did so well at the Academy Awards.Terms of Endear-
mentwas something of a surprise hit in 1983 when it
won a significant number of Oscars. The film beat
outThe Big Chill,The Dresser,The Right Stuff, andTe n-
der Merciesfor Best Picture and James L. Brooks, di-
recting his first picture, won Best Director, beating
out a formidable lineup of veterans: Bruce Beres-
ford, Mike Nichols, Peter Yates, and even Ingmar
Bergman. MacLaine won Best Actress and Nichol-
son won Best Supporting Actor. Brooks also won for
Best Adapted Screenplay from Larry McMurtry’s
novel. A sequel,The Evening Star(1996), allowed
MacLaine to reprise her eccentric character Aurora
Greenway as she raises her grandchildren left be-
hind when their mother died.
Impact Terms of Endearment struck a chord with
movie audiences in the early 1980’s with its depic-
tion of romance between older characters Aurora
Greenway and Garrett Breedlove, its exploration of
a single-parent family, and its heartfelt rendering of
the death of a young mother who must leave her
children.
Further Reading
Evans, Peter William, and Celestion Deleyto, eds.
Terms of Endearment: Hollywood Romantic Comedy in
the 1980’s and 1990’s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni-
versity Press, 1998.
McMurtry, Larry.Terms of Endearment. New York: Si-
mon & Schuster, 1975.
Speidel, Constance. “Whose Terms of Endearment?”
Literature/Film Quarterly12, no. 4 (1984): 271-273.
Charles L. P. Silet
See also Abortion; Academy Awards;Big Chill, The;
Feminism; Film in the United States; Nicholson, Jack.
Terrorism
Definition Acts of violence committed by
individuals or groups seeking to influence
public opinion or public policy
Although incidents of terrorism within the United States
and Canada during the 1980’s were fewer in number and
overall effect than the two previous decades, several notable
incidents occurred.
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI), there were at least two hundred terrorist inci-
dents in the United States during the 1980’s; the
largest single type of incident involved bombing,
which made up seventy-eight of the incidents. Other
types of incidents included armed robbery, a rocket
attack, sniper attacks, arson and other property de-
struction, and assassinations. While some terrorist
groups involved in these attacks had been active
since the 1960’s and 1970’s, a few new organizations
grabbed headlines with their armed activities, in-
cluding the white supremacist Christian Identity
and the neo-Nazi movement. In addition, certain
leftist groups re-formed under different names and
with different personnel.
Canadian Incidents Canada experienced fourteen
acts of terrorism during the 1980’s. Three were at-
tributed to groups pushing for a Sikh nation sepa-
rate from India. Three others were attributed to Ar-
menian nationalists targeting Turkish government
representatives. One incident was committed by a
former U.S. Air Force officer protesting the visit of
Pope John Paul II. The officer’s bombing attack re-
sulted in the deaths of three people in Montreal’s
Victoria Station. Another incident involved a man
from the Canadian Armed Forces who was opposed
to the Parti Québécois’s desire for Quebec to secede
from Canada. The man attacked the Quebec parlia-
ment building, killing three individuals. The anti-
Castro group Omega 7 bombed the Cuban embassy
in Montreal in 1980.
On October 14, 1982, the left-wing anarchist
group Direct Action bombed a Toronto Litton fac-
tory that manufactured triggers for U.S. military
cruise missiles. Direct Action was also responsible
for the bombings of three Vancouver pornographic
bookstores and a hydroelectric substation on Van-
couver Island, British Columbia.
Although Canada was the site of far fewer inci-
dents than the United States, the bombing of an air-
plane departing from Montreal Airport was one of
the deadliest incidents of the decade. On June 23,
1985, Air India Flight 182 was flying over the Atlantic
Ocean when a bomb exploded, killing all 329 people
on board. Canadian police believed that the leader
of the terrorist attack was Talwinder Singh Parmar,
head of the militant Sikh separatist group Babbar
Khalsa.
Domestic Organizations Foremost among terrorist
organizations in terms of numbers of attacks were
a number of groups fighting for the independenceThe Eighties in America Terrorism 959