The Man I Was Taught to Fear - Part 1 - The Man I Was Taught to Fear

Things I've Been Thinking About · Oct 15, 2026 · 4m

For most Americans who grew up in the 1980s, Muammar Gaddafi arrived prepackaged as a villain: the dictator in the sunglasses, Reagan’s “mad dog of the Middle East,” and the face attached to terrorism and confrontation with the United States.

But how did that story begin?

In Part I of The Man I Was Taught to Fear, Jonathan Rodebaugh goes back before the bombings and sanctions to Libya’s Italian colonial past, independence, the enormous American presence at Wheelus Air Base, the discovery of oil, and Gaddafi’s 1969 revolution.

The episode follows the first confrontation between the new Libyan…