Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, a podcast of the presidency. I'm John Dickerson and Face the Nation.

What is it that they do up there in those glass rooms that hover over the airport tarmacs?

Pilots on the plane say we're going to see if the air traffic control can find us some smooth air.

So they must look for

smooth air up there, but we all depend on them to do so much more than that. We hope they keep the

flurry of movement, the coming and the going of all the planes in sync. In 1981, America became

fixated on the air traffic controllers who peered out of those tinted windows.

Their faces illuminated by the green glow of World War II-style radar screens,

searching, searching for dots in the sky, sometimes 50 of them, when things were busy.

Their shirts yellowed from cigarette smoke and their nerves frayed from the deadly daily minutia of directing zooming cans of tin through fog and snow and

thunderstorms. It was a severe and necessary duty, and when the controllers asked for more money and

attention to the conditions that sparked their high blood pressure, they were rebuked. Nearly 12,000 of

them were brought down from their towers and put on the unemployment line

by a president who had come to Washington to set a new tone.

It was the first big crisis of the Reagan presidency,

and the swift and ruthless response to the striking controllers sent a signal

about how serious the small government conservative was

when he talked about changing things in

Washington, D.C. This morning at 7 a.m., the union representing those who man America's

air traffic control facilities called a strike. August 3rd, 1981, 12,000 air traffic controllers,

three quarters of the workforce of the Federal Aviation

Administration walked off their jobs. The men and women who normally directed aircraft on and off

...