Like most Americans, I arrived at the election watch party on Nov. 4, 1980, expecting a long night. It was a little before 9:00 p.m. in Chicago. By 9:05 the television networks had called the election for Ronald Reagan and against Jimmy Carter.
The party’s host, a good friend and conservative, Reagan-supporting medical student, laughed exuberantly. Stragglers walking into the party were stunned that the election night was already over. It was to be the first of many surprises in a tumultuous and defining decade.
Over the next 10 years, as a reporter and writer, I covered many of the events of the 1980s. I was interested in an eclectic mix of issues, which led me to crisscross the country and to fly around the world: the rise of the power of business and the continued immiseration of poor Black Americans; Jesse Jackson’s campaigns for president and the controversies that swallowed him; the rise of China and the massacre in Tiananmen Square; and the eruption of anticommunist revolutions in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall, an assignment that ended as I flew home at the end of the decade on Christmas 1989. Three years after that shocking election night, in November 1983, I was sitting in the newsroom of The Boston Globe, where I worked as a reporter.
An editor came by and assigned me a story on the 20th anniversary of the assassination of John F. How was Kennedy remembered? I started making phone calls.
Kennedy was a hometown political hero, and, not surprisingly, memories of his presidency and the 1960s were bathed in hope and optimism. Then a professor I called pulled me up short. The Globe, like Boston and Massachusetts, was liberal.
Three years into the Reagan presidency, there were massive layoffs and factories closing in the Midwest. I recently bought a house in a gentrifying part of the city with a mortgage interest rate of 16%. The liberal assumptions that had governed American politics since the New Deal were under systematic assault.
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