COLUMN ONE : Searching for the Soul of a Decade : The 1980s--a time of feeling better. But what will history make of years that saw Reagan, poverty, a wild stock market and the Iron Curtain’s fall?

Then it was past, a cork in the swift current, the 1980s--come and gone. This was the decade when the Iron Curtain lifted, the Soviets themselves at the hoists, when a jittery America took reassurance from an actor’s genial lead, when an incurable new disease swung a relentless scythe.

The United States switched sides at the world’s teller window, from biggest lender to biggest borrower. A spaceship shuttled routinely between the heavens and Earth, then exploded one cold morning in the Florida sky. Warming gases aloft in the atmosphere imperiled the very essence of the seasons.

Not everything rushing by was momentous. Stores parceled out Cabbage Patch dolls one to a customer. A movie hero with a bull whip raced against the Nazis to find the lost Ark of the Covenant. Coca-Cola dared tamper with the pause that refreshes. Pete Rose took a head-first tumble out of baseball.

Decades as historical eras, of course, do not bend easily to the tyranny of the calendar, convenient as it may seem to bundle the years into the strict numerals of the decimal system.

What is thought of as the 1960s bled well into the 1970s, with Kent State and Watergate and the fall of Saigon. Then the ‘70s did not exhaust themselves until Ronald Reagan took the oath of office--or maybe even until late 1982, when an economy in recession found new wheels.

Three times the ‘80s have seemed over: when the Iran-Contra scandal scraped away at the presidential Teflon, when the stock market plunged from the rooftop, when Michael S. Dukakis sprinted off with a 17-point head start from the Democratic Convention. Still, the decade persists, wearying, as if in a slow dissolve.

Years ahead, when the endings play out and the balance sheets are audited, historians will affix their judgments, looking back with perspective and detachment. But what sense is there to make of things now? What happened? And to whom?

Certainly, there were obvious winners and losers. Among the former were junk-bond salesmen, drug dealers mightier than governments and a lingerie-clad singer who was called by the same melodic name as the mother of Jesus.

Among the losers were the state of Texas, which sank along with the price of oil; industrial-wage workers, their factory doors welded shut; and children, one in five of whom now live in poverty.

There may never be a simple name tag for the decade; there was no great war to pin on its lapel. There is some temptation to think of it as the “Roaring ‘80s,” what with capitalism so raw and untamed--and greed so shameless.

But the roar of the marketplace went unheard by too many for this to be an encompassing theme. If anything, a phenomenon more subtle was going on, although it, too, failed to touch all: The ‘80s were simply a time of feeling better.

The pollsters point to this on their grids: more confidence in government, more confidence in the economy, more confidence that the year to come will somehow improve over the year gone by.

Yet even this observation is made with ambivalence. Feeling better does not necessarily mean feeling good. The numbers at the decade’s end are high only in relation to those at the decade’s start.

So much anxiety remains. In 1980, a Time/Yankelovich poll showed that 81% of Americans thought the nation in “deep and serious trouble.” In 1988, 43% still felt that same pessimism was warranted.

America feels better now because it felt so bad before.

Two Decades of Wounds

In the year 1980, America looked in the mirror, a country suddenly sensing age like lead in its bones, afflicted by the distemper of high interest rates and pushed around by a robed holy man who called it “the Great Satan.”

Destiny had seemed to turn fickle. For two centuries, Americans had felt their nation evolving on a grand historical mission. At the least, the United States was to be the beacon for a great experiment in democracy; at most it was anointed by God to shine its moral light across an unregenerate world.

“We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people--the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world,” wrote a young Herman Melville. Much later, heroics in two global wars had seemed to prove this so.

But Vietnam left America unsure of its reach. Then the OPEC oil embargo provoked doubts about the nation’s self-reliance; gas lines led from inflation to stagflation and then all the way to malaise.

America had need of a healer to apply a poultice to nearly two decades of wounds, and in 1976 it turned to Jimmy Carter and his old-time religion. But with the gospel came a reckoning of guilt and humility, as if the nation’s troubles were partly self-imposed and possibly unconquerable.

Carter was glum; he suggested limiting goals abroad and lowering thermostats at home. This vision--along with lingering economic dyspepsia--made many people uneasier than before.

If they could not be healed, they at least wanted to be reassured. And that wish was there to be granted. With a pop psychologist’s cheeriness, Ronald Reagan told them it was morning in America, and morning it would ever stay.

“Don’t let anyone tell you that America’s best days are behind her, that this American spirit has been vanquished,” he said. “We’ve seen it triumph too often in our own lives to see it stop now.”

This confident hand was a while in taking grasp; events still seemed dizzying. John Lennon was killed. Pope John Paul II was shot. Reagan himself was struck by a bullet from a young loner’s gun.

The attempt on the President held all the essential bizarreness of a recurring American nightmare. John W. Hinckley Jr. thought Reagan a great leader and fired at him in order to win the attention of an actress--the way another man might have tossed pebbles at a bedroom window.

Yet, oddly, this shooting was also a turning point of sorts. Before, the script surely would have called for the President to die. Instead Reagan walked into the hospital on his own. With blood escaping from his chest, he told jokes to the surgeons.

He said, “I forgot to duck.”

Return of the Can-Do Spirit

A complex world was rendered simple in Reagan’s instinctive hands: Welfare cheats drove Cadillacs. Air traffic controllers faced an ultimatum--if they struck, they quit. Scientists were directed to create an impenetrable shield against the firestorms of Armageddon.

The President’s manner was genuine aw shucks. His face was the Gipper’s. He seemed endlessly familiar, like an oft-repeated favorite on the late show. He rode tall in the saddle and was at home on the range.

True, there was a heavy content of ideology within him. He was far more conservative than most Americans, although his ideas often found camouflage in the most congenial of aphorisms.

“Actually, we knew ideology worked against us,” says Reagan’s pollster Richard B. Wirthlin; the country was not ready to hang a sharp right. So the 1980 campaign plan stressed the themes of “a strong leader . . . who will stand up for America” and a country with “a motto of can-do.”

Once in office, his pollster still arguing caution, Reagan found that there was not much sentiment for tearing down the scaffolding of the New Deal. Tinker with it, yes. Disassemble, no. Social Security was untouchable. So were the broadest outlines of welfare.

But the economy was a mess, and this allowed the President to try something called “supply-side theory,” meant to shake off the doldrums and, as he had so often promised, balance the budget by 1983.

Reagan’s point man for this was his budget director, David A. Stockman, a youthful, bespectacled zealot who seemed to amass ledger books inside his forehead. Stockman urgently whittled back domestic programs--even as he found money to pump iron into the military.

An accountant from the old school would have insisted on a tax hike to increase revenues, but the nervy supply-siders preferred just the opposite. A tax cut , so their theory went, would stimulate growth--and the larger incomes that quickly followed would more than replenish the federal Treasury.

Furthermore, they wanted government to erase some of its persnickety rules. Deregulation would allow the businessman to shake Adam Smith’s invisible hand, wherever that hand could be found and however it made a deal.

But things did not work as expected. The national debt began to multiply, tripling to where it is now--$2.9 trillion, a seemingly fathomless number to the left of 11 zeroes. “Tax and spend,” so disparaged by Reagan, was replaced with a policy closer to borrow and spend.

The President accepted this rocketing debt--more serenely than expected--as a necessary trade-off. Whether people credited the White House or the Federal Reserve Board, a recovery finally had the recession in surrender.

Inflation was down. Taxes were lower. Domestic programs were in check. Regulations were erased. “I’m batting 4 for 5,” Reagan proclaimed.

And in fact, the economy, like a reliable family car, moved along at a steady, gentle pace and propelled the nation through the decade.

Most took comfort in this, although, ironically, the prodigy Stockman was not among them. The deficits spooked him, and he eventually quit.

All along, his confidence had been a ruse, he confessed: “None of us really understands what is going on with all these numbers.”

No More Apologies for Patriotism

America was back and America was fit. Anyone could see it, there in the handsprings of Mary Lou Retton, bouncing her way to gold, or in the smile of Vanna White, in control of all those vowels and consonants.

There was no longer any need to apologize for patriotism. The Vietnam vets finally had a monument to their heroism, and Rambo returned to gather up those boys still left behind in Asian rat holes.

The presidency, again, seemed a manageable 9 to 5 job. Reagan took no guff from the “evil empire.” With his mike supposedly off, and a window to his mind wide open, he joked that he was ready to begin bombing in five minutes.

The bombs were in production. The nation’s defense budget was doubling toward $300 billion, and those who wanted to see the bang for their buck only had to look as far as the Caribbean, to Grenada.

It may not have been a classic match-up between archrivals, but it was actual war, U.S. helicopters sweeping in above the treetops, “The Ride of the Valkyries” blaring from the speakers.

The invasion came not a moment too soon for national morale. Just two days before in Beirut, 241 servicemen had been killed when it seemed Uncle Sam was standing tall only so terrorists could get off a better shot.

That tragedy was a dour reminder of the limits of power. Even in the pumped-up ‘80s, America was unwilling to return as the world’s cop on the beat--certainly not in the jungles of Nicaragua; a private army could be hired to handle that.

But the “strong leader” was welcome to “stand up for America” by talking tough and judiciously picking his spots. If Libya wanted to hurl its bombers into a dogfight above the Gulf of Sidra, he could oblige.

And if hijackers dared toss a wheelchair-bound New Yorker off a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, U.S. fighters could chase them down. “They can run but they can’t hide,” Reagan said of those terrorists.

This threat went double for that “flaky barbarian,” Moammar Kadafi. American jets shelled his barracks in a nighttime raid over Tripoli, missing him but killing his adopted infant daughter and injuring two of his young sons.

The attack in Libya had its flaws, but the post-mortems were riveting, how pilots cruised in low to avoid radar detection and aimed through the cross hairs of infrared bombing scopes. It was the fist of an earlier America.

Democrats, on the sidelines, by and large remained uncritical of this occasional gunplay. After all, Sheriff Reagan mostly fired in the air, harmlessly busting up the bullies on a weekend drunk.

And besides, in the heat of a national pep rally, any downbeat voice was easily scorned as something whiny and defeatist.

Back in 1984, Walter F. Mondale accepted his party’s nomination by pledging to raise taxes. “(Reagan) won’t tell you, and I just did,” he said in a gambit of candor that helped bury him and Geraldine A. Ferraro beneath the landslide.

They did not echo Reagan’s “dream of an America that was a shining city on a hill.” They did not feel a messianic optimism as he did: “America’s light is eternal . . . every promise . . . still golden in this land.”

Ronald Reagan left office with an approval rating the Gallup Poll placed at 68%, the highest final total since Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was the first President in 20 years not widely deemed a failure as he said his goodbys.

A Different Timekeeping

In the back rows, there was a contrary view to “morning in America,” and it placed the hands of the clock nearer high noon: the nation on a binge of nostalgia when it needed to face the realities of a changing world.

By this timekeeping, America had preferred swallowing a dose of Valium to answering those god awful questions in the headlines: Can America Compete? What Happened to Quality? Will We Ever Close the Trade Gap?

Reagan, says biographer Garry Wills, was a “rabble-soother” who “not only represent(ed) the past, but resurrect(ed) it as the promise of the future.”

In that simpler, glorious past, Big Government did not try to play social engineer, with endless handouts and mugger-loving sociology and an interfering hand in the decisions of the workplace.

Reagan may not have put an end to all that, but he did stop its growth--if not with policy, then with the huge financial debt he and the Democratic Congress ran up. There would be little extra cash for social experimentation.

To liberals and others the ‘80s, then, came to seem something of a delayed counterrevolution to the progressive impulses of the ‘60s, even a revenge: the Empire Strikes Back.

They were left to attempt rear-guard actions on Supreme Court nominations, civil rights laws, pollution and the now fiercely contested struggle--in consciences and in the streets--over abortion.

To many of them, Reagan’s past as an actor was symbolic, as if America had hired a sentimental old showman to help it rediscover itself in John Wayne Westerns, Horatio Alger stories and all the other great myths.

A mid-1980s commercial for Vicks cough syrup featured soap opera star Peter Bergman. “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on television,” he began, as if this fact gave him added credibility.

To comedian David Steinberg, the ad seemed an apt metaphor for the Reagan years: I’m not a President, but I play one on television.

The long-running Reagan Show, rhapsodic to most, struck adversaries as employing a cast of cynical heavies, as outlandish as anything on “Dallas.”

Interior Secretary James G. Watt called environmentalists a “left-wing cult.” Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III stated there are not “many suspects who are innocent of a crime.” Image-maker Michael K. Deaver was convicted of perjury.

Reagan himself sometimes seemed empty-headed, obliging critics with examples. Late in the presidency he confessed that he never really understood “what this throw-weight business is all about.”

At times, even former aides joined in the ridicule, calling the White House a “ghost ship” or revealing that the President’s schedule was planned to fit the calculations of Nancy Reagan’s astrologer.

Year after year, scandals sprang up that related to slack management: the misused Superfund for environmental cleanup, the profligate Pentagon, the leaky weapons plants, the bankrupt S&Ls.;

Iran-Contra was the humdinger. Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, a White House Jack-of-all-trades, tried what he called a “neat idea”--using the funds from a weapons sale to Iran to illegally ship arms to the Nicaraguan rebels.

Under whose orders? That may never be known. Reagan admitted approving the Iran deal, but then testified to the opposite. Finally, he said, “The simple truth is, I don’t remember--period.”

As usual, the President was able to emerge from the deep smoke of scandal. How long can this keep going on, critics wondered. And what is the source of the endless appeal?

The answer, at least to writer Mark Crispin Miller, was Reagan’s “earnest yokelism . . . sincere and innocent as anyone ever played by Mickey Rooney.”

And Mickey Rooney never faced high noon.

A Theory of Inevitable Decline

In 1987, Paul Kennedy, an obscure Yale professor, published a best seller that amounted to history’s version of the law of gravity: Great powers that rise eventually fall.

The United States had come out of World War II a colossus among cripples, possessing about 40% of the world’s wealth and power, he said. Inevitably, the nation was slipping toward a far humbler share, maybe less than half that.

Of course, a smaller proportion of an ever-bigger pie is not necessarily so bad. That had been the strategy of post-war America, offering a leg up to other countries, even former enemies.

But by the 1980s the new competition seemed unnerving. Had the United States given other nations a boost only to be left behind? People could see signs of decline almost everywhere.

The Japanese had won the war of the American living room; their first beachhead was the TV and then they rolled on unopposed into the video recorder and the CD player.

Worse yet, the best-made cars in the showrooms were Japanese. The auto had been America’s great pride, a marvel of mass production, a machine to subdue the distances and a love seat for adolescent embraces.

Now, America suddenly seemed second-best. In 1986, a Harris poll showed that 58% of U.S. businessmen believed the highest-quality products were Japanese; only 21% chose American. What was the United States doing about it?

Invariably, the answers to that were like one of those exercises in perspective: the cup half empty or half full. America was getting licked badly but also fighting back gamely.

The big knock against U.S. corporations was that they pocketed short-term profits instead of investing them in equipment and research. This lack of foresight led to a kind of blindness, and the awful result was smokeless smokestacks and a million workers singing the shutdown blues.

But other U.S. industries, such as computers and pharmaceuticals, had been fairly nimble throughout--and still others retooled and thrived; by the late ‘80s, even steel was on a comeback.

A great scramble was on, now on a field where America had no sure dominion; able players were all over. The scoreboard was a graph that showed the United States in a trade deficit each year.

Still, even this tallying grew in perplexity. Who played for whom? American companies, unable to lick their foreign competitors, often joined them. International partnerships flourished.

Besides, manufacturing had become a great vagabond, salaries and profits dispersing every which way. Zenith made TVs in Mexico, and Sony produced them in the United States. IBM was a major exporter of computers from Japan.

The Pontiac LeMans was designed in West Germany, then assembled in South Korea. Honda Accord coupes sold in Tokyo were built in Marysville, Ohio.

The Economy’s Peculiar Tide

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, American workers could depend on raises that sped them ahead of inflation--and the idea of an improving standard of living was accepted on faith as if some natural law.

But wages flattened out in the ‘70s, leaving workers to idle against the current. Then, when the economy perked up in the ‘80s, it brought a peculiar tide that lifted some boats only to swamp others.

Generally hurt were younger males with no college education, says economist Frank Levy, who has studied the income trends. Most of the men had been blue-collar workers. And once, unions had been their armor.

But the labor movement was little protection against the closing of an obsolete mill. Unions, most often, were busy negotiating givebacks. Their numbers declined by 3.1 million and now include only 16.8% of the work force.

Many factory workers switched to lower-paying jobs and learned of a dreary new term: downward mobility.

America was being deindustrialized, people commonly complained, although this was not quite true. Despite all the plant closings, U.S. manufacturing output was actually on a steady climb.

Rather, the production was shifting from goods that depended on intensive labor to those that required superior knowledge, such as microchips, says management expert Peter Drucker; profitable industries needed fewer hands.

This was a dramatic transformation, and it combined with a continuing trend toward single-parent families to further stretch the already-great chasm between America’s rich and poor.

From 1979 to 1988, the top 20% of family incomes rose an inflation-adjusted average of $9,109 to $84,938 a year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau; at the bottom 20%, income actually fell $576 to a meager $8,880.

If, in better-off households, Mom worked by choice, she worked by necessity in poorer ones. In 1988, 57.1% of married women with children under age 6 were in the labor force--against 43.3% in 1979.

Couples juggled their three identities--parents, spouses and workers--like so many bowling pins in the air. For them, even fast food was too slow. It was better to call Domino’s--they delivered.

Stress had a headlock on everyone. The clock was divided into regular time and quality time. Dr. Ruth advised the harried not to forget to have sex.

The poor had little left to save, the rich scant impulse to try. Savings as a percentage of income, as high as 9.4% in 1973, declined most years thereafter, to as low as 3.2% in 1987, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.

Individuals were making the same choices as their government: It was OK to run up a debt so long as credit was available. MasterCard charged enormous interest rates, but why wait to buy? Prices kept going up.

For the federal government, interest alone on the national debt totaled $165 billion by 1989--a stunning 14.6% of the entire budget, or more than the government spent on health care for the elderly and the poor.

Economists argued about this astonishing obligation, some warning that the nation had foreordained a future of fiscal paralysis--and some insisting that this was a lot of old-fashioned, Chicken Little nonsense: just look at the economy grow.

Still others said the problem with the debt was not so much its immensity--it was not that high in relation to the gross national product--but in the way the money had been squandered.

Where were the dollars for roads and bridges and landfills overwhelmed by mounds of garbage? And what of society’s weakest links--its poor, its unskilled, its addicted?

There were long, dark spaces between the 1,000 points of light. Too many of the needy slipped through the safety net onto the cold, hard pavement. They made a home for themselves in a doorway or on top of a steam grate.

Poverty rates were at their worst since the late ‘60s: 32 million living at the edge. They had few champions, although one, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, made a strong bid for the White House--a run against the wind at least in part because of his skin color.

Among the poor were some now called an underclass, people severed from the rest, their behavior not only deemed aberrant but unchangeable. They were ceded entire neighborhoods, consigned to their own fearsome territory.

Americans with money drove by only when they could not avoid it--or to buy crack. The taste for drugs knew no restrictions of social class or venue--the office, the schoolroom, the manicured turf of a baseball stadium.

Employers demanded a urine sample along with a resume. Hospitals tested babies; thousands of newborns--estimates go as high as 375,000 each year--now suffered congenital damage from their mother’s drug use.

What was there to do? Cities seemed ever harsher, people lingering over the nightmares that came to life: a jogger’s terror in Central Park or a racial killing in Howard Beach.

Bernhard H. Goetz, “the subway vigilante,” applied his own solution, answering four panhandlers with a .38, wheeling left to right.

The public wanted the courts to get tougher on dope dealers and other scum. And this was done. By late 1989, the rapidly swelling population in jails and prisons passed 1 million.

America did not spare the rod, nor did it spare much else. There was little willpower, and less tax money, for attempting the old and maligned solutions--job programs and public housing and keeping welfare apace with inflation.

What of new answers? Few came forth. In the ‘80s, the poor no longer had a sympathetic face. The country, like the President, was more concerned with “abuses . . . people with no real need . . . imposing on their fellow citizens.”

America was still a compassionate nation, but it was for the particular and not the general. There was a little girl who fell into an abandoned well in Texas. For two days, rescuers desperately drilled and chipped away.

TV went live; millions watched. Finally, weary crane operators delicately lifted the toddler from the shaft. Cheers erupted, and a pride of accomplishment rippled across the land. This child was safe.

The Money Game of the Super Rich

Phenomenal wealth was nothing new in America, but had it ever been so conspicuously displayed? Donald J. Trump affixed his own name to buildings and hurried between them in a $2-million helicopter. Leona Helmsley declared herself a queen in a coronation of public relations.

The most-popular annual issue of Forbes magazine listed the 400 richest Americans; by 1987, only billionaires were in the top 49. Publisher Malcolm Forbes himself made the list. He celebrated his 70th birthday by flying 750 of his glamorous friends to a black-tie party at his palace in Morocco.

America showed patience, and quite often appetite, for these vanities. The super rich were profiled in magazines as frequently as movie stars, the stories often reading like an expanded Neiman-Marcus catalogue, with the subject glancing at his Piaget watch or writing a check with a Mont Blanc pen.

“Money is the new sex,” was one popular maxim for the fast times, although there was enough left of the latter to set Gary Hart adrift on the good ship Monkey Business. Money and sex were Satan’s devices to rid television of the Rev. Jim Bakker.

The stock market was on an amazing bull run, the Dow closing in on 3,000; even the small investor jumped into the action. Computers united the world’s financial centers. Millions of dollars surged between continents in a single blip across a screen. The pace seemed frenzied, but things were flush.

Capital was plentiful, and the money game became a free-for-all. Formerly, the bond market had functioned in a gentlemanly way, open mostly to blue-chip companies with solid balance sheets.

But now a young genius named Michael Milken convinced investors that the “junk bonds” of smaller or unproven companies--once supposed high risks--were actually a better buy. A dam broke and billions in capital rushed in.

Multimillionaires sat outside Milken’s Beverly Hills office, awaiting his time. Some were “corporate raiders” who wanted to make money the new-fashioned way--using junk bonds to buy a company at a premium and then selling off its parts to make payments on the enormous debt.

On a few occasions, this predation actually led to sounder corporate management, but most often the entire deal was done only to squeeze out a cash bonanza irrelevant to the company’s future--the workers be damned.

For generations, the big corporation had been an American bedrock, but now companies the size of Safeway or Gulf Oil were mere targets. Jobs and pensions and seniority were forever vulnerable.

Quick millions could be made just by getting wind of a takeover attempt, then betting on the outcome by buying stock. One of the craftiest at this was Ivan F. Boesky, a frantic man with three telephones in his limousine.

To Boesky, greed was almost a ritualistic chant. “Greed is all right,

by the way,” he told business students during a commencement address at UC Berkeley. “I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy.”

In all this deal-making, there were fortunes to be made without producing even a single widget. Each storming of the boardroom required investment bankers and attorneys, all taking huge fees for the attacking and defending.

New millionaires were created at a pace of 100,000 per year, according to Thomas Stanley of the Affluent Market Institute in Atlanta.

If there was any public backlash, it was aimed at so-called yuppies, young urban professionals who were thought to have allowed their values to decay in a selfish quest for an aerobic body, a piquant Chardonnay and a well-tuned Volvo.

“Yuppie” quickly became a social slur used against the entire baby boom generation, even though only 5% fit the vital particulars: ages 25 to 39, professionals or managers, income of at least $30,000.

Possibly, Americans saw in the “pervasive” yuppie something that they preferred not to recognize in themselves: self-absorption, careerism, a tolerance for avarice and a disregard for the poor.

Anyway, the word has largely disappeared, gone with much of the fast times, after the Big Crash of ‘87, after Milken’s indictment for fraud, after Boesky--greed’s great purveyor--was convicted of insider trading and sent away to three years of penance.

A Competing Apocalypse

As always, there were doomsayers. They warned of nuclear war: the blast, the whoosh, an eternity of darkness. And then came something else, as if one version of apocalypse had need of competition from another.

The temperature of the planet was rising, scientists cautioned, their logic reasonable enough that even politicians began to listen. Gases that were routinely emitted into the air--the waste of society’s autos and industry--were blocking the escape of heat into the atmosphere: a greenhouse effect.

Natural disasters, then, came to seem premonitions as well. Was the drought of ’88 a sign of global warming? And what of Hurricane Hugo? In decades ahead, the heated climate was predicted to turn temperate places into tropical ones, to send the seas surging across the shores, to parch the nation’s Corn Belt.

There was another foreboding as well. Man-made chemicals were eating a vast hole through the ozone layer that protects the planet from the cancer-causing ultraviolet light of the sun. There was no obvious way to fix it.

To some, these were portents that a threshold had been passed. It is the end of nature, says writer Bill McKibben. By this, he does not mean the end of the world, but the end of man’s relationship to nature as something separate and wild. Nature now bears the permanent stamp of man.

All this may be mere hand-wringing, of course, an intellectual’s version of the disaster movie. Only time will separate the prescient from the paranoid. Science and technology inevitably display several faces, the better to acknowledge the calamities and dilemmas that come with progress.

And so in the ‘80s, as yet more span was added to human life, Alzheimer’s disease, like an eraser across a diary, dimmed the memory of one person in five over age 75, according to researchers at Harvard.

Women signed contracts to conceive babies for other couples, but then could not bear to give up the child. Embryos were frozen for safekeeping, but when the parents divorced, who retained custody?

Doctors replaced worn-out hearts with new ones made from polyurethane and aluminum. The bionic patient then walked from the hospital tethered to 6-foot hoses and a mobile air compressor.

If only such a breakthrough had been discovered for AIDS, the disease that stole the abandon from lovers. Its killing spree was international--so feared that many victims also became castoffs, left to shrivel away in lonely beds.

Woefully, cures were few; typically, gadgets were many. They enriched--and cluttered--people’s lives.

Phones became portable. Camcorders joined cameras as the family’s historian. Fax machines outpaced the postman by two to three days. Personal computers opened a warehouse of data to everyone, including the nosy and the mischievous.

The TV was still every home’s command center, and now nearly three viewers in five chose from the smorgasbord of cable; they switched channels impatiently by remote control, watching several shows at once, straddling the generations between the families of Cosby and the Bradys and Andy of Mayberry.

Images leaped oceans via satellites. News, now more immediate, also seemed more and more a part of the barrage of entertainments. Political campaigning dropped all pretense; it was about TV packaging. Debates were aesthetics. The spin doctors hurried in to answer: Who gave the best performance?

In this high-speed, high-stakes world, accidents will happen--and horrible ones did. A pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, leaked a dense fog of deadly gas. Eleven million gallons of crude gushed from a rip in a tanker, despoiling the beauty and abundance of the Alaskan shore.

What of the assurances that fast work and containment booms would limit such a spill? This was among myths too readily accepted, like beliefs in NASA’s dedication to safety and the radar capabilities of the guided missile cruiser Vincennes.

The Soviets put their great faith in the world’s finest air defense system. Then on a summer evening in 1987, a 19-year-old West German pilot in a single-engine plane circled the Kremlin and buzzed Lenin’s Tomb.

He had flown in from Helsinki, Finland, and he landed unmolested on the cobblestones that lead to St. Basil’s Cathedral and Red Square. “I just wanted to talk to some Russians,” Matthias Rust, the young pilot, said.

At Decade’s End: The Great Gift

So then it was past, a cork in the swift current, the decade free now to drift across the generations and find its place among moon landings and Hula Hoops and the 38th parallel.

Toward the end, Reagan himself--in a mood of accommodation--went to Red Square. He ambled beside Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who hoisted a toddler. “Shake hands with Grandfather Reagan,” the Soviet leader said.

The two men had become friends. On this sunny day they returned to the Kremlin. And what of the “evil empire?” Reagan was asked by a reporter. No, no, he insisted: “I was talking about another time, another era.”

Perestroika had pulled up the Iron Curtain, and behind it the tired wizards of communism were busy at the instrument panel, trying to maintain the facade; theirs was an Oz without a rainbow.

The grand dream of Soviet communism had succeeded in supplanting the feudal power of the czars and forging a great industrial state. But there was no paradise in sight for the worker, just the lock step of dictatorship.

Last month, on the 72nd anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, thousands in Moscow marched in a bold mock of the customary military parade. One large banner in the crowd read: “Workers of the world, we are sorry.”

Across Eastern Europe, history spun like a newsreel on fast forward. Mass rallies toppled governments. Berlin, like some modern Jericho, lost its great wall. The Cold War, which for 40 years had hooked the planet to an I.V. of fear, was declared at an end.

This sudden, breathtaking eruption of freedom was the great gift of the ‘80s, even if there was not enough of it to spare for Tian An Men Square and apartheid and the oppressed in dozens of poverty-enfeebled nations.

America felt triumphant. For so long, one of its sustaining myths had been the bipolar world, good versus evil, democracy versus communism, the eagle and the bear in combat for the destiny of mankind.

Heavy costs had been paid, among them the financial burdens of a military empire. Now the United States stepped from the ring as the seeming victor. What now? There were so many questions.

Would America need a replacement myth? And what would it be? How badly did the Cold War leave the nation scathed? Were its allies merely cheering at ringside, holding Uncle Sam’s coat while going through his pockets?

Reagan, of course, was no longer in the White House with his reassuring answers. He left office as the ‘80s wound down, wondering in a farewell interview “how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.”

The presidency was passed along to his faithful understudy, George Bush, an experienced statesman if not a man with star power.

Bush has eased into the role as best he can, at times familiarly thrusting a flag skyward and pledging that morning in America--the great momentum of feeling better--will go on.

Maybe so. This is hard to tell. Invariably things come back to: Better for whom? Always, there is morning in one place and night in another, just as the shining city on the hill looms above the darkness of the canyon.

Perhaps these many Americas were never meant to find each other. But if so, it is up ahead, somewhere in the swift current of another time.

Times researchers Anna M. Virtue and Nina Green contributed to this story.

Economic Ups and Downs Inflation Rate 1980: 12.5% 1988: 4.4% Source: Commerce Dept. National Debt, Billions of dollars 1980: $908 1988: $2,860 Source: Office of Management & Budget Gross National Product, In billions of 1982 dollars 1980: $3,233 1988: $3,975 Source: Commerce Dept. Trade Balance, Billions of dollars

Exports Imports 1980 $220.6 $244.9 1988 $320.3 $459.9

Trade Deficit, Billions of dollars 1980: -$24.2 1988: -$139.5 Source: Commerce Dept. The American Pie In the 1980s, an increasing share of U.S. income went to those families in the top 20%-enough sothat only this top group had a bigger piece of the pie as the decade came to a close. 1980: Richest fifth: 41.6% Poorest fifth: 5.1% Second poorest fifth: 11.6% Middle fifth: 17.5% Next richest fifth: 24.3% 1988: Richest fifth: 44% Poorest fifth: 4.6% Second poorest fifth: 10.7% Middle fifth: 16.7% Next richest fifth: 24% Source: Census Bureau Electronic Explosion U.S. Households with Personal Computers 1983: 7% 1989: 22% Source: Electronic Industries T.V. Households in the U.S. With Cable 1983: 22.6% 1989: 55.6% Source: National Cable TV Assn. Sales of Camcorders in the United States 1985: 5 million 1988: 2 million 1989: 2.5 *million *estimate Source: Electronic Industries