Command and Control Read Online Free PDF

family dramas about the rich and dysfunctional soon followed:
Dynasty, Falcon Crest, The Colbys
. Situation comedies dealing with topical or working-class issues—like
M*A*S*H
,
Maude
,
Sanford
and Son
,
All in the Family—
were relics of a different era. In Hollywood, the year 1980 marked the end of the highly personal, director-driven filmmaking of the previous decade. Aside from Martin Scorsese’s
Raging Bull
and Robert Redford’s
Ordinary People,
due to open on September 19, the most notable movies were big-budget comedies, action pictures, and sequels like
Smokey and the Bandit II.
    The popular music of a historical moment can be more memorable and evocative than its books, politics, or films. A number of songs released in 1980 had the ability to worm their way into your brain and resist all attempts to dislodge them: “Do That to Me One More Time,” by Captain & Tennille; “You May Be Right,” by Billy Joel; “Sailing” and “Ride Like the Wind,” by Christopher Cross. Disco was finally dead, its fate sealed by the closing of the nightclub Studio 54 and the opening of
Can’t Stop the Music
,a movie starring the Village People. Punk was dead, too, and taking its place was the lighter, dance-oriented New Wave of Devo, The Police, The B-52’s, and Talking Heads. The hard rock of The Rolling Stones had given way to the softer pop sounds of “Emotional Rescue.” Led Zeppelin broke up, transforming Van Halen into America’s favorite heavy metal band. Turning the radio dial, on almost every FM station, you could hear rough edges becoming smooth. Outlaw country no longer threatened the Nashville establishment. It had fully entered the mainstream, with Willie Nelson’s hit “On the Road Again” and Waylon Jennings’s “Theme from the
Dukes of Hazzard.
” Bob Dylan now refused to sing any of his old songs. Born again and on the road, he played only gospel. John Lennon was in New York City, recording a new album for the first time in years and looking forward, in a few weeks, to his fortieth birthday. “Life begins at forty,” Lennon told an interviewer. “It’s like:
Wow!
what’s going to happen next?”
    In retrospect, it’s easy to say that a particular year marked a turning point in history. And yet sometimes the significance of contemporary events is grasped even in the moment. The United States of the 1960s and the 1970s, with its liberalism and countercultural turmoil, was about to become something different. The year 1980, the start of a new decade, was when that change became palpable, in ways both trivial and telling. During the first week of September, the antiwar activist and radical Abbie Hoffman surrendered to federal authorities after more than six years on the run. Before turning himself in, Hoffman sat for a prime-time television interview with Barbara Walters. Another radical leader, Jerry Rubin, had recently chosen a different path. In 1967, Hoffman and Rubin had tossed dollar bills over the balcony at the New York Stock Exchange as a protest against the evils of capitalism. In 1980, Rubin took a job as an investment analyst on Wall Street. “Politics and rebellion distinguished the ’60’s,” he explained in the
New York Times
. “Money and financial interest will capture the passion of the ’80’s.” Rubin had once again spotted a cultural shift and tried to place himself at its cutting edge. At the time,the highest-paid banker in the United States was Roger E. Anderson, the head of Continental Illinois National Bank, who earned about $710,000 a year. The incomes on Wall Street would soon rise. Suits and ties were back in fashion.Mustaches, beards, and bell-bottoms had become uncool, and an ironic guide to the new zeitgeist,
The Official Preppy Handbook,
was just arriving in stores. During a speech at the Republican convention that summer, Congressman Jack Kemp