returned to the world of finance upon his release. His spectacular rise and equally dramatic fall mirrored the course of the economy and cast a harsh light on the era’s questionable business ethics.

On “Black Monday,” October 19, 1987, $870 billion in equity simply evaporated as the market dropped from a Dow of 2,246.73 to 1,738.41 points.

AIDS – Acquired immune Deficiency Syndrome –is caused by infection with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), which attacks immune system cells, ultimately producing severe suppression of the body’s ability to resist other infections.

The disease is transmitted sexually, through the blood (for example, through transfusion with infected whole blood plasma), and during birth, from infected mother to their children.

Since the first AIDS cases were formally reported in 1981, approximately a half-million AIDS cases and mote than a quarter-million AIDS-Mated deaths have been reported in the United States. It is believed that another million Americans, have been infected with HIV through the mid-1990s but have not developed clinical AIDS symptoms.

“So in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—temptation blithely to declare yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.”

Americans learned two important Russian words during the 1980s. Perestroika (literally, restructuring) was how Gorbachev described his program of liberal political and economic reforms. Glasnost (openness) described how the traditionally secretive and closed USSR would now approach its own people and the rest of the world.

Combined U.S. and coalition forces in the Gulf War amounted to 530,000 troops as opposed to 545,000 Iraqis. U.S. and coalition losses were 149 238 wounded, 81 missing and 13 taken, prisoner (they were subsequently released). Iraqi losses have been estimated in excess of 80,000 men, with overwhelming loss of materiel.

The only thing Americans cherish more than their cynicism is their heroes, and the Persian Gulf War produced one in General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, overall commander of operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Born in Trenton, New Jersey, on August 22, 1934, Schwarzkopf graduated from West Point in 1956. He served with distinction in numerous staff strategic and personnel management assignments, as well as in field command in Vietnam and in the 1983 invasion of Grenada.

During the Persian Gulf War, Schwarzkopf commanded a combined U.S.-coalition force of 530,000 troops opposed to 545,000 Iraqis and achieved overwhelming victory. Frequently appearing on television press conferences during the conflict, he impressed the American public with his forthrightness, military skill, and softspoken humanity. “Any soldier worth his salt,” Schwarzkopf declared, “should be antiwar. And still there are things worth fighting for.” Much honored, he retired after the war.

In This Chapter

End of the Reagan-Bush years

The New Right, Libertarians, and militia groups

An electronic democracy

Writing about what has happened is much easier than writing about what is happening. Because we don’t live in the future, it’s no mean feat to say one current event is historically significant, but another one isn’t. The history of our times has yet to be written. So this closing chapter is nothing more than a moistened finger lifted to the prevailing ,winds. By the time you read this, some of these winds may be forgotten breezes, and I may well have overlooked the coming storms.

In 1980 and again in 1984, the American electorate voted Ronald Reagan into office with gusto. In 1988, Americans had relatively little enthusiasm for either Democrat Michael Dukakis, governor of Massachusetts, or Republican George Bush, vice president of the United States. Nor was there wild enthusiasm in 1992, when the incumbent Bush was opposed by the youthful governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. However, during the Bush administration, the American dream seemed somehow to have slipped farther away. True, the world was probably a safer place than it had been at any time since the end of World War II (but it was still a dangerous world), and the United States had acquitted itself in the best tradition of its long democratic history by resolving the Persian Gulf War. Yet the electorate felt that President Bush habitually neglected domestic issues and focused exclusively on international relations. Candidate Bill Clinton’s acerbic campaign manager, James Carville, put it directly, advising Governor Clinton to write himself a reminder lest he forget the issue on which the election would be won or lost: “It’s the economy stupid.”

The economy. It was not that America teetered on the edge of another depression in 1992. Although homeless men, women, and even children could be seen on corners and in doorways of the nation’s cities, there were not the long bread lines or crowded soup kitchens of the 1930s. But a general sense existed among the middle class, among those who had jobs and were paying the rent, that this generation was not doing “as well as” previous generations. Sons were not living as well as fathers, daughters not as well as mothers. The pursuit of happiness, fueled in large part by cash, had become that much more difficult, and a majority of voters blamed it on George Bush. Bill Clinton entered the White House by a comfortable margin, but if voters rejected Bush, a sizable minority of them also rejected Clinton.

For the first time since Theodore Roosevelt ran as a Bull Moose candidate in 1912, a third-party contender made a significant impact at the polls. Presenting himself as a candidate dissatisfied with both the Republicans and Democrats, billionaire Texas businessman H. Ross Perot (b. 1930) told Americans that they were the “owners” of the nation and that it was about time they derived benefit from such ownership.