When I was growing up, I remember that my parents and others from their generation would speak about their past, about the times when they were young, with somewhat of a measure of reverence and, yes, perhaps even awe.
Of course, the early eighties was a period of relative quiet, when things here in the Untied States were steady and consistent. Change was not exactly in the air, with the most conservative White House that had been seen in decades.
So, when they spoke about the crazy sixties, when the nation went through an incredible amount of changes and saw some huge, monumental events that would further shape the destiny of the country's history, possibly for decades to come, I would listen with rapt attention. The sixties had seen the rise of a young President who had embodied the image of a nation, and then shortly thereafter had seen the assassination of a President; it had seen the March on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech, and the general escalation of the Civil Rights Movement, until President Johnson finally signed into law a couple of pieces of legislation that ended legalized segregation in the nation; there was the Gulf of Tonkin and the outbreak of war in Vietnam, a war that would prove costly and highly controversial for millions of Americans. That divide would prove to stretch beyond the war, and it ushered in the hippie movement, and the so-called "Summer of Love". The year 1968 alone was monumental, and my father would tell me about just how unbelievable that year was. That was the year when there were seeming revolutions breaking out in several countries all at once. Czechoslovakia, France, and the United States, all saw major movements like that. That was the year when Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were shot. There was the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and the unpopularity of that was becoming overwhelming. The next year, 1969, saw man walking on the moon, and towards the end of the summer, saw Woodstock, perhaps the most famous concert in history. Of course, the sixties were well known as the decade of experimentation on so many levels. It was just so different than what I was living under, and so it was hard to imagine that such times had actually existed!
Yet, as the 1980's ended, there were some unbelievable times and events, as well. Not perhaps quite on the scale of the sixties, to be sure. Yet, things were moving and the world was changing, only, seemingly, not here in the United States. But everywhere else, things were happening.
I would suggest that 1989 was where we saw the most changes - and there were huge changes. It started with the final Soviet troops withdrawing from Afghanistan. The Soviet Union, under the leadership of Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, continued the reform process, as he opened his country, and the Eastern European Soviet satellite states, to reform. He eventually refused to intervene when Poland, and then the rest of the Eastern bloc, had a series of revolutions that, in effect, ended the Soviet Communist grip on the East. The Berlin Wall fell, seemingly overnight, and with a certain spontaneity, if you will (at least, that is how it looked from the outside). In South Africa, PW Botha tried to hang onto the reins of power, but was eventually ousted by FW DeKlerk, who himself would be compared with Mikhail Gorbachev, and was seen as the reformer for his country. A few months after 1989 ended, DeKlerk would announce that apartheid had failed, would lift the abolishment of such political opposition groups such as the Pan African Congress and the African National Congress.
It was not all good news, of course. In China, there were pro-democracy students who found to try and get recognized. They wanted to usher in the kinds of changes that would soon sweep their way through Eastern Europe. They stood strong against a feared regime in Beijing's Tienanmen Square, and for a while, it seemed like they really had something going, that change, perhaps was in the air. But then came the crackdown, and it was brutal. The Chinese government had decided that it had had enough, and it killed. World opinion did not mean much of anything to them, evidently. Forever ingrained in the world's imagination was the image of a young protester, no longer with numbers on his side, nonetheless standing in front of a moving tank, boldly making a stand against all that the tank represented, although it was futile. China might not have been anyone's favorite tourist destination that year, and many were critical of the Chinese government. But it was effective in ending the popular protests.
That was in summer. But the winds of change in Eastern Europe proved more positive. Proving some measure of legitimacy regarding a new kind of "domino theory", the nations that had been under the Soviet influence, part of the Warsaw Pact, suddenly all at once decided that they had had enough. This was possible under Gorbachev's more liberalized policies of opening itself up to western nations, under "perestroika" and "glastnost". One by one, the puppet communist regimes all fell, with the revolution in Romania being particularly bloody, as Ceaucescu tried to hang onto power. it cost him his life. But the enduring image of this sweep of change was of the fall of the Berlin Wall, with people, ordinary Germans, taking their best shots with their sledge hammers, and tearing down the wall, climbing it, passing through the holes that soon appeared overnight. It was a different time, and the end of the Cold War was near.
In the middle of all of this, FW DeKlerk took over in South Africa, replacing PW Botha, the President who had promised change, but had failed to deliver it. DeKlerk would enter into negotiations with Nelson Mandela and the ANC, albeit quietly, behind the scenes. But in the first months of 1990, he would make the historical announcements essentially beginning the process of ending apartheid in South Africa, which by then stood alone as the lone remaining legally racist state in the world.
Of course, the calendar year of 1989 ended with the American invasion of Panama. Many Americans would have barely been able to point to Panama on a map, and knew really next to nothing about it, or the leader that the United States managed to depose, Manuel Noriega. Noriega famously hid in the Vatican's embassy, but was eventually captured by American forces, who blasted loud rock music just outside of the complex, in an effort to get him out of there. He was subsequently taken as a prisoner of war, and brought to the United States.
Again, if we mention the year of change and some of the incredible, and memorable events that transpired during this time, we might want to note one sports item. In Tokyo, Japan on February of 1990, right around the time that Mandela was finally freed from prison, undefeated, undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, "Iron" Mike Tyson, sporting a 37-0 record, entered the ring against James "Buster" Douglas, who was a 42-1 underdog. But Douglas enjoyed the fight of his life, and clearly outclassed Tyson throughout the fight, battering him, pounding away until Tyson finally fell to the canvas in the 10th round. he did not beat the count, and the most incredible upset in the history of the sport would mark the end of Tyson's dominance. Tyson had enjoyed a historical level of dominance and intimidation prior to that fight, but would never quite be the same again.
But the biggest news of the year, the defining moment in history for the year 1989 to most, came in the fall, with the end of Communist domination in Eastern Europe. Under Gorbachev, the Soviet Union would continue to open up and reform, until it ceased to exist altogether in 1991. But that was later, and would likely not have been possible without the unbelievable events of 1989 that set up an era of change.
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