1985 in the United States

Decades:	1960s ; 1970s ; 1980s ; 1990s ; 2000s ;
See also:	History of the United States (1980–1991) ; Timeline of United States history (1970–1989) ; List of years in the United States ;

Last updated March 16, 2025

Incumbents

Federal government

Howard Baker (R-Tennessee) (until January 3)

Bob Dole (R-Kansas) (starting January 3)

Congress: 98th (until January 3), 99th (starting January 3)

Governors and lieutenant governors
Governors Governor of Alabama: George Wallace (Democratic) Governor of Alaska: Bill Sheffield (Democratic) Governor of Arizona: Bruce Babbitt (Democratic) Governor of Arkansas: Bill Clinton (Democratic) Governor of California: George Deukmejian (Republican) Governor of Colorado: Richard Lamm (Democratic) Governor of Connecticut: William A. O'Neill (Democratic) Governor of Delaware: Pierre S. du Pont IV (Republican) (until January 15), Michael Castle (Republican) (starting January 15) Governor of Florida: Bob Graham (Democratic) Governor of Georgia: Joe Frank Harris (Democratic) Governor of Hawaii: George Ariyoshi (Democratic) Governor of Idaho: John V. Evans (Democratic) Governor of Illinois: James R. Thompson (Republican) Governor of Indiana: Robert D. Orr (Republican) Governor of Iowa: Terry E. Branstad (Republican) Governor of Kansas: John W. Carlin (Democratic) Governor of Kentucky: Martha Layne Collins (Democratic) Governor of Louisiana: Edwin W. Edwards (Democratic) Governor of Maine: Joseph E. Brennan (Democratic) Governor of Maryland: Harry R. Hughes (Democratic) Governor of Massachusetts: Michael Dukakis (Democratic) Governor of Michigan: James Blanchard (Democratic) Governor of Minnesota: Rudy Perpich (Democratic) Governor of Mississippi: William Allain (Democratic) Governor of Missouri: Kit Bond (Republican) (until January 14), John Ashcroft (Republican) (starting January 14) Governor of Montana: Ted Schwinden (Democratic) Governor of Nebraska: Bob Kerrey (Democratic) Governor of Nevada: Richard Bryan (Democratic) Governor of New Hampshire: John H. Sununu (Republican) Governor of New Jersey: Thomas Kean (Republican) Governor of New Mexico: Toney Anaya (Democratic) Governor of New York: Mario Cuomo (Democratic) Governor of North Carolina: Jim Hunt (Democratic) (until January 5), James G. Martin (Republican) (starting January 5) Governor of North Dakota: Allen I. Olson (Republican) (until January 1), George A. Sinner (Democratic) (starting January 1) Governor of Ohio: Dick Celeste (Democratic) Governor of Oklahoma: George Nigh (Democratic) Governor of Oregon: Victor G. Atiyeh (Republican) Governor of Pennsylvania: Dick Thornburgh (Republican) Governor of Rhode Island: J. Joseph Garrahy (Democratic) (until January 1), Edward D. DiPrete (Republican) (starting January 1) Governor of South Carolina: Richard Riley (Democratic) Governor of South Dakota: William J. Janklow (Republican) Governor of Tennessee: Lamar Alexander (Republican) Governor of Texas: Mark White (Democratic) Governor of Utah: Scott M. Matheson (Democratic) (until January 7), Norman H. Bangerter (Republican) (starting January 7) Governor of Vermont: Richard A. Snelling (Republican) (until January 10), Madeleine M. Kunin (Democratic) (starting January 10) Governor of Virginia: Chuck Robb (Democratic) Governor of Washington: John Spellman (Republican) (until January 16), Booth Gardner (Democratic) (starting January 16) Governor of West Virginia: Jay Rockefeller (Democratic) (until January 14), Arch A. Moore Jr. (Republican) (starting January 14) Governor of Wisconsin: Tony Earl (Democratic) Governor of Wyoming: Edgar J. Herschler (Democratic) Lieutenant governors Lieutenant Governor of Alabama: Bill Baxley (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Alaska: Stephen McAlpine (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas: Winston Bryant (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of California: Leo T. McCarthy (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Colorado: Nancy E. Dick (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut: Joseph J. Fauliso (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Delaware: Michael N. Castle (Republican) (until January 15), Shien Biau Woo (Democratic) (starting January 15) Lieutenant Governor of Florida: Wayne Mixson (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Georgia: Zell Miller (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Hawaii: John D. Waihee III (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Idaho: David H. Leroy (Republican) Lieutenant Governor of Illinois: George H. Ryan (Republican) Lieutenant Governor of Indiana: John Mutz (Republican) Lieutenant Governor of Iowa: Robert T. Anderson (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Kansas: Thomas R. Docking (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky: Steve Beshear (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana: Robert "Bobby" Freeman (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Maryland: J. Joseph Curran (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts: John Kerry (Democratic) (until January 2), vacant (starting January 2) Lieutenant Governor of Michigan: Martha W. Griffiths (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota: Marlene Johnson (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi: Brad Dye (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Missouri: Kenneth Rothman (Democratic) (until January 14), Harriett Woods (Democratic) (starting January 14) Lieutenant Governor of Montana: George Turman (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Nebraska: Donald F. McGinley (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Nevada: Bob Cashell (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of New Mexico: Mike Runnels (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of New York: Alfred DelBello (Democratic) (until February 1), Warren M. Anderson (Republican) (starting February 1) Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina: James C. Green (Democratic) (until month and day unknown), Robert B. Jordan III (Democratic) (starting month and day unknown) Lieutenant Governor of North Dakota: Ernest Sands (Republican) (until month and day unknown), Ruth Meiers (Democratic) (starting month and day unknown) Lieutenant Governor of Ohio: Myrl H. Shoemaker (Democratic) (until July 30), vacant (starting July 30) Lieutenant Governor of Oklahoma: Spencer Bernard (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania: William Scranton III (Republican) Lieutenant Governor of Rhode Island: Thomas R. DiLuglio (Democratic) (until January 1), Richard A. Licht (Democratic) (starting January 1) Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina: Michael R. Daniel (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of South Dakota: Lowell C. Hansen II (Republican) Lieutenant Governor of Tennessee: John S. Wilder (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Texas: William P. Hobby Jr. (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Utah: David Smith Monson (Republican) (until January 7), W. Val Oveson (Republican) (starting January 7) Lieutenant Governor of Vermont: Peter Plympton Smith (Republican) Lieutenant Governor of Virginia: Richard Joseph Davis (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Washington: John Cherberg (Democratic) Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin: James Flynn (Democratic)

Events

January

January 20
- President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush are privately sworn in for a second term in office (publicly sworn in, January 21).
- Super Bowl XIX: The San Francisco 49ers defeat the Miami Dolphins 38–16 at Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto, California.
January 28 – In Hollywood, California, the charity single "We Are the World" is recorded by USA for Africa. Like the enormously successful "Do They Know It's Christmas?" that was recorded by Band Aid in the UK two months prior, the single raises money to combat the ongoing famine in Ethiopia. The American act consists of high-profile performers, including Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper and Diana Ross.

February

February 5 – Australia cancels its involvement in United States-led MX missile tests.
February 6 – President Reagan delivers his fourth State of the Union Address to the Congress. The congress sings Happy Birthday to him afterwards.^[1]
February 9 – U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena is kidnapped and murdered in Mexico (his body is discovered on March 5).
February 13 – Bobby Knight throws a chair across a basketball court.
February 14
- CNN reporter Jeremy Levin is freed from captivity in Lebanon.^[2]
- 21-year-old female singer Whitney Houston releases her debut album – Whitney Houston .^[3]
February 15 – John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club is released in theaters

March

March 1 – The GNU Manifesto by Richard Stallman is published for the first time.
March 4 – The Food and Drug Administration approves a blood test for AIDS, used since then to screen all blood donations in the United States.
March 6 – Boxer Mike Tyson makes his professional debut in Albany, New York, a match which he wins by a first-round knockout.
March 8 – A car bomb planted in Beirut by CIA mercenaries attempts to kill Islamic cleric Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. He survives, but the bomb kills more than 80 people and injures 200.
March 16 – Associated Press newsman Terry Anderson is taken hostage in Beirut (he is eventually released on December 4, 1991).
March 25 – The 57th Academy Awards, hosted by Jack Lemmon, are held at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, with Miloš Forman's Amadeus winning Best Picture and Best Director (Forman's second win), along with six other awards out of 11 nominations. The film is tied in nominations with David Lean's A Passage to India .
March 31 – WrestleMania debuts at Madison Square Garden.

April

The National Archives and Records Administration is established as an independent federal agency.^[4]
Cincinnati, Ohio–based Procter & Gamble ditches the moon & stars symbol from its packaging.
April 1 – Eighth-seeded Villanova defeats national powerhouse Georgetown, 66–64, to win the first 64-team field NCAA Tournament in Lexington, Kentucky.
April 7 – National Geographic Explorer debuts on Nickelodeon.
April 11 – The USS Coral Sea collides with the Ecuadorian tanker ship Napo off the coast of Cuba.
April 12 – 1985 El Descanso bombing: A terrorist bombing attributed to the Islamic Jihad Organization in the El Descanso restaurant near Madrid, Spain, mostly attended by U.S. personnel of the Torrejon Air Force Base, causes 18 dead (all Spaniards) and 82 injured.
April 19 – A four-day siege of white supremacist group The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord begins in Arkansas.
April 23 – Coca-Cola changes its recipe and releases New Coke. The response is overwhelmingly negative, and the original formula is back on the market in less than three months.

May

May 5 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan joins West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl for a controversial funeral service at a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, which includes the graves of 59 elite S.S. troops from World War II.
May 11 – The FBI brings charges against the suspected heads of the five Mafia families in New York City.
May 13 – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Mayor Wilson Goode orders police to storm the radical black American resistance group MOVE's headquarters to end a stand-off. The police drop an explosive device into the headquarters, killing eleven members of MOVE and destroying the homes of 61 city residents in the resulting fire.^[5]
May 15 – An explosive device sent by the Unabomber injures John Hauser at UC Berkeley.
May 19 – John Anthony Walker Jr., is arrested by the FBI for passing classified Naval communications onto the Soviets.
May 31 – Forty-one tornadoes hit in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Ontario, killing 76 people.

June

June 9 – Los Angeles Lakers win the NBA championship, defeating the Boston Celtics.
June 13 – In Auburn, Washington, police defuse a Unabomber bomb sent to Boeing.^[6]
June 14 – TWA Flight 847, carrying 153 passengers from Athens to Rome, is hijacked by a Hezbollah fringe group. One passenger, U.S. Navy Petty Officer Robert Stethem, is killed.^[7]
June 17 – John Hendricks launches the Discovery Channel in the United States.^[8]
June 20 – NeXT is founded by Steve Jobs after he resigns from Apple Computer.
June 24 – STS-51-G : Space Shuttle Discovery completes its mission, best remembered for having Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, the first Arab and first Muslim in space, as a payload specialist.
June 26
- A Walt Disney World Monorail System train catches fire in Epcot around 9:00 p.m, due to friction caused by a flat tire.
- U.S. Route 66 is officially decommissioned.

July

July 1
- Nick at Nite, a nighttime program service with an emphasis on classic television reruns, is launched in the United States, being broadcast on the same channel as Nickelodeon.
- A&E, which previously shared Nickelodeon's channel, begins broadcasting as its own 24-hour cable channel in January of that year on a separate satellite transponder.
July 3 – Back to the Future opens in American theaters and ends up being the highest-grossing film of 1985 in the United States, and the first film in the successful franchise.
July 13
- Live Aid pop concerts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and London raise over £50,000,000 for famine relief in Ethiopia.
- Vice President George H. W. Bush serves as acting president for eight hours, while President Ronald Reagan undergoes colon cancer surgery under anesthesia.
July 19 – Vice President George H. W. Bush announces that New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe will become the first school teacher to ride aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger .
July 20 – The main shipwreck site of the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha (which sank in 1622) is found forty miles off the coast of Key West, Florida by treasure hunters who begin to excavate $400,000,000 in coins and silver.
July 24
- Commodore launches the Amiga personal computer at the Lincoln Center in New York City.
- Walt Disney Feature Animation's 25th feature film, The Black Cauldron , is released. Considered one of the studio's darkest releases, it receives mixed reviews and results in a large revenue loss for Disney, putting the future of its animation department in jeopardy.

August

August 2 – Delta Air Lines Flight 191 crashes near Dallas, Texas, killing 137 people.
August 4 – Major League Baseball player Rod Carew of the California Angels becomes the sixteenth player to achieve 3,000 hits in a career.
August 20 – Iran–Contra affair: The first arms, 96 BGM-71 TOWs, are sent to Iran in exchange for hostages in Lebanon and profits for the Nicaraguan Contras without public knowledge.
August 25 – Samantha Smith, "Goodwill Ambassador" between the Soviet Union and the United States for writing a letter to Yuri Andropov about nuclear war, and eventually visiting the Soviet Union at Andropov's request, dies in the Bar Harbor Airlines Flight 1808 plane crash. She was 13 years old.
August 26 – Ryan White, who was expelled from Western High School in Indiana, is allowed to attend his first day of classes via telephone.
August 28 – The first smoking ban for restaurants in the United States is passed in Aspen, Colorado.^[9]
August 31 – Richard Ramirez, the serial killer known as the Night Stalker, is captured in Los Angeles.

September

September 2 – Hurricane Elena makes landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast after reaching Category 3 status.
September 4 – Catcher Gary Carter of the New York Mets ties a record with five home runs in two games.
September 6 – Midwest Express Airlines Flight 105, a Douglas DC-9, crashes just after takeoff from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, killing 31 people.
September 9 – Laborers of two food processing facilities in Watsonville, California, organize a strike against recent wage and benefits reductions.
September 11 – Pete Rose becomes the all-time hit leader in Major League Baseball, with his 4,192nd hit at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati.
September 13 – Steve Jobs resigns from Apple Computer in order to found NeXT.^[10]
September 26 – Kalina, the first captive orca born at SeaWorld as well as the first to survive past infancy, is born at SeaWorld Orlando.

October

October 4 – The Free Software Foundation is founded in Massachusetts.
October 7
- The cruise ship Achille Lauro is hijacked in the Mediterranean Sea by four heavily armed Palestinian terrorists. One passenger, American Leon Klinghoffer, is killed.
- The Mameyes landslide in Puerto Rico kills close to 300 people in the worst ever landslide in North American history.
October 15 – In separate events, mail bombs kill two people in Salt Lake City, Utah; a third bomb explodes the next day, injuring career counterfeiter Mark Hofmann. The ensuing police investigation leads to the arrest of Hofmann for the two murders.
October 18 – The Nintendo Entertainment System is released in U.S. stores.
October 27 – The Kansas City Royals defeat the St. Louis Cardinals, 4 games to 3, to win their first World Series title.

November

November 13 – Xavier Suárez is sworn in as Miami's first Cuban-born mayor.
November 18 – The comic strip Calvin and Hobbes appears for the first time, in 35 newspapers.
November 19 – Cold War: In Geneva, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev meet for the first time.
November 20 – Microsoft Corporation releases the first version of Windows, Windows 1.0.
November 26 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan sells the rights to his autobiography to Random House for a record US$3,000,000.

December

December 1 – The Ford Taurus and Mercury Sable are released for sale to the public.
December 12 – Arrow Air Flight 1285, a Douglas DC-8, crashes after takeoff in Gander, Newfoundland, killing 256, 248 of whom were U.S. servicemen returning to Fort Campbell, Kentucky from overseeing a peacekeeping force in Sinai.
December 16 – In New York City, Mafia bosses Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti are shot dead in front of Spark's Steak House, making hit organizer John Gotti the leader of the powerful Gambino crime family.
December 24 – Right wing extremist David Lewis Rice murders civil rights attorney Charles Goldmark as well as Goldmark's wife and two children in Seattle. Rice suspected the family of being both Jewish and Communist, and claimed his dedication to the Christian Identity movement drove him to the crime.
December 27 – American naturalist Dian Fossey is found murdered in Rwanda.
December 31 – The last issue of The Columbus Citizen-Journal is circulated.

Undated

"The Year of the Spy", name given by media to 1985 because of a large number of foreign spies arrested in the United States.
The Tommy Hilfiger brand is established.
The Asian tiger mosquito, an invasive species, is first found in Houston, Texas.
ATI Technologies is founded (originally as Array Technology) in North America by Lee Ka Lau, Francis Lau, Benny Lau and Kwok Yuen Ho.

Ongoing

Cold War (1947–1991)
Iran–Contra affair (1985–1987)