By Vernon E. Jordan, Jr.

Twenty years ago this month, the pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square stunned the government of China and electrified the world. (The government, however, quickly recovered and brutally suppressed the demonstrations, and ever since has blocked any acknowledgement within China that they occurred.)

But, in fact, Tiananmen Square was just one of a series of dramatic events in the year 1989 which underscored the breathtaking changes roiling the old world order. Indeed, one could say the events of that year ushered in the world we are living in today. As the year opened, however, no one could have imagined what was to come-not even so astute an observer of the global scene as Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., the former president of the National Urban League who was then one of Washington’s most powerful lawyers and a counselor to business leaders the world over.

In early January 1989, Jordan was preparing to deliver a speech to Japan’s leading business association when, viewed in hindsight, the first of the year’s signal events occurred. This speech is included in Jordan’s 2008 collection of speeches, the book Make It Plain: Standing Up and Speaking Out.

In setting out the reasons the speech was then so important, Jordan, a longtime NAACP Legal Defense Fund board member, offers a striking summary of some of the central economic concerns of the 1980s-and an acute description of the extraordinary confluence of events of what he described as “A Year of Cascading Change.”

– The Editors

A Year of Cascading Change: 1989

By Vernon E. Jordan, Jr.

My most pressing business concern in early January 1989 was fine-tuning a speech I was to give in ten days hence in Japan to Japan’s most prestigious and powerful association of business executives, the Keidanren. My mission was to set forth the concept of corporate social responsibility- American-style-and help reaffirm the message they had been hearing from many of their American counterparts: that this was one means of reducing the tension-and outright hostility- that had increasingly come to characterize American-Japanese relations.

Economic issues were at the heart of it. In the mid-1980s, Japan had begun flexing its newfound economic might in ways that startled and angered many Americans. No longer was it just the matter of Japanese-made cars being widely seen as a better product, and Japan’s auto industry regarded as more innovative and efficient. By the mid-1980s, Japanese business prowess had also overwhelmed a good part of the American electronics industry, from semiconductors to television sets. And while Japanese products streamed into the American market, to be eagerly purchased by American consumers, Japan’s restrictions on foreign business activities in Japan and its protectionist trade policies rankled American companies and American politicians.

For all its growing tensions, however, the debate about Japanese business investments in the United States had largely been confined for most of the 1980s to the high-level arena of congressional hearings, meetings of governmental trade and diplomatic delegations and think-tank sponsored discussions, and the opinion pages of major newspapers. What transformed it late in the decade into a bitter public controversy was the juxtaposition of two things.

The first was the publication of several well-received books, such as Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, that discussed the newly powerful economic competition America faced from countries in Europe and Asia, including Japan. Those books declared that these countries’ economic surge was substantially paring America’s global economic hegemony, which had effectively been unchallenged since the end of World War II. Numerous conservative commentators and many ordinary Americans took umbrage at the notion that America’s place in the world was “declining.”

Second, the buying spree by Japanese businesses at the top of America’s business and commercial and real estate markets intensified the general economic anxiety. As the decade deepened, several of America’s most iconic companies, such as Firestone Tire and Rubber Company (which was bought by the Bridgestone Corporation of Japan in mid-1988), were figuratively sprouting a banner that read: Under new management.

The most stunning acquisitions were to come in late 1989. In October of that year, Japan’s Sony Corporation bought the film studio Columbia Pictures Entertainment, Inc., for more that $ 3 billion. A few weeks later the giant Japanese development group Mitsubishi Estate Company bought a controlling stake in several prominent midtown office buildings – including the landmark Rockefeller Center. The response of one New Yorker walking by Rockefeller Center when told of the deal by a reporter seemed to speak for many within and outside Gotham: “What?” the person said. “I don’t believe you.”

It became a cliché in some quarters in the United States for these deals to be described as an “invasion”- even though all of them had been sought by the American companies’ executives and directors. In that regard, the charged word invasion and the attitudes behind it not only indicated that some Americans still thought of Japan in terms of the bitter war the two countries had fought in the South Pacific forty years earlier. It also reflected the fact that the controversy had an unmistakable racial facet to it. Many Japanese and some Americans asserted that Japanese investors were being unfairly criticized for having the skill and the resources to astutely apply standard capitalist practices to the American market. These observers noted that in actual dollar terms, British ownership of assets in America outstripped that of Japan, and Canadian and Dutch business investments were nearly as prominent. Yet those investments drew little notice and no hostility.

That flaring of the simmering controversy was eleven months away as I prepared in early January for my first visit to Japan. My preparations were interrupted on January 6 when the news flashed that Hirohito, emperor since 1927, had died. His death was expected; he had been ill for some time with cancer. Nonetheless, given the admiration of him in Japan and the reverence the Japanese held for tradition, I wondered if the leaders of the Keidanren would ask me to postpone my trip.

They did not. I gave the speech on the day originally planned, advising my listeners in some detail about their need to expand the boundaries of their thinking concerning what constituted good business practices and what being a good corporate citizen meant to fit the American landscape. This advice included taking an active role in community improvement projects, supporting voluntary associations in the arts and education, and recognizing that the significant inclusion in their American workforce of blacks, other minorities, and women matters. Given that Japanese society placed great store in homogeneity and conformity, I especially wanted to impress upon them that they should understand and acknowledge in their practices the importance of America’s great diversity.

I was focused on making sure my message got through to my Japanese hosts even as I conveyed my sympathies to them regarding the death of Emperor Hirohito. I had no inkling, beyond the inauguration of president-elect George H.W. Bush on January 20, of the seismic shift coming. Only later, in retrospect, did I fully comprehend that the seemingly innocuous act of the Keidanren leadership sticking to their schedule even in the immediate shadow of the emperor’s death underscored what was to happen in 1989.

The year 1989 was the pivot point in moving the world from one era to the next. It was a year of cascading changes that introduced the world’s nations and peoples to a new arrangement of global forces and relationships- the complex of issues and circumstances we are grappling with today.

Consider these crucial developments that occurred during those months:

?The Soviet Union was listing badly from the failed ideology of communism. The economic and political reforms its charismatic and forwarding-thinking president, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, tried to implement would not be enough to prevent either the USSR’s dissolution or Russia’s eventual slide into a decade of widespread political and economic corruption at the top of its society and increasingly desperate social conditions for the Russian masses.

?By 1989, the USSR’s internal problems had produced a stunning spiraling impact throughout Europe, intensifying with lightning speed the “liberalization” and “democracy” movements in country after country of the old, tottering Warsaw Pact. By November 1989, the process of disintegration of the Iron Curtain, which had formed one ideological boundary of the forty-year cold war, was virtually complete. The Communist leaders of East Germany, their hold on power rapidly crumbling beneath them, opened the gates of its great symbol of modern political oppression, the Berlin Wall, as hundreds of thousands of East and West Berliners, who would soon live in a unified city, danced in the streets.

That kind of dancing would soon spread to the far end of another continent, Africa. For by then, it had also become clear that apartheid, South Africa’s brutal system of racial oppression, once seen as being deeply entrenched there as communism was in Eastern Europe, was swiftly collapsing, too. Three months later, in early February 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of a prison near Cape Town, a free man for the first time in nearly thirty years. Amid a delirious worldwide celebration, Mandela began the negotiations that would bring the vote to black South Africans and majority rule to that country for the first time.

Some observers noted with wonder and hope that these two oppressive regimes met the same ironic fate. They had depended for their existence on the threat and application of brute force. But in the end their swift collapse occurred without violence, driven substantially by the power of words extolling the virtues of democracy. One American diplomat, a veteran of European cold war politics, told a reporter: “I guess history comes in waves, and this is one that is clearly cresting. It is not coups we are talking about. It is mass movement, people in the streets.”

The spirit of liberation did not bloom everywhere, however. In June 1989, the Chinese government unleashed its military against pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where protestors had camped out since April. The number who were killed-some put it in the hundreds-has never been accurately established. And soon, in the Balkans and in Rwanda, the dream of diverse populations living among each other peacefully turned into a nightmarish genocidal war. Those eruptions of savagery put the world on notice that the capacity of human beings to do great evil in the name of nationalism was undiminished- and underscored all the more the imperative of using words and speech for good.

Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. a former president of the National Urban League, is a senior managing drector of Lazard Freres & Company LLC and a senior counsel with Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, LLP. He is also a member of the board of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.