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The relatively peaceful freedom movements were not successful in China where students and demonstrators were brutally put down in 1989. And independence movements within the Soviet Union itself—most notably in the Baltic Republics, the Russian Republic and the southern Soviet Republics—have met stiff resistance as well.

Delegates to the 1986 IBEW International Convention.

President Bush orchestrated stunning victories in Panama in 1990 and in the Persian Gulf in 1991. Maintaining a delicate alliance between most NATO and most Middle Eastern countries, including Israel, during the Gulf War, and defeating Iraq’s army—one of the world’s largest—in a matter of weeks, was a particularly large achievement.

But at home Bush’s performance has been less than spectacular. Unemployment has steadily risen through the end of the ‘80s and into the ‘90s. And by early-1991 America found itself’ mired in recession. The economic policies of the Reagan Era, which concentrated on the “Trickle Down” approach of tax cuts for the wealthy, hit working people hard by the mid-and late-1980s. According to John J. Sweeney and Karen Nussbaum’s book Solutions for the New Work Force (Seven Locks Press, 1989), an increasing number of American families were expected to do more with less. They write, “The stagnation in income [during the ‘80s] hides an even more alarming trend; a growing inequity in income distribution in [ America]. Family income has fallen precipitously for low- and middle-income families. As of 1985, the bottom 20 percent of families were struggling to live on one-third less then they did in the early ‘70s. Fewer and fewer families today are achieving yesterday’s middle incomes.” At the same time, they go on to write, “cuts in job based health insurance and pension coverage have pushed family living standards still lower…Most families are losing ground.”

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1986-1991 A Union of Hearts and Minds