Hello, Useless Knowledge Nation.
Pull up a chair. Pour yourself something strong. Because tonight, we’ve got a story that slipped through the cracks of history—filed somewhere between “classified” and “you’ve got to be kidding me.”
It’s June 26, 1993. Bill Clinton is about to address the nation from the Oval Office. Not to talk about saxophones or health care or jogging in short shorts—but to announce that the United States has just launched a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missiles into downtown Baghdad. A direct response to a plot by Iraqi intelligence to assassinate former President George H. W. Bush. This is big. Heavy. Global stakes.
But behind the camera? Absolute chaos.
The makeup artist is patting down Clinton’s forehead, trying to keep his Southern sheen from turning into a full-on Texas oil slick. George Stephanopoulos is in his ear, running down last-minute script changes like a disheveled stage manager on opening night. Staffers are whispering frantic updates, trying to locate the one thing standing between a composed presidential address and a live-TV panic attack: the damn teleprompter cord.
It’s missing. Gone. Vanished.
No cord means no script. No script means Clinton is about to go full jazz solo on national security policy. And while the man can riff with the best of them, this isn’t a campaign rally in Little Rock. This is a military strike announcement. You don’t wing it when missiles are screaming across deserts at 500 miles an hour.
Meanwhile, Al Gore is standing off to the side, cool as a cucumber in a cryo chamber, calmly explaining that he made “a few small edits” to the speech—edits that Clinton hasn’t seen and Axelrod wants to murder someone over.
The room is tense. The seconds tick down. Clinton starts pacing like a tiger in a cage, looking over cue cards as beads of sweat trace the lines in his forehead. Somewhere behind the scenes, an unsung hero—probably an unpaid intern or a tech from the tape room—finds the power cord and jams it into the prompter like he's defusing a bomb.
The green screen flickers to life.
Clinton exhales. Straightens his tie. Puts on that disarming, Southern preacher-meets-bluesman voice. And like magic, the president we all remember appears—steady, confident, presidential.
The nation saw a polished address.
But we saw how the sausage was made.
And thank God the tape room hit record.
Because history isn’t just made in front of the camera. It’s made in the scramble, the sweat, the panic, and the patched-together miracles that happen right before the red light turns on.
Got a dusty VHS or a wild story that never made the news? Send it our way. We’re building a library of the absurd, the overlooked, and the almost-forgotten.
This is Useless Knowledge®. And sometimes, it takes a missing power cord to reveal how power really works.
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