How the 1980s Permanently Shaped America

—fotograzia—Getty Images 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.

I was 24.

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.

Kennedy.

How was Kennedy remembered? I started making phone calls.