The 1980s: Government and Politics: People in the News

THE 1980s: GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

On 3 September 1983 David Bergland, a lawyer from California, won the Libertarian Party nomination for president. He opposed taxes, domestic spending, and involvement in foreign affairs and pledged to sell the national parks.

William Buckley, first secretary of the political section of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, was kidnapped by Arab extremists on March 1984. He was the third American abducted in Beirut in three weeks. On 20 January 1987 it was revealed that Buckley, who was alleged to have been chief of CIA operations in Lebanon, had been slain by his captors.

On 12 April 1988 Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) announced that he would step down as head Senate Democrat after eleven years as majority or minority leader.

In February 1982 Juanita Castro, sister of Cuban president Fidel Castro, became a citizen of the United States, underscoring her political differences with her brother.

Edward Clark, the Libertarian candidate for president in 1980, won a place on the ballot in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. Clark and his running mate, David Koch of New York City, received 880,000 votes in the election, stressing that the sole purpose of government should be to protect individual freedoms.

Barry Commoner, a professor of environmental science at Washington University in Saint Louis, organized the Citizens' Party in April 1980 and ran as its candidate for president, charging that the Democrats and Republicans could not solve the nation's problems. He and his running mate, LaDonna Harris, got 220,000 votes in the election.

Richard M. Daley was elected mayor of Chicago on 4 April 1989. His father, Richard J. Daley, held the same office from 1955 to 1976.

On 16 May 1989 City Councilman George Darden of Nashville, Tennessee, failed to convince fellow council members to build a landing pad for unidentified flying objects (UFOs). One councilman suggested he might support the idea if the pad were built in Darden's district, but an opponent pointed out that the area had "too much traffic already."

On 5 January 1983 Elizabeth Dole, wife of Sen. Robert Dole (R-Kan.), was nominated as secretary of transportation. She was the first woman named to President Ronald Reagan's cabinet.

In April 1986 actor Clint Eastwood was elected mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, running as an opponent of political bureaucracy. When asked if he had aspirations for higher office, Eastwood replied, "This is where it stops."

On 2 April 1984 Congressman George Hansen, a Republican from Idaho, became the first congressman convicted under the Ethics in Government Act (1978) when he was found guilty of filing false financial statements.

On 12 January 1983 President Reagan added a second woman to his cabinet: Margaret Heckler, a former congresswoman from Massachusetts, who was appointed secretary of health and human services.

Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman emerged from hiding in September 1980, just in time to publicize his new book, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture. The radical political activist had gone underground in 1974 after jumping bail on a drug charge in New York City. Changing his appearance through plastic surgery and taking the name Barry Freed, he had become an environmental activist, even testifying before a U.S. Senate subcommittee without having his true identity discovered.

In August 1984 Sonia Johnson of Virginia became the Citizens' Party candidate for president. Johnson, a feminist, had first made the news in 1979, when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) excommunicated her for supporting the Equal Rights Amendment.

On 24 February 1989 Gov. John R. McKernan Jr. of Maine married Congresswoman Olympia J. Snowe, also of Maine. The wedding is believed to be the first between a governor and a member of Congress to take place while the bride and groom were both in office.

On 17 March 1989 six English springer spaniel puppies were born at the White House to Millie, pet to President and Mrs. George Bush.

Ron Paul, the Libertarian candidate for president in 1988, won 431,616 votes in the November election, 0.5 percent of the total votes cast.

On 10 August 1989 Gen. Colin L. Powell became the first African American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Maureen Reagan, daughter of President Ronald Reagan, was hired by the Republican National Committee on 23 August 1983 to help improve her father's image with women. The appointment came several days after her father had commented, "If it wasn't for women, us men would still be walking around in skin suits and carrying clubs."

On 31 January 1982 Adm. Hyman G. Rickover retired as head of the U.S. Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program. He used the occasion to speak out in favor of disarmament. Appearing before the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, Rickover, widely known as the father of the nuclear navy, criticized defense contractors and the nuclear arms race and asked the committee to put him in charge of an international disarmament conference.

In April 1988 former deputy presidential secretary Larry Speakes published a memoir, Speaking Out, in which he revealed that during the 1985 Geneva summit meeting he had made up some of the statements he had attributed to President Ronald Reagan because he believed the president was being outshone by Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev. Speakes also admitted that in 1983, when the Soviets shot down a Korean airliner, he had attributed to his boss some statements actually made by Secretary of State George P. Shultz. According to Newsweek (25 April 1995), the president said, "I wasn't aware of that and just learned it recently." A few weeks after the book was published, Speakes was forced to resign from a job as a vice president and chief spokesman for Merrill Lynch.

Sen. John C. Stennis (D-Miss.) retired on 3 January 1989, after forty-one years, one month, and twenty-one days in the U.S. Senate. The only senator in office longer was Sen. Carl Hayden (R-Ariz.), who retired in 1969, after forty-one years and ten months of service. At the time of his retirement Stennis was president pro tempore of the Senate and chairman of the Appropriations Committee. The last of the powerful Southern Democrats who dominated the Conservative Coalition of the 1950s and 1960s, he was a strong supporter of military spending and played a dominant role in policy decisions as chairman of the Armed Services Committee at the height of the Vietnam War.

On 4 February 1988 Philip Stevens, great-grandson of Chief Standing Bear, became the first war chief elected by the Sioux Indians of the United States in one hundred years. Stevens, the head of an engineering firm, was charged with leading the fight to recover unoccupied government-owned land in South Dakota that was taken from the Sioux 110 years earlier.

The November 1981 issue of The Atlantic Monthly quoted Budget Director David Stockman as saying President Ronald Reagan's "trickle-down" economic program would not work. On 12 November the president delivered an angry reprimand to Stockman but did not demand Stockman's resignation. As he emerged from the White House, Stockman compared the meeting to a "visit to the woodshed." He remained in his post until 9 July 1985.

Sixty-year-old Matt Urban, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Jimmy Carter on 19 July 1980. Urban was given the medal, the highest military award for valor, for his actions in France in 1944, during World War II. A soldier who fought under Urban had recommended him for the Medal of Honor, but the letter was lost and did not come to light until a search was begun for it in 1978.

On 2 April 1986 Alabama governor George Wallace announced his retirement from politics.

On 5 October 1981 President Ronald Reagan made Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg an honorary citizen of the United States, praising Wallenberg for saving some one hundred thousand Hungarians from Nazi death camps during World War II. Wallenberg disappeared in 1945, after agents of the Soviet Union seized him in Hungary.

On 12 April 1983 Democrat Harold Washington was elected the first black mayor of Chicago.