After the fourth negotiating session I knew it was time for some new ammunition; the stalling tactic was wearing thin. I got a lucky break. It so happened that Local 47's patience was also wearing thin, and I heard through my network that the union would soon hold a strike vote. Well, nothing makes as sweet music to the ears of anti-union management as the word strike—particularly in the fall of 1981. In August of that year the most powerful man in the world, the president of the United States of America, had pulled off the biggest union bust in history. That month President Ronald Reagan fired thirteen thousand striking federal air traffic controllers—who were striking essentially for safer working conditions— and allowed their employers to hire permanent replacements. Reagan also had five union leaders prosecuted under a never-before-used law prohibiting strikes against the government. In firing the strikers, and calling their leaders criminals, the president, himself a former union official as onetime president of the Screen Actors Guild, displayed his contempt for organized labor. The firing annihilated the air controllers union, PATCO, and crippled all labor organizations by destroying their most powerful economic weapon, the strike. What I did not know was that a few months later, Reagan would outlaw PATCO itself. Thus, in ninety days Ronald Reagan recast the crimes of union busting as acts of patriotism. When word came to me of Local 47's strike vote, I grinned. I knew the moves. And I would start making them immediately.