million troops, 1,800 aircraft, and some 100 ships.
Indeed, comparisons with Vietnam were plentiful, made principally by Americans who objected to trading “blood for oil” and who feared that the nation would become mired in another hopeless conflict. The fact was that Middle East oil had become essential to the Western economy, But the issues also went far beyond this commodity. President Bush was one of the last of the generation of U.S. leaders who had fought in World War Il. He well knew what can happen when an international bully like Saddam Hussein, in command of the fifth largest army in the world, is allowed to operate unchecked.
In early August 1990, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia invited American troops into his country to protect the kingdom against possible Iraqi aggression. Called Operation Desert Shield, this was a massive, orderly buildup of U.S. forces. In January 1991, the U.S. Congress voted to support military operations against Iraq in accordance with a U.N. Security Council resolution, which set a deadline of January 15, 199 1, for the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. When Saddam Hussein failed to heed the deadline, Operation Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm, a massively coordinated lightning campaign against Iraq from the air, the sea, and on land. After continuous air attack beginning January 17, the ground war was launched at 8:00 p.m. on February 23 and lasted exactly 100 hours before Iraqi resistance collapsed and Kuwait was liberated.
New World Order
Bush, who consistently earned high marks from the American public for his conduct of foreign relations, now enjoyed overwhelming popular approval in the wake of the successful outcome of the Persian Gulf War. But Bush did not bask alone in the war’s afterglow. Military success in the Gulf seemed to exorcise the demons of failure born in the Vietnam War, and with the liberalization and ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans felt that their nation was in the vanguard of what President Bush called a “new world order.” Not only had the long ideological struggle between communism and democracy ended in a victory for democracy, but a bully from the Third World, Saddam Hussein, had been defeated—and he was defeated with the cooperation of many nations and to the applause of most of the world.
The Least You Need to Know
President Reagan started a conservative revolution in America, introducing supplyside economics and undoing much of the welfare state that had begun with FDR.
The Reagan-Bush years saw victory in the 50-year Cold War (as well as victory in the brief but dangerous Persian Gulf War) but at the cost of quadrupling an already staggering national debt and sidelining such domestic issues as welfare and the AIDS crisis.
Main Event
President Reagan had been in office only two months when he exited the Washington Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981, after delivering a speech. Six shots rang out, fired from a .22-caliber revolver loaded with explosive “Devastator” bullets. Secret Service agent Timothy J. McCarthy and Washington police officer James Delahanty were hit, as was White House press secretary James S. Brady, who suffered a severe head wound.
The president was bundled into his limousine, where it was discovered that he, too, had been wounded in the chest. Fortunately, the bullet, lodged in his lung, had failed to explode and was removed in an emergency surgical operation. “I hope you’re all Republicans,” the president quipped to his surgeons.
The shooter, 25-year-old John Warnock Hinckley, Jr., was the drifter son of a wealthy Denver oil engineer. Hinckley was obsessed with screen actress Jodie Foster, who had made a sensation as a teenage prostitute in “Taxi Driver,” a 1976 film dealing in part with political assassination. Hinckley apparently decided to kill the president to impress Foster.
A jury found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity, and fie was confined to a psychiatric hospital. All of his victims recovered, except for Brady, who was left partially paralyzed. Brady became a passionate advocate of federal regulation of handguns—a policy President Reagan had himself opposed.
Real Life
The words put into Gordon Gecko’s mouth were paraphrased from a real-life Wall Street manipulator, Ivan Boesky, who told the graduating class of the School of Business Administration at the University of California, Berkeley, on May 18, 1986: “Greed is all right, by the way … I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”
Word for the Day
During the Reagan years, the Wall Street word for the day was
Real Life
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.
Stats
